The entire history of NFT began in 2013. That year the first experiments with Bitcoin-based NFT began. These projects were called Colored and Counterparty. But the development of tokens did not end there.
In October 2015, the first full-fledged NFT project called Etheria was launched at the DEVCON 1 conference in London. This project was launched by the developers of Ethereum itself 3 months after the Ethereum blockchain itself appeared. This project sold 457 hexagonal Etheria tiles. Most of these tiles were not sold until March 13, 2021, when NFT got its second wind, causing a stir among buyers. Within 24 hours, all of the tiles that were hard-coded for 1 ETH (0.43 cents at launch) were immediately sold out for a total of $1.4 million.
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In 2017, Ehtereum’s blockchain began rapidly gaining popularity due to the storage of tokens within it. Since then, the company introduced the term “non-interchangeable token. Thus, there were many enthusiasts who started making NFT tokens. Larva Labs was considered the first pioneers. The studio released the CryptoPunks collection, a project for trading cartoon characters.
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An example of a CryptoPunks token that was sold for 68.99 ETH, equivalent to $334,237.23.
But Larva Labs wasn’t the only one who got high on NFT. At the end of 2017, a game called CryptoKitties came out. The point of this game was that you had to collect kitties, and you could crossbreed them. You would end up with a new, unique kitty that you could then sell at auction. This game quickly went viral, attracting $12 million in investment, and some cats sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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An example of a CryptoKitties token that sold for 600 ETH in 2018. At the time, this token was worth $171,138.00. Today, that transaction is valued at $2,904,954.00.
It would seem that NFT as an underground movement that captured the attention of the crypto community is slowly moving into mainstream art. On Valentine’s Day 2018, Kevin Abosch, a well-known photographer, partnered with GIFTO to hold a charity auction. The day was a transition for NFT to the next level. The charity auction resulted in a deal valued at $1 million. The work that was sold was titled “Eternal Rose.” Sold as NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, Forever Rose was, as CNN notes, the most expensive virtual artwork in the world at the time.
Abosh didn’t stop there. It got to the point where he decided to up the ante and started using his blood to draw with the Ethereum blockchain system to create a project called “IAMA Coin.” Abosh is not the only artist who has decided to adopt this form of self-expression. It is slowly gaining momentum among artists looking to push their creative boundaries.
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In 2019, Nike patented a system called CryptoKicks that allows it to use NFT to verify the authenticity of sneakers, as well as provide a virtual version of the shoe to the customer. Similar to CryptoKitties, owners will also be able to “crossfit” shoes. This process will involve actual restrictions on production, where ownership of each successive generation will be tied to the original shoe. The patent states:
Quote, “Using a digital asset, a purchaser may securely trade or sell a tangible pair of shoes, trade or sell digital shoes, store digital shoes in a cryptocurrency wallet or other digital blockchain storage, cross-breed digital shoes with another digital shoe to create ‘shoe progeny’ and, based on rules of acceptable shoe manufacturability, custom fabricate new progeny as a new tangible pair of shoes.
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In March 2021 there was a BOOM in digital art. Digital artist Beeple, aka Mike Winkelman, sold his digital painting entitled “EVERY DAY: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS. It exists only as a jpg file compiled from the five thousand paintings that Mike has posted daily on social networks for five thousand days since 2007. The artwork sold for 69 million dollars! The auction house Christie’s noted that as a result of such a great transaction, Beeple became one of the three most expensive and richest modern artists of the world next to Jeff Koons (USA) and David Hockney (UK). To this day, the digital artist continues to delight digital art lovers with his paintings, creating increasingly strange, bizarre and even grotesque masterpieces.
In conclusion, we can add that NFT is no longer a hype, but an objective reality that will attract more and more new people. Digital art will continue to develop, finding more and more investors and unique artists who will delight not only collectors but also ordinary digital art lovers with their works.
