Happy International NFT Day
On behalf of the Renfter team, I would like to wish you all a happy International NFT day — what a crazy year it’s been. So many exciting events, the rise and downfalls of big NFT projects, and the overall growth of our entire industry. All of us can say that we made history and were among the first to set foot on the soil of the wild west called NFT space. Setting alarms at 3 am to mint NFTs and smashing keyboards when we weren’t able to mint them
A little bit of History
You’ve all probably heard of BoredApe, MutantApe, Azuki, and Doodles, but how many of you know what’s considered to be the first NFT ever?
2014: Quantum
In May of 2014th, on the Namecoin Bitcoin fork, the first NFT “ Quantum” was minted. It was long before the term NFT had even been coined, but we can still say that it was the first NFT ever, or at least NFT Lucy.
2015: Terra Nullius
Terra Nullius was the first NFT on ETH, it was minted on 8th of August 2015th and is designed to allow users to stake a claim on a blockchain.
Interestingly, the founders of this project did not categorize their project as an NFT but rather an Interactive Ethereum contract.
2016: Peperium
Peperium project was designed to enable users to trade memes on the blockchain. The mint kicked off in October 2016 but the collection was not traded until March 2017. Peperium was inspired by Pepe and the meme culture that is more than accepted in crypto. This is arguably the first NFT collection that had a community gather around it
2017 in a nutshell:
CryptoPunks
CryptoPunks mint in June 2017, and four years later they changed the NFT scene forever. Created by John Watkinson and Matt Hall, they were the first NFT project to go mainstream and start attracting more people to the NFT space. In addition, they were the inspiration for the ERC-721 standard that most NFT projects use today. They have been mentioned in The New York Times, Christie’s of London, Art|Basel Miami, and The PBS NewsHour. The most expensive sold was CryptoPunk #5822: $23.7 million (8000 ETH).
ERC-721 Proposal
Just three months after that, in September, the first draft ERC-721 proposal was published by Dapper Labs CTO Date Shirley, which included the first formal usage of the term NFT.
CryptoKitties
In November, the same people responsible for submitting Ethereum Improvement Proposals were responsible for crashing Ethereum when they released the first NFT blockchain game CryptoKitties. The project itself was a big hit that caused unprecedented transaction volume on Ethereum shortly after launch.
2018–2020
After the 2018 crash, the whole web3 space was in some kind of hibernation mode. Nothing special was happening, but by the end of 2020 things started to change. Bitcoin was going up and the rest were following. The new rise had an impact on NFTs too, but we can say that NFTs had an impact on and contributed to the rise too.
2021 till now
OpenSea and Metamask became more accepted. Major art organizations began to feature NFTs in their exhibitions. Sotheby’s was doing auctions where they accept ETH Crypto galleries opened up and a large number of artists started selling their paintings as NFT.
The first Solana NFT project and the awakening of the market at Solana
It is debatable which is the first NFT to be minted on Solana, some say it is Kreechers some say it’s Solarians. Kreechers minted off-chain, which is different from the usual minting process today. Solana’s NFT scene has progressed a lot, with a lot of serious and strong projects like DeGods, Degenarete Ape Academy, Aurory, Portals, Nyan Heroes and OkayBears. That changed the meta and set new rules in space.
In 2021, we could see a lot of jump in the market, and a more exponential growth, which is contrary to the events that took place from 2018 to 2020. The NFT market is still young and very susceptible to rapid changes. It remains for us to follow and try to predict every change.
Changes in NFT space
The NFT space is known as a mostly male-dominated industry, but it might not be that way in the future. More and more women are entering the NFT space and starting to build their careers. Which is quite important for mass adoption. The NFT industry will start to focus more on social change and environmental change, not just on pure technology or flipping. The NFT market will surely improve a lot compared to today and it will be interesting to see what we will have to talk about next year on International NFT Day.
Originally published at https://renfter.com.
