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Hello there! It’s me, Ivan. 🙂
How about spending your holidays learning more about NFTs?! So far, we’ve covered the basics of NFTs and blockchain, smart contracts, minting, and gas fees, as well as an introduction to Web3 and Metaverse!
Now I would like to take you down the NFT memory lane. Let’s go!
The grandfather of all crypto blockchains is the Bitcoin monetary network. Bitcoin was launched in late 2009 by an anonymous developer, who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto.
It would be hard to overstate the significance of this ingenious technology.
Many experts believe that it will change the future of humanity in unimaginable ways. While the Bitcoin blockchain was not initially designed to facilitate the creation of NFTs, it laid the foundation for bankless peer-to-peer payments. Now anyone in the world can send funds to anyone else in the world quickly and cheaply without the need for a bank.
Bitcoin was such a new concept and was understood by so few people that it took a couple of years for adoption to begin to gain some steam. In 2012, someone came up with the brilliant idea to use blockchains to record and transfer ownership of things other than money, and the concept of NFTs was born.
Most NFTs today are minted on the Ethereum blockchain. However, long before Ethereum existed, the concept of NFT was fully realized. In fact, in December of 2012, Meni Rosenfeld introduced the first “Colored Coins” issued on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Colored Coins were tied to the records of individual Bitcoin transactions.
The concept is a tad technical, but in his whitepaper on the topic, Rosenfeld described a method of representing tangible, real-life assets in addition to proving and transferring ownership of said assets using the Bitcoin blockchain.
These coins can represent any assets and have several uses, including property, coupons, shares of a company, subscriptions, access tokens, digital collectibles, and even the ability to issue your own cryptocurrency.
Because the Bitcoin network was not designed for this purpose, ultimately, Colored Coins could only have value if there was unanimous agreement among participants. The system would have been undermined if one participant no longer supported Colored Coins.
After an inordinate amount of experimentation and development based on the Bitcoin blockchain, the Ethereum blockchain was launched. It was called a virtual machine because it could run smart contracts on a decentralized network of computers rather than just one single computer.
Smart contracts are what makes NFTs possible.
The first collaborative NFT art project on the Ethereum blockchain was Curio Cards. Minted on May 9, 2017, this collection included unique images based on collectible cards from seven different artists. In total, there are 29,296 individual cards with varying degrees of value and rarity.
CryptoPunks kicked off the generative NFT collection trend. Larva Labs initially minted CryptoPunks in 2017. They were later reminted on the Ethereum blockchain.
Decetraland, a 3-D metaverse world founded on the Ethereum decentralized blockchain, was launched on January 20, 2018. Participants can buy and develop virtual land, play games, and earn MANA – the metaverse’s virtual currency. MANA can be traded for real-world money or other cryptocurrencies.
On March 14, 2018, another play-to-earn game called Axie Infinity was created. Since its inception, the game has gone viral. It uses blockchain technology and NFTs to create a combat pet universe.
Overall, 2020 was a transformative year in the NFT world as people around the globe began to fully grasp the value of blockchain-based digital assets. Venture capital investors also began to take notice of the phenomenon.
In the first half of 2020, there were $13.7 million in NFT sales.
Then in June 2020, the NFT market on OpenSea brought in $150 million. By the end of 2020, NFT sales had tripled to more than $250 million.
We can’t talk about the history of NFTs without talking about the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection (BAYC). This generative NFT project featured cartoon images of an Ape with several common and rare features. This was one of several projects that imbued the NFTs with added utility.
Each Ape is also a passport to a metaverse called New Pangea. Some of the other projects involved included Cool Cats, Notorious Frogs, and Wicked Craniums. The Bored Apes collection has since branched out and inspired a tsunami of copycat projects.
While these generative collections aren’t generally attributed to any particular artist, thousands of artists are required to create the NFTs, the websites, and the various lands within New Pangea.
Well, the situation in the NFT world is not the best at the moment, but it is not the worst if you ask me. We are in the bear market, and like with stocks or any other tradable asset, these things happen.
I’m happy that the NFT market dropped, because of all the scam projects that were happening, and I hope this will bring a new era for the NFTs. We are at the beginning of something big, like it was with the Web, so don’t miss the boat, and start learning about it.
I salute you for now, but keep an eye on this space because, in our next article, we will talk about why people buy NFTs! 😀
The article was written by: Ivan Markov, NFTartXpert
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