Historical NFTs 📅 – by William M. Peaster
Metaversal is one Bankless newsletter for weekly levels on NFTs, virtual worlds and digital collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,
Last week we explored one of the NFT ecosystem’s newer categories, write NFTs.
Of course, all the innovation we have Today has been made possible by the world’s trailblazers – the first NFT projects that led to the creation of categories, as CryptoPunks did for profile picture (PFP) collections.
That said, “Historical NFTs” is a kind of meta-category that covers the NFT ecosystem’s earliest projects.
Since early 2021, there has been a huge increase in rediscovery, research and trade efforts around these digital things as more people have begun to see them as objects in the chain.
For today Metaversallet’s take a quick look at historic NFTs and highlight two new marketplaces that explicitly cater to them!
-WMP
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Then Bankless would love to see your portfolio! The team is currently working on their first NFT project and we are looking to hire a digital artist to work with us. If you are interested, contact us via our submission form. Thank you very much!
Ethereum is the first smart contract platform that has served as the home of the modern NFT boom.
But what we might consider “Proto-NFTs”, or the ancestors of the non-fungible tokens we have today, existed on Bitcoin, Namecoin, Counterparty and beyond before the launch of Ethereum in July 2015.
I won’t delve too far here, but some notable projects from this pre-Ethereum proto-NFT era include:
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Bit domains — A domain name system launched on Namecoin in April 2011.
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Punycode domains — A domain name + art experiment on the chain started in May 2011.
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Colored coins — Yoni Assia introduced the concept of “colored coins” on top of Bitcoin, an NFT-like system, in March 2012.
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Monograph — Launched in May 2014, Monegraph was the first NFT platform on Namecoin.
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NILICoins — Nili Lerner issued conceptual art tokens as Bitcoin-powered colored coins in September 2014.
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MY SOUL — Artist Rhea Myers conceptually tokenized her soul on the Counterparty and Dogecoin blockchains in November 2014.
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FDCARD — Introduced in March 2015, these were counterpart digital trading cards and the start of the Spells of Genesis project.
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Rare Pepes — User-issued trading cards centered around Pepe the Frog first appeared on Counterparty in September 2016.
Perhaps in a century, all NFTs minted before 2025 will be considered historic. This means that the very concept of historical NFT will always be changing to a certain extent!
Still, there are a handful of projects that many NFT archaeologists agree are very important early NFT efforts in the Ethereum era. These projects include:
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Terra Nullius — Released in August 2015, this was the first proto-NFT project (ie before the ERC721 standard) on Ethereum; it allows users to create non-transferable messages in the chain.
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Etheria v1.1 — A virtual world project with Ethereum’s first transferable proto-NFTs launched in October 2015; Etheria v1.2 was also released in October 2015.
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Million Ether homepage v1 — First introduced in December 2016, this project allowed users to create 10×10 pixel blocks as proto-NFTs.
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Ethereum naming service — Ethereum’s leading domain name system was launched in March 2017.
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Curio card — A collectible art project that first appeared on Ethereum in May 2017.
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CryptoPunks — v1 and v2 The CryptoPunks collections were both launched in June 2017, paving the way for the 10,000 PFP collections we have today.
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MoonCatRescue — Launched in August 2017, the MoonCats project was the first generative art project on Ethereum.
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Digital zones — A conceptual art project released by artist Mitchell F. Chan on Ethereum in August 2017.
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DADA Creeps and Weirdos — Started in October 2017, this was the first project to encode artist royalties directly into NFTs.
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CryptoKitties — The digital cats collective project that inspired the modern ERC721 NFT standard.
In recent days, two marketplaces have stepped forward to accommodate historical NFT traders: HNFT and NFT history. The arrival of these projects speaks to the growing interest we’ve seen around the historical NFTs category recently, and to the fact that existing NFT marketplaces haven’t doubled down in this space yet.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see how these niche marketplaces fare and if their listings can grow as further NFT archeology leads to the potential rediscovery of more early NFT projects!
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🙇 Check out these great historical NFT resources:
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🧐 Check out HNFT and NFT history marketplaces
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🎨 If you are an artist or know an artist who is interested in working with Bankless, please get in touch via our form for submission of portfolio!
William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal– a bankless newsletter focused on the rise of NFTs in the crypto-economy. He has also recently contributed content to Bankless, JPG and more!
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Mediation. From time to time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive a commission if you purchase through one of these links. In addition, the Bankless writers have crypto assets. See our investment information here.
