(Non-Fungible) Token Bubble History / Timeline - Unique Digital (On-Blockchain Stored) Assets, Numbers & Bits
The project that inspired the modern crypto art movement. Featured in Mashable, The Financial Times, The Paris Review, Christie's of London, Art|Basel and The New York Times. [...] The first "non-fungible token," and inspiration for the ethereum ERC-721 [non-fungible token] standard that powers most digital art and collectibles.
-- Matt Hall & John Watkinson, Crypto Bro Millionaire (Con?) Artists
Matt & John's® Punks - The First (Non-Fungible) Token, Really? The History the Con-Art Fraudsters Don't Tell You.
2009-01-03 Bitcoin genesis block, first on-blockchain data (raw hex version, non-transferable) and blockchain birth
2011-04-21 Namecoin launch (2nd blockchain) and first-non-fungible asset minted (bitcoin.bit domain)
2011-04-29 First operating fully decentralized domain - www.ata.bit on Namecoin
2011-05-06 First non-fungible asset trade - radio.bit on Namecoin for 5 Bitcoin
2011-05-10 First art based asset minted - ϾϿ (ASCII-Art Punycode)
2012-03-27 Colored Coins idea brought by Yoni Assia
2013-02-15 First on-blockchain image minted - Damselfly base64 png encoded in 5470 Namecoin domains
2014-01-13 Counterparty launch and first bitcoin non-fungible asset minted
2014-03-10 Blockheads launch - first non-fungible token in URL to profile picture (PFP) serie on namecoin; 44 blockheads minted in 2014 & 2015
2014-03-19 Bitcoin op_return function improvement (to store on-blockchain data) in Bitcoin v0.9.0
2014-05-02 First on-blockchain proof-of-existence intent by an artist (Kevin McCoy with Quantum on Namecoin)
2014-06-03 Vitalik Buterin mention "non-fungible assets" in ethereum whitepaper
2015-03-11 First blockchain-based (video) game and intentional collectibles launch - Spell of Genesis on bitcoin
2015-07-13 Ethereum genesis block
2015-10-19 First ethereum non-fungible token contract uploaded (Etheria v0.9)
2016-05-06 First interoperable game asset - NINJASUIT skin for Sarutobi Island - birth of metaverse!
2016-09-16 RARAPEPE first series released, birth of crypto art movement
2017-05-09 First ENS (Ethereum Name Service) domain minted - rilxxlir.eth
2017-06-23 Matt & John's® CryptoPunks launch and collectibles mass market adoption unlocked
2017-12-20 Opensea launch and mass market consumption / trading (buy & sell) unlocked
For more see The (Non-Fungible) Token Timeline »
Free Draft Chapters on Early History of [Non-Fungible] Tokens
Part I - How Did the Grift Begin?
How did the [non-fungible] token grift begin? Like so many things in crypto, it didn't happen overnight - it evolved.
[...]
"Colored coins" proposed to take a few satoshis (the smallest fragment of a bitcoin - one one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin) and "color" or tag them with a unique symbol. These "colored coins," unique coins in their own right, could then be used to represent real-world assets.
Note that you could never actually put the real-world asset on the blockchain. The only "decentralized" thing was always the token. [...]
Ethereum would eventually become the main platform for [non-fungible] tokens and [non-fungible] token marketplaces.
[Non-fungible] tokens finally hit the big time in late 2017, near the peak of the bitcoin bubble, with the launch of CryptoKitties. But there were a few other attempts at [non-fungible] token-like crypto assets before the cat pictures that took down Ethereum.
2014 was the peak of popularity for the microblogging site Tumblr. People were right-clicking artists' work willy-nilly and re-posting images online with no attribution. [...]
They [Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy] wanted to help artists protect their work, so they came up with an idea for recording images on the blockchain. Their project Monegraph, short for "monetized graphics," was built on the early bitcoin clone Namecoin.
Dash and McCoy quickly figured out that blockchains aren't designed to handle large chunks of data. So as a last-minute hack, the pair put a URL [web address link] in the Namecoin blockchain record that pointed to an image elsewhere on the internet. It was never clear how exactly this would protect artists' work.
To this day, however, [non-fungible] tokens still rely on the same shortcut. When someone buys an [non-fungible] token, they're not buying the actual digital artwork, they're buying a link to it - but on a blockchain.
[...]
Part III (Upcoming)
We thought we'd only have two parts, but now it looks like we have three. Stay tuned for CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties!
Post them on the CryptoPunksDev reddit. Thanks.