The digital economy is upon us. It's best you don't resists it. So where did NFTs come from ? What is the history of Non-Fungible Tokens ?Also , what is an NFT? These NFTs are everywhere you look! So what's the story of the first non-fungible tokens in blockchain? Well, it's pretty intense and interesting answer.
I'll keep this quite simple , 'fungible' means 'interchangeable'. A dollar bill is a fungible asset. Shares on a stock exchange are fungible assets. Bitcoin is a fungible asset. Those things are all completely interchangeable. 1 bitcoin is equal to 1 bitcoin. So non- fungible means non-interchangeable, 1 thing is unique from another thing. Examples from of real-life non-fungible assets are things like Art , Diamonds , baseball cards , real estate and now , non-fungible tokens these are the digital equivalent of what I just described basically. This is Digital painting, gif videos clips , virtual land, crypto domains e.c.t
NFTs are just literally the true ownership of complete unique digital asset. These NFTs are backed by ethereum blockchain and thus are completely digitally contractually solidified which allows for the first large scale real deal legitimate capability to track and maintain this system of a digital asset economy. The capabilities and potential of where this all goes from here and even where it is currently today is absolutely incredible, but where the heck did this all come from ?? What started this madness and allowed it to explode to where it is today .
Well let's jump back to 2012. Bitcoin was about 3 years into existence. This is the year where the first instance of a non-fungible token and was ever mentioned known at the time as a Colored coin. In an incredibly ahead of it's time an article posted by Yani Assaya, CEO of Etoro. He discussed the possibility of a new economic framework, an evolved version of the digital currency a framework built on top of the bitcoin protocol. Thus creating an economy of what he then called bitcoin 2.X . He had a concept that would transfer a certain amount of bitcoin through genesis transaction which would create a separation of coins from regular to bitcoin. Separating them into what he called colored coins. These colored coins would still be able to be transferred through the regular bitcoin network but because they would be permanently identified as colored bitcoins they would be equivalent to rare coins and thus their value would vary from the bitcoin value according to the demand for the rare coins.
In 2014 bitcoin price starts the year off at $770 a coin and actually fell to $314 a coin at the end of the year. Well this came with a creation of counterparty.io This was actually the first large-scale actualization of an open source protocol on top of bitcoin blockchain utilizing a form of digital contracts and decentralized ledger networks to extend bitcoin's functionality. But infact in 2015-2016 utilizing the counterparty system rare pepes enter the world.
Those had virality appeal to them. Well Rare pepes are the 'meme economy' . The earliest start of the meme economy was pepe the frog. In 2015 people began trading, collecting and distributing rare pepes. When people first began trading these rare pepes , they were paid for using ,'Good boy points'. You can go google the origins of 4chan goodboy points if you're unfamiliar. Good boy points economics were unsustainable.
At this time, rarepepewallet.com came to existence. A rare pepe exchange utilizing the counterparty system. So being able to create unique digital tokens unfabricatable in the theory to be traded like bitcoin but instead there were hundreds of rare pepe images formatted like trading cards. After the experimentation of the colored coins these were there the first real-ish forms of NFTs being actively traded online.
In 2017 it was a massive year for bitcoin. It started at $998 a coin after a wild ride at the end of the year it was $13, 412 with noteworthy 2017 all-time high of $19,783. As for NFTs , well Ethereum happened . Ethereum brought a switch over for the meme economy of the time the new decentralized. Marketplace was built on top of the ethereum Blockchain. Ethereum Blockchain is much better for smart contracts and ledgers on a large scale and incredible standard was developed atop the ethereum blockchain called ERC72. ERC72 is the interface the token standard to build non- fungible unique assets is the most effective and still most common standard to this day.
The history still continues
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