Short History of NFTs from 2014 to 2021
Cryptopunks, CryptoKitties, Etheria and building early web3
In 2021 the NFT market exploded. The entire volume for 2020 on OpenSea was $21.7m, which grew by a factor of 646(!) in 2021 to mind boggling $14 billion. By March 2021 it was clear that NFTs are going mainstream and the whole world heard about CryptoPunks or Beeple’s Everydays.
Today, the most famous NFT collection seems to be Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched in May 2021, which appeared in all major magazines, were adopted by celebrities and crypto world alike.
In my goal to understand what makes a successful NFT collection, I want to delve deeper into the first NFT collections and how they were created, supported and adopted, to process then to 2021, 2022 and beyond. This text concerns the first years of NFTs in a broad outline.
What is the first NFT collection?
CryptoPunks weren’t the first NFT collection, but they were the first to put NFTs on the map.
Let’s start from the beginning. The early experiments with NFTs started already in 2014 (see Quantum). Then in 2015 came the collection Etheria, a virtual world, with a total of 914 tiles. Still it took years to sell them out and it came only in 2021 during the NFT boom.
