To understand the history of assets, it is important to know how NFTs originated and accelerated growth at every stage and progression.
2012-2013: Colored Coins
Colored Coins could’ve been perceived as the very first NFTs to exist. Colored Coins are made of small bitcoin denominations that can be as small as a single satoshi, the smallest unit of a bitcoin. Colored Coins could be used to demonstrate a wide range of assets and have various applications, including:
- Coupons
- Real Estate
- Possibility of creating your cryptocurrency
- Distribute a company’s shares
- Purchasing Subscriptions
- Tokens of access
- Collectibles on the internet Colored Coins epitomized a significant advancement in Bitcoin’s capabilities; however, their disadvantage was that they could only represent specific values if everyone agreed on their value. Colored Coins allowed further research and opened the way for NFTs. The enormous potential of putting physical assets onto distributed ledgers was obvious, but deployment requested a more flexible blockchain.
2014 — Counterparty
. Many people became aware of the tremendous growth for granting assets onto blockchains also as a core component of Colored Coins. People also realized that Bitcoin, in its present form, wasn’t intended to support these new features. Counterparty enabled asset creation, as well as a decentralized exchange and a crypto token with ticker XCP. It had several work and assets, like trading card play and meme trading.
2015 — Counterparty
Spells of Genesis’ founders were not only the first one issue in-game assets onto a blockchain via Counterparty, but they were also among the first to launch an ICO. So early, that ICOs were dubbed “crowdfunding.” Spells of Genesis funded development by issuing a token known as BitCrystals that served as the in-game currency.
Rare Pepes on Counterparty in October 2016
That was only a question of time before memes commenced to move to blockchain. People began issuing “rare pipes” as assets on the Counterparty platform in October of 2016. A Rare Pepe is a meme that showcases a frog character. Rare Pepes on Ethereum in March 2017 With the rise of Ethereum in popularity in early 2017, memes began to be traded there. In March of 2017, Peperium, a “decentralized meme marketplace and trading card game (TCG) that allowed anyone to create memes that live forever on IPFS and Ethereum,” was stated.
Cryptopunks — June 2017
As the trading of rare pepes on Ethereum became more popular, 2 “innovative technologists” planned to start their own NFT project with such a flair. John Watkinson and Matt Hall revealed that they could yield unique characters on the Ethereum blockchain. Characters would be limited to 10,000, and no two would be alike.
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