A brief history of NFT: the shining moments of stars spanning six decades
Original title: "A Brief History of NFT: The Shining Moment of NFT Stars Over Sixty Years"
Original Author: 0x11, ForesightNews
Leibniz said that there are no two identical leaves in the world. This sentence is expressed in today's fashionable technology carrier: each of us is an NFT.
NFT, I believe everyone in the encrypted world today is familiar with it. In the past two years, it has been like a hurricane, blowing through every corner of the encrypted world, and even penetrated through the narrow door to reach the vast physical world. A pixel avatar randomly generated by code sold for $23.7 million; encryption artist Beeple's work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" fetched $69.3 million at Christie's.
Perhaps you find it difficult to understand why these useless or even aesthetically ineffective pictures are so valuable? Under the impact of the recent crypto cold wave, the once-thriving NFT suddenly fell to the altar, and the daily turnover fell from $3.6 billion at the peak to $200 million recently. So some people sighed: the NFT myth was shattered.
NFT historical turnover trend, data source : NFTGo
It would be short-sighted to confuse NFT with the notorious tulip bubble in history suspected. Hegel once said, "To be is to be rational." Discussions and analyzes on the value and prospects of NFTs are not uncommon, and the answers are different. Here, we want to go back to the source and connect the development trajectory of NFT with several characters and stories in order to answer some doubts in your mind.
The development of NFT has obvious phased characteristics. In the first stage, before the birth of Bitcoin, NFT thoughts and concepts sprouted here; in the Bitcoin era, NFT had the soil for experiments and began early exploration; in the last Ethereum era, NFT ushered in a full-scale ecological explosion. Let's turn back the time to 60 years ago and start telling our story.
The Budding Era
Andy Warhol: The Spiritual Banner
Everything starts with a painting.
Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol, 1962
This It is a set of 32 cans neatly arranged, just like the display on a supermarket shelf, each of which looks almost the same, the difference is that each can has a different taste. This seemingly "monotonous and boring" "Campbell's Soup Can" set off an artistic storm in the second half of the 20th century. Its author, Andy Warhol, is known as the Pope of Pop Art, and with a series of Works with similar styles have entered the world's top art halls and become legendary artists comparable to Picasso and Van Gogh.
The original idea of this painting came from a friend who said inadvertently: You put What will happen if you draw the canned food you eat? Andy Warhol was awakened by a word. After painting the above "Campbell's Soup Cans", he started a series of creations in a similar style, but the themes changed to Marilyn Monroe, political leaders, and others. Own.
Andy Warhol's self-portrait, he did not expect that more than 30 years after his death, these three portraits were made into NFT, and finally sold for 2.8 million US dollars
If you look closely at Andy Warhol's works, it is easy to find that they all have a common logic: simple repeated subjects superimposed random variables. The British "Guardian" once commented: "Warhol is an expert in showing the power of repetition. Through repetition, he adds something, without making us feel boring, and without dissolving the thing itself." His creation and life are both In practicing this kind of repetition, "I like things that keep repeating. I have eaten the same breakfast for twenty years."
This kind of unscrupulous and bold repetition is unique in the history of human art. Some people questioned that his works are not works of art, but industrial prints. Why can this repeated "print" become a treasure of human art?
Art is art, its value is never derived from the visual beauty, but It is the humanistic spirit behind it. To answer in the words of Andy Warhol:
The great thing about America is that it created A tradition: The richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
You can see Coca-Cola on TV, you know the president drinks Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and then you think about it, you can also drink Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola, and no money can buy you a better Coke than the bum on the corner is drinking. All Cokes are the same, and all Coca-Colas are good. Elizabeth Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the homeless man knows it, and you know it too.
This is the general spirit of people in the industrial age revealed by Andy Warhol's works state. Any ordinary person can shell out their pockets to enjoy the same Coke and burgers as the president and queen of the country. In a way, you are no different from those who are famous and rich. So, what's different?
Just like the 32 cans arranged neatly, the difference between them is taste; The tiny variables between them are the basis for each person to become himself. And so, Andy Warhol uttered that classic quote: "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Because everyone is different, it's those heavily repeated traits that accentuate that tiny difference.
Here, have you found Andy Warhol's style of repeating subjects plus random variables, It is exactly the same as the ideological root of FT (homogeneous token) to NFT (non-homogeneous token). Since one bitcoin is equal to one bitcoin, if I want the bitcoin in my hand to be different, I must what to do?
But in the era of Andy Warhol, there was no Bitcoin, no NFT and even the Internet It has only just sprouted.
Andy Warhol's story did not end with his death in 1987 , Pop Art experienced development afterwards and became one of the main art genres. The later pop artists Banksy, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama also left their footprints in the NFT wave like fate.
The well-known street artist Banksy's "Fool", created in 2006, is intended to satirize the superficial and over-inflated art market. The painting depicts a crowded auction hall with an ornately framed work next to the auctioneer, which reads: "I can't believe you idiots actually bought this."
In March 2021, street artist Banksy's work "Fool" was burned by a group of art lovers, and its electronic version was subsequently made It was turned into an NFT and sold for $380,000 (4 times the price of the original work). This group of crazy fans even live-streamed the burning painting on social media, and they also said that burning painting "is an artistic expression in itself."
This is all afterwords, the sixth year after Andy Warhol’s death, in In the field of cryptography, which has nothing to do with art, a thought experiment slowly brought the prototype of the NFT concept to the stage of history.
Hal Finney: Pioneer of the NFT concept
In 1993, a cryptographer named Hal Finney mentioned the idea of cryptocurrency trading cards in an email to members of the Cypherpunks. concept.
Finney introduced this in the email:
I thought a little more about my idea of buying and selling digital cash and I thought of a way to showcase it. We are buying and selling "crypto trading cards". Enthusiasts of cryptography will love these fascinating examples of cryptographic art. Notice how it's perfectly combined - a mix of one-way functions and digital signatures, and random blinding. What a perfect piece to treasure and show off to your friends and family.
He also described the scarcity of cryptocurrency trading cards, “They come in all sorts attributes, from the common 1 to the rare 50, all the way to the extremely rare 1000."
This passage basically outlines the prototype of today's NFT - digital collections. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, this idea was not realized at the time.
When fate closes a door, it opens another window. Finney's continued efforts in the field of cryptography ultimately paid off. On January 3, 2009, a whole new world opened up, because on this day, Bitcoin was born.
Hal Finney became one of the earliest open source contributors to Bitcoin, and he is also the world's first A person who receives bitcoin transfers. Even, he is considered to be one of the actual inventors of Bitcoin under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto", but this claim was denied by him.
As for the idea mentioned in the email sixteen years ago, I don't know if it was forgotten by him, or Due to the deterioration of physical condition, it was not realized. In October 2009, Hal Finney announced that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and finally in August 2014, he said goodbye to this new world that was just unfolding.
In the world of Bitcoin, new and old things collide, sprout and grow here. Finney's unfinished vision was later realized on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Era
In March 2012, a person named Yoni Assia wrote "bitcoin 2.X(aka Colored Bitcoin) – initial specs" on his website Article, introducing his thoughts on Colored Bitcoin.
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In this article, colored coins envisage creating new tokens on the Bitcoin network. This novel idea immediately attracted the interest of a group of people in the Bitcoin community, and they participated in the discussion and improvement of this idea middle. As more and more people join, the functions of colored coins are continuously expanded, from a simple idea to a complete white paper. Vitalik Buterin, the genius boy who later created the Ethereum empire, was one of them.
The core idea of the improved colored coins is:
“If bitcoins can be marked, and these marked bitcoins can be traced, then these special bitcoins can lead to many other uses."
In technical logic, colored coins are small denominations Bitcoins, except that they are tagged with additional data to represent a variety of assets and have a variety of uses, including property, coupons, issuing company shares, etc.
But the limitation of colored coins is also quite obvious, that is to bring to catastrophic performance pressure. In the protracted debate in the community, the colored coins have not been expected to be put into practice for a long time.
Until early 2014, three young people named Robert Dermody, Adam Krellenstein and Evan Wagner founded started a project called Counterparty. It quickly implements the idea of colored coins, and completes functions that cannot be realized by general bitcoin software by writing data in bitcoin transaction scripts. Counterparty supports asset creation, has a decentralized exchange, XCP contract currency, and many projects and assets, including card games and Meme transactions. What really promotes the emergence of NFT is the "Rare Pepes" created on Counterparty-making the popular meme Sad Frog into an NFT application.
So far, those names that have flashed in the history of cryptocurrency, whether it is encryption Currency trading cards, colored coins or Counterparty, have become ancient monuments in the minds of crypto users flocking to crypto users years later, never even heard of. Their first exposure to NFT may have to wait until CryptoPunks in 2017, or the famous encrypted cats after that.
Ethereum Era
"If it is not necessary, do not increase the entity." Bitcoin is a model of the successful application of Occam's razor principle. As a point-to-point electronic cash system, its achievements are beyond doubt ; but to lead the entire network world into the encrypted world, it is powerless, and the task of becoming a "world computer" has to be realized by its follower, Ethereum.
In 2013, Vitalik Buterin, one of the many authors of the colored currency white paper, was traveling in Israel , came across two companies that were trying to develop smart contracts based on Bitcoin.
Vitalik was attracted by this idea, and he proposed an idea to the Mastercoin community, which was studying the scalability of Bitcoin at the time: to develop a smart contract platform for Bitcoin, Allow users to write scripts conveniently and quickly. Unfortunately, Vitalik's proposal was not accepted. Disappointed, he turned to research a new smart contract platform, so in November of that year, the Ethereum white paper was born. By July 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was launched, and a new era kicked off.
Ethereum has become a paradise for decentralized applications, thanks to Fabian Vogelsteller's 2015 The ERC-20 standard was proposed in November. ERC-20 provides a series of standard interfaces, allowing developers to build token applications that can interoperate with other products and services, giving birth to the first encryption application boom, followed by the brutal ICO bull market in 2017 relation. The Ethereum official website document introduces this standard as follows:
ERC-20 introduces a homogeneous generation Tokens are standard, in other words they have properties that make each token identical (in type and value) to another. For example, ETH is an ERC-20 token, and 1 ETH is always equal to another 1 ETH.
The core of this description: one token is equal to another token, it is easy to let People think in the opposite direction: what can a token be used for if it is not equal to another token? The first to answer this question was the NFT pioneer on Ethereum: CryptoPunks.
CryptoPunks: The intersection of history
This is an era of turmoil, and it is also a meeting point of science and art. The script of "Campbell's Soup Cans" from more than fifty years ago is being re-enacted on Ethereum.
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Is this group of neatly arranged avatars exuding a similar charm to "Campbell's Soup Cans" more than 50 years ago: repeated subjects are superimposed with random variables, but the variables are more abundant: skin color, hairstyle , hats, glasses...
Even if you are a newcomer to NFT for the first time, you must be familiar with the above It's not uncommon to see heads with stern expressions in this picture. Number 5822 of the 10,000 unique heads sold for $23.7 million on February 12 this year.
That's right, it's the avatar above, CryptoPunks#5822. What, why is it so valuable, you ask?
If you are lucky enough to own a CryptoPunks and set it as your social media profile picture, It will definitely attract the envy and onlookers of many people. Because there are only 10,000 such avatars, with it, you have the same capital as Shopify founder Tobi Lutk and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Isn't that enough?
As one of the most expensive NFTs, CryptoPunks has rich and diverse sources of value. One of the most important aspects is its historical status. To understand the pioneering value of CryptoPunks and its impact on later NFTs, you need to read the following story first.
In 2005, two Canadians named Matt Hall and John Watkinson formed Larva in the United States labs, translated into Chinese is the larva laboratory. It was them who later created the NFT godfather on Ethereum: CryptoPunks.
Matt and John have known each other since 1994, both at the University of Toronto Study computer science. After graduation, Matt worked as a software engineer at Modus and then at Columbia University Medical Center. John, on the other hand, completed a graduate degree in computer science at the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and genetics at Columbia University. A background in programming and math prepared Matt and John for their independent entrepreneurial paths.
On the left is Matt Hall, on the right is John Watkinson
Larva labs is not born for NFT, for a long time, this is A small software company that develops mobile apps for the iPhone and Android has always been just two people, Matt Hall and John Watkinson.
Among the many apps they developed, there is one that can help you randomly generate Android robot avatars App.
By the beginning of 2017, they have been thinking about digital avatars all the year round and figured out an avatar generator. But what to do with this generator?
Great works of art usually come from a moment of inspiration. At this time, John's little niece, who was obsessed with collecting dolls, gave them inspiration: Since collection is the nature of all human beings, why not make a digital collection? However, a new problem has arisen, how to ensure the scarcity of digital collectibles?
The two immediately went to find the answer, but unexpectedly discovered a new continent. Earlier we mentioned the NFT solution on Bitcoin, Matt and John were not satisfied with the limitations reflected on Counterparty. They set their sights on the young but dynamic Ethereum.
There was no ERC-721 standard at that time, and the issuance of NFT on Ethereum was far from what it is today Simple. Matt and John can only use ERC-20 to add some functions to it, so the earliest NFT in Ethereum was born.
As a tribute to the spirit of cypherpunk, Matt and John decided to The avatars are distributed for free, and of course they keep 1,000 for themselves. When the application was first opened, there were very few people, until a technology reporter named Jason Abbruzzese noticed this interesting new experiment and wrote an article reporting, "This Ethereum-based project may change our understanding of digital art." Known". Subsequently, CryptoPunks became famous, and the remaining NFTs were quickly collected. Although it is sought after by collectors, it is still a long time before CryptoPunks reached the peak of history.
At the first NFT meeting in 2018, Matt and John met A photographer named Anne, who advised them that if they want CryptoPunks to gain wider influence, they should cooperate with galleries and auction houses. Matt and John were so convinced that 24 NFTs were swept away in the first auction. Traditional collectors have shown unexpected interest in this new species of digital art collection.
Subsequently, the cold winter that made many encrypted OGs unforgettable came, and CryptoPunks could not be spared Falling, waiting for the moment when the king returns.
Crypto Kitties: Detonate the powder keg of encrypted collectibles
CryptoPunks, while attracting a lot of attention, paled in comparison to the CryptoKitties that would take the crypto world by storm a few months later. The earliest Gas war on Ethereum was started by it.
In 2012, three years after graduating from Stanford, Roham Gharegozlou founded a studio called Axiom Zen , focusing on new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. At the Money 20/20 Hackathon in Las Vegas in 2014, Axiom Zen led by Roham won the grand prize, and 2 of the 3 entries submitted by the team were Bitcoin apps.
In 2016, he successfully persuaded Dete, chief software architect of Axiom Zen, to develop A tangible, fun and even a bit clunky way to de-risk the platform for developers. At the same time, Roham's high school classmate Mik Naayem had just sold his mobile game platform startup to Animoca Brands. After Roham's persistent "brainwashing" and invitation, Mik quickly joined the new venture. At this time, the team is still thinking about how to explore the decentralized world.
Stable currency, privacy blockchain... After briefly conceiving these ideas, they decisively gave up , because these technologies are difficult to penetrate into the lives of ordinary people.
“One day after another fruitless brainstorming session, a man named Mack Flavelle's colleagues say we need to put cats on the blockchain."
Just In this way, a butterfly in Latin America flapped its wings, and a storm sweeping the crypto world entered the countdown.
The 2017 ETH Waterloo Hackathon, like all hackathons, is a feast for tech nerds . 8 new projects were selected, including Axiom Zen's CryptoKitties.
The reason why they chose to put cats on the blockchain instead of dogs or other animals is so clear and simple: the Internet love cats. For many cat-loving and exploratory Internet residents, this reason is enough for them to rush into the novel world of encryption.
By the end of 2017, there was a long-term congestion phenomenon on the Ethereum network, and users competed for priority Transaction rights, without hesitating to submit high fees, later this phenomenon has a notorious name: Gas War. Although the Gas war has long been used to Ethereum users a few years later, it was the first time that the Ethereum network continued to be congested at that time.
From the following data, we can get a glimpse of the grand occasion at that time: unconfirmed transactions soared from less than 2000 More than 11,000, CryptoKitties contract addresses account for about 12% of the total number of Ethereum transactions.
Crypto Kitty number 40 was sold for 225ETH , is the highest price in the history of CryptoKitties
CryptoKitties is a digital collection game, not Then there are simple collectibles like CryptoPunks. As a game, CryptoKitties provides new ways to play, such as two cats can mix genes to give birth to kittens. However, just because it is a game, Encryption Kitties has the same fate as many popular small games, like a short-lived fireworks, it will soon fade out of the stage of history.
But CryptoKitties is not just an NFT game, or not just a The NFT collectibles game, which has another far-reaching identity: the first ERC-721 NFT project. That's right, the most extensive token standard in the NFT world later came from Axiom Zen, and the term "NFT" was born here. In fact, before the release of CryptoKitties, Axiom Zen's CTO Dieter Shirley proposed the original version of the ERC-721 protocol inspired by CryptoPunks.
At this point, you may wonder why Axiom Zen, who has made such outstanding achievements, is so unknown ? Because they later changed another name: Dapper Labs. As for the reason for the name change, you can definitely guess: separate CryptoKitties and open up new businesses.
The famous Dapper Labs soon announced the a16z and USV collar in March 2018 It invested 12 million US dollars in financing, and then contacted the NBA, hoping that the two parties will cooperate to launch sports NFT collections on the blockchain.
When the focus of Dapper Labs' work shifted to Flow, the long encryption winter came quietly. At the end of the year, the price of Ethereum had dropped from $1,300 at the beginning of the year to $140. With dramatic changes in the market, CryptoKitties continued to cool down, and Dapper Labs’ account was once short of funds. In the next two years, three more rounds of financing were conducted.
The turning point came in September 2020 when Flow’s token sale on Coinlist was a huge success , more than 12,500 users from 100 countries invested nearly $9 million, breaking CoinList's record at the time. In the second week, Dapper took out another 25 million FLOW for auction and raised another $9.5 million.
Subsequently, the Flow network was launched, an NFT collectible project NBA that records the shooting moments of NBA stars Top Shot became the first experimenter on this public chain tailored for NFN, which is also the result of Dapper Labs' previous pursuit of official cooperation with the NBA. NBA Top Shot also lived up to expectations, continuing the legend of Dapper Labs' explosive factory.
2021 is off to a good start, and the NBA Top Shot competition continues to soar. Daily volume peaked at $47.9 million, and on May 7, the number of users peaked at 186,000.
After the NBA Top Shot, NFT popularity began to soar. Let’s review the market background at that time: DeFi set off a frenzy in the summer of 2020, igniting the enthusiasm of the entire encryption world. The horn of a new round of bull market has sounded before many people noticed it. Perhaps it is a group of late-conscious trend-seekers who missed the first wave of huge dividends in DeFi and looked for new wealth narratives in this market. NFT becomes the lucky one who gets selected.
The dark period between 2018 and the first half of 2020 is skipped in our narrative , In this dark night sky, there are not no moments when stars twinkle. OpenSea, which occupies an absolute dominant position in the NFT trading market today, was born during that time.
OpenSea: The absolute ruler of the NFT market
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The birth of Opensea is also the story of two technical men who made their fortunes. The rare encryption bull market in 2017 attracted Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah with computer backgrounds. The two demonstrated their first encryption project Wificoin at the Techcrunch Hackathon in September of that year, encouraging users to share Wifi routes in exchange for corresponding incentives . Wificoin was favored by Y Combinator, the top incubator in Silicon Valley, who hoped to include Wificoin in the incubation plan to promote the further development of the project.
During the transition period between Wificoin's acceptance of the program and its launch in January 2018, the cryptocurrency market a huge change. Ethereum has reached the pinnacle of that round of bull market. The madness not only reflects the rapid rise of Ethereum, but also the CryptoKitties mentioned above that just came out at that time. There is no need to describe the grand occasion. Most people are surprised by the energy of NFT , and Finzer and Atallah smelled new business opportunities: since CryptoKitties is built on ERC-721, if a trading market is built on the basis of ERC-721, it can support a variety of NFT.
Finzer and Atallah are entrepreneurs with a keen sense of the market, but they are not the only ones who smell business opportunities. Their competitor started an NFT marketplace called Rare Bits around the same time.
On the same day in February 2018, OpenSea and Rare Bits launched on Product Hunt. OpenSea describes itself as "the eBay for crypto goods." Rare Bits is positioned as "an eBay-like zero-fee encrypted asset marketplace." Both are aiming at the direction of eBay in the NFT world, but their operating strategies are different. OpenSea insists on charging commissions from user transactions, while Rare Bits offers a free transaction model. History has concluded that the strategy of subsidizing users and relying on traffic to build a moat in the Internet era has failed here. Today’s NFT market has long been dominated by OpenSea, but Rare Bits has long since disappeared in the dust of history.
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One of the earliest investors in OpenSea, Richard Chen, a general partner of 1confirmation, once summarized and reviewed the competition between the two:
Rare Bits is an on-paper team of ex-Zynga employees who have raised far more money from traditional VCs than OpenSea. But the OpenSea team is leaner, and Devin and Alex have done a great job of discovering new NFT projects and supporting them to trade on OpenSea, where most of the trading volume on OpenSea comes from. At the time of our investment in April 2018, OpenSea had 4 times the transaction volume of Rare Bits.
OpenSea's 2018 bear market was not smooth, but in November 2019 They pulled in a $2.1 million investment from Animoca Brands and pulled through the tough times. By March 2020, when the new crown virus epidemic spread globally, OpenSea had only 5 employees. At that time, the monthly transaction volume was 1.1 million US dollars. Calculated according to the 2.5% sales commission, OpenSea’s monthly income at this time was only a negligible 28,000 Dollar.
By 2021, the NFT market will recover, and OpenSea will enter a high-speed growth channel. In January 2022, OpenSea's monthly transaction volume peaked at US$5.86 billion, and its monthly revenue based on a 2.5% sales commission reached US$146 million. At the same time, OpenSea announced a Series C financing of up to US$300 million, and its valuation soared to US$13 billion, making it a well-deserved giant in the NFT world.
So far, the pioneers who created the NFT prosperity have all appeared on the stage. If the experience of DeFi is copied, the emergence of ERC-20 and Uniswap laid the foundation for the summer of DeFi; then we have reason to infer that after NFT has ERC-721 and OpenSea, it is only one fuse away from the explosion.
If you look at it from the perspective of the entire history of cryptocurrency, NFT is just an episode . NFT can usher in its explosion in 2021, but it is just in accordance with the weather. At the beginning of 2021, the DeFi frenzy that lasted for half a year attracted fresh blood to the encryption market. However, the pace of innovation in the DeFi market is gradually declining, and the market is looking for new growth points.
According to NFT data company Nonfungible.com, the total amount of NFT transactions in 2020 is 82 million US dollars , and in 2021 this data will reach 17.6 billion US dollars. 2021 is the first year of the NFT explosion, there is no doubt about it. And at the time point in early 2021, the outing of the NBA Top shot may be the powder keg that detonates the entire NFT market.
In the following year, encryption art and PFP avatars appeared one after another, becoming a bull market symphony The most striking melody of the period.
The Art of Encryption: Beeple and Pak
When it comes to encryption art, most people may first think of Beeple and his famous "Everydays: The First 5000 Days".
Beeple has published paintings on the Internet every day since May 1, 2007. After drawing 5,000 paintings, he used NFT technology to combine them together to generate new works "Everydays: The First 5000 Days"
Beeple is his name in the encryption world, in In the real world, he has another name, Mike Winkelmann. Mike, born in 1981, is a graphic designer from the United States who is well known in his field of work. He has designed for companies such as Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton and Space X.
As a graphic designer, Mike found a British artist while browsing the web, every day They will draw sketches and put them on their social networking sites, attracting many fans.
Inspired by this artist, Mike took the name Beeple for himself on the Internet . Since May 1, 2007, he insisted on completing a painting every day, day after day, without interruption.
Beeple created the first painting on May 1, 2017, depicting his uncle nicknamed "Uber Jay"
One painting a day, Mike persisted for 13 years, more than 5,000 days. He made a huge collection of all the paintings of the daily painting, named "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS". The next thing is well known, at the Christie's auction on March 11, 2021, the piece "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" was sold for $69.3 million, making it the most expensive encrypted artwork at the time. This is the moment when encrypted art is a blockbuster in the entire art world, and it is also the moment when NFT, as a new carrier of art, shows unlimited potential.
As Beeple stated, he is not a pure cryptographer. After subtracting auction fees and taxes, Beeple received $53 million worth of ether from the auction. At the end of March, shortly after the auction, Beeple told The New Yorker that he was frightened by the price fluctuations of Ethereum, and immediately exchanged all Ethereum for US dollars, and threw away the argument that "NFT is a bubble" and go. Beeple said, "I was doing digital art long before I did these things, and if all these NFTs disappeared tomorrow, I would still be doing digital art."
Beeple's achievements cannot be denied because of his pessimism about the NFT market at that time, and encryption art will not be dimmed because of Beeple's departure. In fact, encryption art has had a fantastic start, but a more exciting story is yet to come.
Beeple's record hadn't even stood for a year before it was broken by another artist.
On December 2, 2021, on the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway, a 48-hour The auction has started. The work up for auction is called The Merge, and it consists of small ball masses. During the auction, collectors can buy any number of mass, but each wallet can only have one small ball. When buying a second ball, the two balls will be merged into one, and the color and volume will also change. After the auction is over, small balls will no longer be produced, and "annexation" will continue to occur with secondary market transactions, and the number of balls will become less and less.
The auction event finally attracted more than 28,000 collectors to participate, and the total auction value reached 91.8 million US dollars, and this The creator behind the work, Pak, also ascended to the altar and was praised as the Satoshi Nakamoto of the NFT world.
Different from Beeple who has a real identity in the physical world, Pak is still a mystery artist. No one knows his name, what he looks like, or even his gender. What people know is that he is the founder of Undream studio and the chief designer of AI curatorial event Archillect. He has been engaged in digital art creation for more than 25 years and has worked with hundreds of major brands and studios.
Pak shaped the new pinnacle of crypto art, and not only that, he also created a living artist public The highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. The previous record was set in 2019 by Jeff Koons in the work "Rabbit". People were amazed to discover that the pinnacle of physical art has been surpassed by encrypted art.
PFP: Theme
When encryption art shines, CryptoPunks has also returned to people's vision. As a pioneer of NFT on Ethereum, CryptoPunks' significance and value potential are self-evident , Some people call it Bitcoin in the NFT world and gold in the digital collection world.
CryptoPunks historical transaction data, yellow is The number of transactions, the white is the transaction amount, the transaction volume of CryptoPunks ushered in a significant increase in February 2021, and reached its peak in August. Data source: NonFungible
The return of the CryptoPunks king opened the door to "PFP" NFT at the same time. PFP is the abbreviation of "profile picture", which is a copyrighted avatar in the form of NFT.
If NFT is the most eye-catching drama of this crypto bull market, then PFP is the stage The brightest new star in the world.
The ranking of the total NFT transaction volume so far , PFP occupies most of the seats in the top ten, data source: NFTGo
The spotlight on the stage is not Will stay with the CryptoPunks forever, this time the story features someone else, a group of futuristic crypto hit apes who hang out at secret clubs in the swamp, all dressed in different colors, but with smears on their faces. A look of boredom. They are called Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
As for what did these boring apes do? Set your sights on their highlight moments first.
On March 12, 2022, Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, announced the acquisition of CryptoPunks developed by Larva Labs and Meebits NFT series, on March 23, Yuga Labs completed a financing of 450 million US dollars at a valuation of 4 billion US dollars.
This is a story of a latecomer’s counterattack, and the script of the story almost follows CryptoPunks, Early sales were lukewarm, and the team was unknown, but BAYC was fortunately born at the starting point of the NFT boom. Another more critical difference is BAYC's open strategy and marketing ideas.
According to The New Yorker, BAYC has four anonymous creators who are real Friends in life, Gargamel is a writer and editor, Goner is a cryptocurrency day trader, Tomato and Sass are programmers.
BAYC was inspired by an NFT project called Hashmasks. They realized that the focus of NFT is not technology, but cultural innovation is the key. So they hoped to create a club that would bridge the gap between mainstream culture and Web3.
Initially, BAYC was a multi-person collaborative work of art with a single canvas that allowed multiple people to Change one of the pixels to your favorite color every 15 minutes. The founding team told Nicole Muniz about the idea. So what started as a simple idea for a collaborative project turned into a picture with a story: a futuristic Miami swamp inhabited by a bunch of bored apes. Gargamel wanted them to be punk apes with "a sort of existential boredom."
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Subsequently, the team hired a professional illustrator for $40,000. Lead designer Seneca imagined himself as an ape neighbor in a scruffy city where apes roamed freely as citizens of the city. Seneca describes this group of citizens as "apes who are bored with life but have all the money and time in the world hanging out in metal bars". Thus, the BAYC Boring Ape we know today was born.
On April 23, 2021, BAYC opened the pre-sale. After 7 days, 500 NFTs were sold out. However, by May 1st, the remaining 9,500 BAYC were wiped out.
At that time, the casting price of each BAYC was 0.08ETH, and it was only less than a year On March 17, 2022, the floor price of BAYC on OpenSea has exceeded 100ETH.
The difference in the attitudes of BAYC and CryptoPunks towards NFT copyright is considered to be the reason why the former successfully surpassed the latter The essential. CryptoPunks' opening of NFT copyrights is quite restrained, which has aroused strong dissatisfaction from the community. One of the holders, Dom Hofman, dumped all the CryptoPunks in his hands and created a new NFT project, Nounce, which is the first NFT to adopt the open copyright CC0 model, opening all copyrights to the community.
BAYC endows its holder with almost complete commercial copyright and encourages the holder to create secondary works. Each holder can create a brand or product based on BAYC and sell it independently.
With the gradual growth of BAYC, the team has also upgraded from an anonymous group of four to more than 40 people Yuga Labs. Yuga is actually the villain in The Legend of Zelda: A Triangular Force of Gods 2. It has a special ability to turn itself and others into paintings. According to the founder of BAYC, the name "Yuga" implies the extraordinary creativity of the team.
The turning point that made BAYC really famous came from the celebrity effect. Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is the first celebrity to hold a BAYC. In May 2021, Mark Cuban received BAYC and exhibited it in his Lazy.com NFT gallery. Subsequently, many celebrities poured in, including NBA star Stephen Curry, Youtube big V KSI.
BAYC is starting to go to the top, but if only BAYC, or CryptoPunks, is not enough To describe the grand occasion of PFP NFT. Most of the NFTs we call blue chips today are among them.
June 2021, three former Dapper Labs members Evan Keast, Jordan Castro and Scott Martin Jointly launched Doodles, of which Evan Keast and Jordan Castro are the core developers of Cryptokitties.
In January 2022, Chiru Labs, led by former tech entrepreneur Zagabond, launches Azuki. Interestingly, Zagabond revealed in May this year that he had created a copycat version of CryptoPunks such as CryptoPhunks, CryptoZunks, etc., and failed, which caused Azuki to fall into a crisis of trust.
April 2022, a community led by NFT collector and tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose PROOF Collective launched Moonbirds, which also attracted the attention of the NFT community.
The glory of PFP continues here. However, after May today, the once mighty crypto empires Terra and Three Arrows collapsed one after another, the entire crypto market was involved in a liquidity vortex, and NFT also cooled down.
NFT has shown remarkable continuity in its short history. From the enlightenment of literature and art, to technical practice, and finally to the application, all have the same origin. Just as the literary critic Harold Bloom explained in the work "Western Canon" that Western literature originated from Shakespeare, there is also a similar role in NFT history: CryptoPunks. Whether it is Dapp Labs drafting ERC-721, or later traffic stars such as BAYC and Azuki, they are all influenced by CryptoPunks without exception. So how to understand the value of CryptoPunks mentioned earlier, the answer is self-evident.
Looking Forward: Democracy
Countless time is always needed to pass meaninglessly before a truly historic moment—a moment when human stars shine.
Zweig’s sentence is also suitable for NFT.
We reviewed in detail those pivotal projects, teams and their shining moments in the history of NFT. Such bright moments are rare in any history, and it is they that clearly engrave the skeleton of historical development.
Aside from these main themes and highlight moments, we have also skipped a lot of things in the NFT field The people and things that make a difference. For example, the once massive blockchain games Axie Infinity and STEPN have incorporated the token economics design of NFT; another example is the NFTFi track that combines DeFi and NFT, and many innovative figures have emerged: NIFTEX, Unicly and Fractional have pioneered NFT fragmentation experiments, and NFTfi, BenDAO, etc. have made great efforts in the field of NFT lending. They converge into the flesh and blood of NFT development.
All these stories sum up the experience and direction for the back waves of the NFT world.
Finally, back to the question that everyone cares about, where will the historical river of NFT go? where? No one can give a definite answer. However, we can learn from the ideas of the sages to peek into one or two.
Vico once proposed three stages of the historical cycle in "New Science", namely Age of theocracy, age of aristocracy, age of democracy. History always rhymes with the same rhyme. From a higher-dimensional historical perspective, the history of NFT development also basically conforms to the characteristics of Vico's historical syllogism. Now NFT is blooming everywhere on Ethereum and other public chains, and ordinary people can easily touch it. This is the beginning of the democratic era.
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