Even though the NFT industry spiked in popularity in the past year or two, some projects have been around for more than seven years.
In terms of NFT archaeology, people are backtracking the process of the entire NFT marketplace in order to find some of the NFT projects that laid the foundations of modern culture. Nowadays we can find even NFT games, like Wizardia, but NFTs go a long way to what we have now.
Some of the oldest NFT projects managed to survive and build quite a name for themselves in the new market trading at millions of dollars per image and some of them didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
In today’s article, we will take a look at some of the oldest projects in the NFT space, and find out more about these OG NFTs that initiated an entire movement on a global scale.
Eggs (2014) – Namecoin
If you are a crypto enthusiast chances are that you already know about one of the first NFT projects that were very different from what we are used to seeing in the NFT space. The ‘Eggs’ project was built on top of Namecoin, which was a fork of Bitcoin and the only other project that Satoshi Nakamoto worked on.
Namecoin was released in 2011 and served as a decentralized name registration service, similar to the ENX names that we know and love today.
A few years down the line, people realized that Namecoin can track metadata onto their names as a decentralized key-value pair. Some even decided to attach profile pictures to their names. This was the birth of PFPs.
Out of all PFPs, 277 defaulted Twitter avatars known as “Twitter Eggs” and collectors identified them as some of the earliest traces of on-chain collectibles in the NFT space.
Spells of Genesis – (2015) – Bitcoin
When we are talking about collectibles, the first thing that comes to mind is Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. The Spells of Genesis were made on the same principle as a trading card game but on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Each card contains a piece of art representing a historic moment in Blockchain history. This was one of the first projects where blockchain technology was used for creating a game, marking the start of a new era.
Pixel Map (2016) – Ethereum
Remember The Million Dollar Homepage from 2005? – If not, let us remind you about the concept. A person created a website with 1 million pixels and went on to sell each individual pixel for $1 to companies. In a short period of time, he sold all the pixels earning him 1 million dollars.
Well, the Pixel map is based on the same principle, but it is not created by the same person. In fact, Ken Erwin created a decentralized version of the artwork and deployed it to the Ethereum Blockchain in 2016.
This is a billboard-style project where everyone can buy a piece and change the image being displayed on that file. In some way, the entire piece becomes a collaborative piece of NFT art, that is never complete.
Rare Pepes (2016) – Bitcoin
At the time of meme, NFTs started to emerge and any OG NFT list wouldn’t be complete without the legendary Rare Pepes. These were collectible cards that are stripped from the internet culture in a form of ‘memes’ and were the first experiments on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
There were around 1,800 cards issued across 36 series, and Series 1, Card 1 is actually represented by Satoshi Nakamoto, which is the person or group of people that created Bitcoin.
CryptoPunks (2017) – Ethereum
Even if you are new to the NFT marketplace, these 8-bit avatars don’t need any introduction. The recently trading CryptoPunks was one of the first Ethereum-based NFT projects started by Matt Hall and John Watkinson, a software developer that pioneered the PFP trend that took over the world.
These avatars are viewed as both collectibles and art and slowly have worked their way up securing first place as the most traded NFT recently with individual pictures selling for multiple millions of dollars.
CryptoKitties (2017) – Ethereum
This was one of the first full adaptations of Blockchain technology in a game that revolutionized the crypto world and uncovered new possibilities for this technology. On the date when CryptoKitties was released, the project literally broke Ethereum, driving gas prices up so high.
This was the first ERC-721 token, which opened a standard that most NFTs use today.
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