Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney first mentioned an early version of NFTs in 1993. He called them “Crypto Trading Cards.” In a forum discussion, Finney touched on definable scarcity, exclusive ownership and provenance. These concepts are now at the core of every NFT.

The idea of NFTs wouldn’t see much development until 2012 when Yoni Assia wrote about “colored bitcoins,” which eventually became “colored coins.” Built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, Colored Coins created semifungible tokens that were supposed to represent real-world assets such as real estate, commodities and bonds.

One of the earliest NFT iterations “Quantum” was created in 2014 by Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash and presented at the New Museum in New York City. In 2015, the first Ethereum-based NFT called Etheria was launched at Devcon 1. This is largely considered to be the first truly nonfungible token.

The term “NFT” emerged in 2017. Although little known at the time, two very significant NFT projects, CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties, were launched in 2017. This same year, the first NFT house was sold through Propy. This marked the first wave of NFT popularity which synchronized with the crypto market cycle.

NFTs have become a booming market that expands year after year. For example, sales have grown from just $41 million in 2018 to an astonishing $2.5 billion in the first half of 2021, representing a 60-fold growth in three and a half years.

Even compared to 2020, the growth is staggering. Total sales in 2020 reached $340 million and in 2021 so far the sales have already surpassed $9 billion which is more than 25-fold growth according to data from NonFungible.com on NFTs on Ethereum.

Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney first mentioned an early version of NFTs in 1993. He called them “Crypto Trading Cards.” In a forum discussion, Finney touched on definable scarcity, exclusive ownership and provenance. These concepts are now at the core of every NFT.

The idea of NFTs wouldn’t see much development until 2012 when Yoni Assia wrote about “colored bitcoins,” which eventually became “colored coins.” Built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, Colored Coins created semifungible tokens that were supposed to represent real-world assets such as real estate, commodities and bonds.

One of the earliest NFT iterations “Quantum” was created in 2014 by Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash and presented at the New Museum in New York City. In 2015, the first Ethereum-based NFT called Etheria was launched at Devcon 1. This is largely considered to be the first truly nonfungible token.

The term “NFT” emerged in 2017. Although little known at the time, two very significant NFT projects, CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties, were launched in 2017. This same year, the first NFT house was sold through Propy. This marked the first wave of NFT popularity which synchronized with the crypto market cycle.

NFTs have become a booming market that expands year after year. For example, sales have grown from just $41 million in 2018 to an astonishing $2.5 billion in the first half of 2021, representing a 60-fold growth in three and a half years.

Even compared to 2020, the growth is staggering. Total sales in 2020 reached $340 million and in 2021 so far the sales have already surpassed $9 billion which is more than 25-fold growth according to data from NonFungible.com on NFTs on Ethereum.