NFT

Collins Dictionary has announced that its word of the year for 2021 is NFT. Collins defines it as "a unique digital certificate registered on the blockchain for recording ownership of assets such as art or collectibles". Metaverse has also been shortlisted for word of the Year. ​​​

Sales of NFT game Axie Infinity have skyrocketed. As of August 7, the cumulative transaction volume of NFT game Axie Infinity exceeded $1 billion, ranking first in the NFT market by transaction volume, according to CryptoSlam data. The rapid rise of Axie Infinity drives the rapid development of the entire NFT market segment.

The online FLOW public chain and the combination of NFT and DeFi realize Gamefi -- NFT ushered in its spring. Digital artist Beeple started making images one a day in 2007, eventually stitching 5,000 images together into a 316 MB JPG file and selling it as NFT. Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, which took 14 years to create, sold for $69.34 million at Christie's. After the record auction of the Beeple, Zion Lateef Williamson, Takari Murakami, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Twitter CEO, Edward Joseph Snowden, Paris Hilton, Yao Ming and other celebrities and artists have posted on various NFT platforms NFT, once again bringing NFT to the masses.

NFT Ecology saw massive growth in 2018 and 2019, with more than 100 projects in the field and more in the pipeline. Led by OpenSea and SuperRare, the NFT market is booming. While trading volumes were small compared to other cryptocurrency markets at the time, they grew at a rapid pace and have come a long way. As Web3 wallets like Metamask continue to improve, joining the NFT ecosystem becomes easier. There are now several sites, such as Nonfungible.com and NftCryptonews.com, that delve into NFT's market metrics, game guides, and provide standard information about the field.

June 2017: CryptoPunks. In 2017, when the Ethereum ecosystem began to gain momentum, two developers who were not in the cryptocurrency community came into the ecosystem by chance with more than 10,000 pixel avatars, and thus developed the world's first NFT project -- CryptoPunks. John and Matt, originally mobile App developers, created a pixelated avatar generator in early 2017 and created a bunch of cool pixelated avatars, and when they thought about what they could do with them further, They looked at blockchain and Ethereum, which was gaining popularity with the ERC20 token standard. So they decided to put these pixel avatars on the blockchain, so that these pixel avatars, which are also very personalized, can be verified by the characteristics of the blockchain, and they can be owned by others or allowed to be transferred by others. Since there were no ERC721 or ERC1155 token protocols for NFT at the time, the duo made appropriate modifications to the ERC20 standard and successfully moved these pixelated avatars with punk spirit to Ethereum. Thus, the world's first truly NFT project, CryptoPunks, was born. It pioneering image as a cryptographic asset into the field of cryptocurrency, when all kinds of tokens were flying around, as a clear current to many practitioners new inspiration.

The concept of NFT was formally proposed by Dieter Shirley, founder and CTO of CryptoKitties, in 2017. In that year, as BTC rose from $5,000 to $20,000 in just two months, a crypto cat game quickly became popular in this massive crypto bull market. In the summer of 2017, the ERC20 token standard and ERC20-based ICOs were particularly popular. After the launch of Crypto Cat, many users asked Dieter how crypto cat and ERC20 interact, but in fact crypto cat and ERC20 are not compatible. Because crypto cat is based on another token standard, ERC721, which is non-homogenous, whereas ERC20 is homogenous. In order to better explain the difference between crypto and ERC20, Dieter came up with a fixed and simple answer. Dieter then came up with the concept of NFT, the concept of non-homogenous tokens. With the popularity of crypto cats, the concept of NFT quickly entered the public consciousness. Thus, digital assets no longer just refer to cryptocurrencies, but are a combination of homogenous cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets represented by non-homogenous NFT.

October 2017: CryptoKitties. As CryptoPunks, an innovative project, has been hyped up on Ethereum, the non-homogenous token has brought a new ethos. Inspired by CryptoPunks, The Dapper Labs team launched the ERC721 token standard specifically for building non-homogeneous tokens, and then based on ERC721, the Dapper Labs team launched a CryptoKitties cat game. Make each digital cat unique and its value cannot be duplicated. "Only scarcity can maximize the value". CryptoKitties' innovation in the presentation of value creation has made CryptoKitties popular and mainstream in the market, so NFT has become popular.

2014: Counterparty. The birth of color coins has made many people realize the great potential of issuing assets on the blockchain. Robert Dermody, Adam Krellenstein, and Evan Wagner founded Counterparty in 2014. It is a peer-to-peer financial platform that builds distributed open source Internet protocols on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Counterparty supports asset creation and owns decentralized exchanges, XCP coins, and many projects and assets, including card games and Meme transactions. What really propelled NFT was the creation of "Rare Pepes" at Counterparty, which turned the popular meme Sad Frog into an NFT app. A meme, translated as a meme, is actually a kind of expression package, picture or sentence, or even a video or GIF, which can be simply understood as the well-known "meme".

2012: ColoredCoin (color coin) In 2012, the first NFT-like token, Colored Coin, was born. Color coins are made up of bitcoins in small denominations, with the smallest unit being a satong (the smallest unit of bitcoin). It can represent a variety of assets and can be used for a variety of purposes, including property, coupons, and issuing company shares. Although there are still many defects in the design of color coin, color coin shows the plasticity and development potential of the chain of real assets, which lays the foundation for the development of NFT.

1993: Crypto trading card. The concept of NFT and its predecessor can be traced back to Crypto Trading Cards in 1993. Basically, in 1993 Hal Finney (the veteran cryptographic expert and bitcoin pioneer who first received Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin) shared an interesting concept that went something like this: "I've been thinking a little bit more about the idea of buying and selling digital cash, and I've come up with a way to demonstrate it. We're buying and selling crypto trading cards. Cryptography enthusiasts will enjoy these fascinating examples of the art of cryptography. Note that it is perfectly rendered in combination -- a mixture of one-way functions and digital signatures, as well as random blindness. What a perfect piece to treasure and show your friends and family." This is probably the earliest statement and thought we can find about NFT, although the logic is the same as when we bought a whole set of outlaws of the Marsh cards when we were kids; But the form of expression is based on cryptographic and mathematical representations, which are then randomly arranged into a series of cards, which Hal defines as cryptographic cards.