Where did NFT came from?

NFTs have been big business nowadays, many things have already been sold as such, from the first tweet to the New York Times articles (sold for half a million euros) to Marco Montemagno’s photos.

According to Glitch CEO Anil Dash, the whole story of NFT began as an elaborate project for a hackathon (an event in which experts from different fields of computer science participate in various capacities) that had paired artists and programmers.

What was its beginning?

It was 2014, Dash writes when he was paired with digital artist Kevin McCoy on that project. We were at the height of Tumblr culture. A bustling and inspiring community of millions of artists and fans shared images and videos without attribution, compensation, or context. A solution to that problem became the seed of their idea.

McCoy and Dash had created an early version of a blockchain-compatible means of claiming ownership of an original digital work. So they gave our creation an ironic name, not an acronym like NFT. They called it monetized graphics. Neither Dash nor McCoy patented the idea, although McCoy spent some later years evangelizing it. But both envisioned their creation as a way to give artists more control over their work. The technology would allow artists to exercise control over their work, sell it more easily, and protect themselves more strongly against others not authorized to appropriate it.

Proto NFT approach

The “proto NFTs” conceived by Dash and McCoy are fascinating because they are explicitly artist-oriented and not necessarily as interested in profit, unlike the NFT market we have now. McCoy, on the other hand, created ‘Quantum’ which is considered to be the earliest known NFT and one of the most historically important examples of crypto-art. The work of Kevin McCoy, a New York digital artist, simply depicts an animated geometric figure on a black background that keeps changing shape and color. It was created in May 2014.

NFTs journey:

NFTs have benefited artists, but this technology evolved much more, being many companies that have entered this world making different campaigns and more and more people are entering with new ideas of how to reward many people in this world.