A history of Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and NFT
A brief history of Blockchain and cryptocurrency
Having a long history of development and transformation, Blockchain foundation was first seen in 1991 when Stuart Haber and W Scott Stornetta first described a cryptographically chain of blocks. Fast forward to 2008, a developer under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper describing the model of Blockchain, officially bringing this technology to the world.
In 2009, Nakamoto put blockchain into use as a public ledger for transactions that uses Bitcoin and until 2014, Blockchain became more popular than ever. It separates from currency and people start to explore its vast potential in financial and interorganizational transactions. This has opened a new age of Blockchain, presenting Blockchain 2.0 and its applications in services beyond normal currency.
When first introduced in Nakamoto’s white paper, Bitcoin was first known to be a form of currency that works in a peer-to-peer system with a desire to eliminate the participation of the central bank and other authorities in transactions. Furthermore, the creation of Bitcoin is just one year after the global economic crisis happened in 2008. Bitcoin was introduced to become a new way of payment that can be done internationally, decentralized without any financial institution.
Bitcoin was introduced to the world as one of the first popular Cryptocurrency and a digital asset designed to work as a medium exchange. Bitcoin then slowly taking its adoption, growing in value now becoming the most valuable cryptocurrency at the moment with 1 bitcoin equals $54,969.
Blockchain technology involves every day and has given birth to many other coins and the second biggest cryptocurrency at the moment is Ethereum, which is stated to be Blockchain 2.0 when it offers more significant features such as Smart Contract, Proof of Stake, solidity and more. In all and all, Cryptocurrencies have become a part of Blockchain system to secure transactions without the involvement of the central bank and authorities, bringing a huge potential in changing the financial system.
And with the development of both Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies worldwide, NFT was introduced as an innovation of digital assets.
NFT: How it started and how it is impacting the world
There are many arguments but many believe Colored Coin was the first form of NFT back in 2012–2013. Back then, Colored Coin had a value of 1 Satoshi, which is the smallest unit of Bitcoin and it represents multiple forms of assets and has multiple use cases such as: physical assets (car, house), coupons, digital collectibles, issue share of economy and more.
In 2014, the rise in popularity of colored coins led to a wide recognition of its potential in issuing assets on the Blockchain system. Robert Dermody, Adam Krellenstein and Evan Wagner have founded Counterparty, a financial platform built on a peer-to-peer network with an open-source Internet that is built on top of bitcoin blockchain. The platform allows actions such as asset creation and most noticeable projects of Counterplay are: card game and meme trading.
With an intensive growth, Counterparty first launched its ICO in 2015, became a larger trading card game platform in 2016 and grew strongly in popularity when a meme called Pepes became an asset on Counterparty, drawing people’s attention globally and becoming one of the biggest NFT platforms at that teime.
In 2017, Crypto Punk and CryptoKitties are the two most famous NFT projects that introduce a more appealing and attractive look of NFT to the world. CryptoKitties especially is blockchain virtual games allow you to adopt, raise, trade and breed virtual cats. The game quickly went viral when it came first place in ETH Waterloo Hackathon, world’s largest hackathon for Ethereum Ecosystem. People started to buy virtual cats, breed and trade virtual cats worldwide and some virtual cats were sold for over $100,000.
2018–2019 and to this day, we are witnessing the booming of NFT. There are now over 100+ NFT projects in progress and NFT marketplaces are now one of the most attractive platforms such as OpenSea, SuperRare, Rarible, Enjin,… NFT expands its functionalities and does not show any sign of stopping in growth. Digital assets such as painting, artwork, card game and in-game items,… are the most popular form of NFT at the present.
NFT in Non-fungible token represents non-fungible assets that are unique and cannot be interchangeable in nature. The popularity of NFT lies within the uniqueness it gives when there is only one copy of a NFT, boosting its rarity and owning an NFT means you are the only rightful owner of it.
One of the most expensive NFT artwork is Beeple’s Everdays: First 5,000 days sold for $69.3 millions or Grimes, Elon Musk’s girlfriend sold her NFT collection for $6 millions. NFT has opened a new future and changed people’s perspective about digital assets. Tokenizing assets in the future, people will have more power in ownership without any third parties involvement, transactions are done quicker and more transparently due to the fact thatthey are done on a decentralized system.
