The History of the Term “NFT”

2010–2013: “Non-fungible” on Bitcointalk

The word turns up on Bitcointalk, the main Bitcoin forum, almost as soon as there was a Bitcoin economy to discuss.

• 27 July 2010. A user named Red, who had written about coin collecting in the forum’s marketplace section: “If you want create a new topic and we can all discuss ‘non-fungible’ bitcoins.”¹
• 13 July 2012. Explodicle, in a thread titled “Namecoin and Economic Rent”: “the only objects with value in Bitcoin are the coins themselves, which are fungible, while Namecoin also has domains which are non-fungible. ‘google.bit’ is worth FAR more than ‘googlesearch.bit’.”²
• 26 November 2012. markm, on the Open Transactions project: “even non-fungible things are also on the roadmap, things that will involve deeds so that each individual one of the thing (each house, each car, each ship, etc) can be different from other things of its type.”³
• 15 April 2013. The earliest “non-fungible tokens” found, in an argument about privacy. passerby objected to any system “that requires formation of ‘fixed-denomination’ non-fungible ‘tokens’ with fixed BTC value.”⁴
• 8 October 2013. jtimon (Jorge Timón), listing the features of Freimarkets, a proposed asset system for Bitcoin-like chains: “Support for unique non-fungible assets (better for some smart property use cases).”⁵

By the end of 2013 the idea had its vocabulary: unique, non-fungible things on a blockchain, with Namecoin names as the working example.

2014: The Ethereum whitepaper

Ethereum’s whitepaper took the word up in the spring of 2014. The copy on ethereum.org in January 2014 does not contain it. In the version on Ethereum’s GitHub wiki, last edited on 24 April 2014, the applications the whitepaper lists include “non-fungible assets such as domain names (‘Namecoin’).” The phrase is still in the whitepaper today.⁶

Namecoin itself never adopted the word. The source of its website, with a history going back to 2015, never calls its names NFTs; the only related phrase, “the nonfungible nature of Namecoin names,” is from a technical post of 2022.⁷ The “NFT” label was put on Namecoin names years later, by others; see Namecoin in Early NFT Claimants, Examined.

Quantum, Kevin McCoy’s Namecoin record from May 2014, did not use the word either. It speaks only of title: “Title transfers to whoever controls this blockchain entry.”⁸

2015–2017: The thing without the name

Etheria launched on Ethereum in October 2015, with tiles that are unique, owned and tradable on-chain, in a set its contracts define. It was a blockchain collectible two years before the initialism existed, so nobody called it an NFT.⁹

The phrase also kept turning up in other senses. In March 2015 a member of the Omni team worried about “two non-fungible tokens causing user confusion”: issuing Factom’s coin on both Omni and Counterparty would have made two versions that could not be swapped for each other. In April 2017 a Bitcointalk regular, arguing that “Bitcoin is not even fungible,” added that “any non-fungible token is a permissioned ledger by default.”¹⁰

September 2017: ERC-721 coins “NFT”

The initialism comes from one document. On 20 September 2017 Dieter Shirley of Axiom Zen, the studio behind CryptoKitties, drafted “ERC: Non-fungible Token Standard,” posted two days later as Ethereum issue 721. Its abstract: “The following standard allows for the implementation of a standard API for non-fungible tokens (henceforth referred to as ‘NFTs’) within smart contracts.” No earlier “NFT” in this sense has been found.¹¹

The draft also gave examples: “Examples of existing or planned NFTs are LAND in Decentraland, the eponymous punks in CryptoPunks…” CryptoPunks were called NFTs first by the standard’s author, not by Larva Labs.

2018–2021: Larva Labs’ “first NFT”

In January 2018, at the R.A.R.E. Digital Art Festival, Matt Hall of Larva Labs presented CryptoPunks as “The first digital collectible on Ethereum (as far as we know).” When a member of the Curio Cards team said they had launched in May 2017, Hall answered: “Okay, you know, we were the second.”¹² That was not true either. Etheria (October 2015) and PixelMap (November 2016) were collectibles on Ethereum before CryptoPunks, so even setting aside Curio Cards, which do not meet the collectible definition, CryptoPunks came third.

A year later Larva Labs claimed more. On 24 January 2019 John Watkinson wrote on Reddit: “the Cryptopunks, as the first ever NFT, seems OK to me.” Between 24 January and 6 February 2019 the CryptoPunks page gained a new line: “The first ‘Non-Fungible Token,’ and inspiration for the Ethereum ERC-721 standard that powers most digital art and collectibles.” The same page announced a talk at NFT.NYC, a conference named after the initialism, so the word was already the industry’s own. What Larva Labs added was the claim to be first.¹³

The claim stayed up through the 2021 boom. On 3 July 2021 the page still read “the first ‘Non-Fungible Token’ on Ethereum.” Etheria’s founder called Larva Labs out publicly on 9 July, and by 23 July the line read “one of the earliest examples of a ‘Non-Fungible Token’ on Ethereum.”¹⁴

2021: The word goes mainstream

On 16 February 2021 Christie’s announced that it would sell Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days: “This sale marks the first time that a purely digital NFT (Non-Fungible Token) based work of art has ever been offered by a major auction house.” The release explained the term to readers who had never met it, and got it wrong: “An NFT is a unique digital token encrypted with the artist’s signature.” A token is a public record on a blockchain, not an encrypted file. The token itself came from the crypto market: “The NFT for this work has been generated by MakersPlace,” an NFT marketplace.¹⁵

The sale closed on 11 March 2021 at $69,346,250, the third-highest price for a living artist at auction.¹⁶ That November, Collins named “NFT” its Word of the Year 2021.¹⁷

The new word was then applied backward. Namecoin names from 2011, McCoy’s Quantum from 2014, a 2015 Ethereum guestbook and others were rebranded as “the first NFT,” often by the people selling them. Each claim is examined in Early NFT Claimants, Examined.

Sources

1. Red, “Re: Money Transfer Regulations” (archived), Bitcointalk, 27 July 2010.
2. Explodicle, “Namecoin and Economic Rent” (archived), Bitcointalk, 13 July 2012.
3. markm, “Re: I wish we had this (Universal Wallet)”, Bitcointalk, 26 November 2012.
4. passerby, “Re: Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin” (archived), Bitcointalk, 15 April 2013. Another user replied the same day that the poster was “confusing fungibility with divisibility.”
5. jtimon, “Re: Bitcoin-like implementation of Ripple” (archived), Bitcointalk, 8 October 2013.
6. The whitepaper as published at ethereum.org, archived 11 January 2014, with no form of “fungible”; the GitHub wiki’s “[English] White Paper,” archived 3 June 2014, last edited 24 April 2014; the current whitepaper.
7. The namecoin.org site source, full history from 9 April 2015; Jeremy Rand, “Changes to name_show in Electrum-NMC Protocol v1.4.3”, 28 October 2022.
8. The 2014 Namecoin entry for Quantum (archived).
9. Etheria in Early NFT Claimants, Examined; verified source for all four contracts in etheria_source.
10. udecker, quoted by Cablez in “Re: The Official Mastercoin Foundation, Master Protocol & Mastercoin Thread”, Bitcointalk, 17 March 2015; r0ach, “Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD”, Bitcointalk, 10 April 2017.
11. Dieter Shirley, “ERC: Non-fungible Token Standard”, ethereum/EIPs issue 721, opened 22 September 2017; the original draft, dated 20 September 2017, is kept in the issue.
12. Matt Hall at R.A.R.E., 13 January 2018: the slide and the answer (archived), recording posted by RARE ART LABS; the quotes are at 0:29, 20:46 and 20:57.
13. John Watkinson, comment on r/ethereum, 24 January 2019; larvalabs.com/cryptopunks, archived 24 January 2019 (without the claim) and 6 February 2019 (with it).
14. larvalabs.com/cryptopunks, archived 3 July 2021 and 23 July 2021; the call-out, 9 July 2021 (archived).
15. Christie’s, “Christie’s to Offer the First Purely Digital NFT-Based Work of Art Ever Offered by a Major Auction House” (archived), press release, 16 February 2021.
16. Christie’s, “Beeple’s Purely Digital NFT-Based Work of Art Achieves $69.3 Million at Christie’s” (archived), press release, 11 March 2021.
17. Collins, “The Collins Word of the Year 2021 is… NFT” (archived).