What Makes an NFT Historically Important?
By NFTRanker Editorial · · 26 min read
Age matters. But being early is not the same thing as mattering.
A strange thing happens when a market becomes old enough to have a history.
People start trying to rank the past.
Which NFT was first?
Which collection invented profile pictures?
Which project created the first on-chain art?
Which one deserves to be called the first crypto art collection?
Which forgotten contract should suddenly be worth millions because somebody discovered that it predates CryptoPunks by six months?
These questions sound objective.
Blockchains, after all, are unusually good at timestamps.
If two contracts were deployed five minutes apart, Ethereum can tell us which came first without relying on anyone's memory.
But history is not quite that cooperative.
The oldest object is not necessarily the most important object.
The rarest object is not necessarily the most influential object.
And the most expensive object is not necessarily the one future collectors will care about.
A blockchain can tell us when something happened.
It cannot tell us whether that thing mattered.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as NFTs develop something they barely had during the 2021 boom:
a past.
(If tokens, contracts and on-chain ownership are unfamiliar territory, our explainer on what an NFT actually is covers the mechanics this article assumes.)
History Is Not a Leaderboard
Imagine discovering an obscure NFT contract from 2016.
It predates CryptoPunks.
The supply is tiny.
The contract still works.
Only eleven tokens survive.
Does that automatically make it historically important?
Probably not.
Now imagine another project launched a year later.
It wasn't the first NFT.
It wasn't even the first NFT on Ethereum.
But thousands of collectors adopted it. Developers copied its ideas. A token standard evolved around the same problem it was exploring. Its visual format spread across the internet. Artists referenced it. Auction houses sold it. Museums eventually collected it.
Which project matters more?
The blockchain gives the first project chronological priority.
Culture may give the second historical priority.
These are different things.
We encountered exactly this problem when examining the history of V1 CryptoPunks. The first CryptoPunks contract was deployed before the corrected contract that eventually became famous. That fact is permanently recorded on Ethereum.
Yet the later contract became the canonical CryptoPunks collection.
The market formed around it.
The community formed around it.
The famous sales happened through it.
The museum acquisitions refer to it.
So V1 CryptoPunks have chronological primacy, while the corrected Punks have something closer to canonical primacy.
Both statements can be true.
And that suggests a more interesting way to think about NFT history.
Historical significance is not one variable.
It is the accumulation of several.
The Difference Between Being First and Changing What Comes Next
In 2014, artist Kevin McCoy minted Quantum.
Sotheby's describes it as the first NFT: a digital artwork connected to a unique blockchain asset years before "NFT" became common terminology.
That makes Quantum extremely important.
But consider what happened afterward.
The NFT ecosystem did not immediately explode into existence.
There was no OpenSea.
No MetaMask as we know it today.
No ERC-721.
No 10,000-piece PFP collections.
No NFT Twitter.
No Discord allowlists.
No rarity rankings.
No floor prices.
No expectation that millions of ordinary internet users would understand what it meant to own a token associated with an image.
An invention can exist before the ecosystem necessary to make the invention consequential exists.
This happens surprisingly often.
The first technology to demonstrate an idea is not always the technology that causes society to reorganize around it.
History therefore cares about at least two different events:
Who demonstrated the possibility?
and
Who made the possibility contagious?
Sometimes those are the same project.
Often they aren't.
Etheria: What If Digital Land Could Actually Belong to You?
Ethereum itself launched in July 2015.
Only a few months later, an experiment called Etheria appeared.
Etheria consisted of ownable hexagonal land tiles stored on Ethereum. Its early versions were deployed in October 2015, and the project was demonstrated at DEVCON 1 that November.
This was before CryptoPunks.
Before CryptoKitties.
Before Decentraland.
Before OpenSea.
Before ERC-721.
According to Etheria's historical documentation, each version contained 457 ownable tiles arranged within a 33 × 33 map.
Look at the project through modern eyes and the concept feels almost mundane:
digital land that you can own and transfer.
In 2015, it was anything but mundane.
Ethereum itself had barely existed long enough for people to understand what applications might be built on top of it.
Etheria was exploring a primitive but profound idea:
a blockchain asset does not need to represent money. It can represent a place.
That concept would later become enormous.
Virtual land became a category.
Metaverses became companies.
Billions of dollars eventually flowed through blockchain-based worlds.
Etheria did not cause all of that by itself.
But it sits unusually close to the conceptual origin.
This gives us our first criterion for historical significance:
Did the project expand the set of things people believed blockchains could represent?
Being early helps.
Expanding the possibility space matters more.
Rare Pepes: When Internet Culture Became Ownable
Then something stranger happened.
People put Pepe on Bitcoin.
Beginning in 2016, artists created Rare Pepe cards on Counterparty, a protocol built on Bitcoin.
The idea seems almost inevitable today.
It wasn't.
The existing internet already had a sophisticated informal economy around memes.
People created them.
Remixed them.
Collected them.
Stole them.
Improved them.
Ruined them.
Declared certain Pepes "rare."
Sometimes images were jokingly watermarked with warnings not to save them.
The humor worked precisely because digital scarcity was absurd.
An image on the internet could be copied infinitely.
Then someone attached scarcity to it.
Rare Pepes transformed an existing piece of internet culture into blockchain collectibles.
A community formed around them. A directory emerged. Artists submitted cards. Curators accepted or rejected them. PepeCash became part of the ecosystem. A dedicated Rare Pepe Wallet made the cards easier to view and trade.
Eventually, roughly 1,800 official cards spread across 36 series would enter the directory.
This is historically important for a reason that has little to do with any individual Pepe being beautiful.
Rare Pepes demonstrated something deeper:
digital scarcity could become social.
The token mattered because a community agreed that the token mattered.
That sounds circular.
It is.
But most collecting is circular in exactly this way.
A first-edition Pokémon card is cardboard and ink.
A Rolex is metal.
A baseball caught during an ordinary inning is worth almost nothing; the physically indistinguishable baseball caught during a historic home run can be worth millions.
The difference is a story that other humans recognize.
Rare Pepes put that mechanism onto a blockchain.
And they did it before the term "NFT" had developed the meaning it has today.
One of the clearest demonstrations came in January 2018.
At the Rare Digital Art Festival in New York, the one-of-one HOMERPEPE sold for 350,000 PEPECASH, worth roughly $39,000 at the time. Years later it changed hands again for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another 2016 Rare Pepe, PEPENOPOULOS, sold for $3.6 million in a Sotheby's auction in 2021.
The later prices are interesting.
The more important fact is that people were gathering in a room and bidding substantial sums on tokenized memes in early 2018.
This wasn't simply digital art.
It was internet-native culture developing its own collectible market.
That same pattern — a community deciding together which objects carry weight — is the one NFTRanker's head-to-head voting tries to measure directly.
Curio Cards: Digital Art Finds Ethereum
On May 9, 2017, Curio Cards launched on Ethereum.
That was roughly six weeks before the corrected CryptoPunks collection.
Curio presented digital art as collectible editions, with 30 numbered card designs contributed by seven artists. Its contracts experimented with ideas that now feel familiar: limited supplies, direct purchasing, digital artwork associated with blockchain assets, and IPFS hashes incorporated into the system.
Again, none of this looks radical in retrospect.
That is one of the hazards of studying technological history.
Successful ideas become invisible.
Once a convention wins, later generations assume the convention was obvious.
It wasn't obvious that digital artwork should have limited editions.
It wasn't obvious that collectors would pay artists directly from smart contracts.
It wasn't obvious that ownership of a token could function as a meaningful representation of ownership of publicly visible art.
Somebody had to try these things before they became defaults.
Curio Cards matters because it shows the architecture of the NFT art market beginning to take recognizable shape.
That leads to another test:
Did later projects start behaving in ways that this project had already demonstrated?
Historical influence does not require every later creator to have consciously copied the original.
Ideas can become important simply because they help establish the grammar of a medium.
CryptoPunks: The Experiment That Became a Language
Then came CryptoPunks.
Matt Hall and John Watkinson created 10,000 algorithmically generated 24 × 24 pixel characters.
The project was strange even by 2017 crypto standards.
Nine thousand Punks were made available for anyone with an Ethereum wallet to claim for free.
There was no established NFT playbook because there were not yet established NFTs.
Larva Labs built a custom contract and marketplace because the standardized infrastructure that later collections would rely upon did not exist.
The original contract was deployed in June 2017.
Then a critical marketplace bug was discovered.
Larva Labs deployed a corrected version, and the second contract became the CryptoPunks collection that history largely recognizes today. We trace that split, and the strange afterlife of the abandoned first contract, in Were V1 CryptoPunks the Real Originals?
But the contract mechanics are only part of why Punks matter.
CryptoPunks stumbled into a remarkably powerful format.
There were enough Punks to form a large community but few enough for the collection to feel bounded.
Every Punk belonged to the same visual family.
Yet individual Punks were sufficiently different to become recognizable.
The square portraits were perfectly suited to avatars.
And an avatar does something a normal collectible doesn't.
You don't merely own it.
You can be represented by it.
That transformed the NFT from an object sitting in a wallet into an identity displayed publicly across Twitter, Discord and the rest of the internet.
The 10,000-piece generative PFP collection subsequently became one of the dominant formats of the NFT boom.
Thousands of projects borrowed some combination of:
- a fixed collection size,
- algorithmically combined traits,
- rarity distributions,
- profile-picture artwork,
- public ownership,
- secondary trading,
- and community identity.
CryptoPunks did not invent every individual ingredient.
History rarely works that cleanly.
Its achievement was combining ingredients into a form that proved unusually contagious.
That is much more important.
The canonical collection is also still very much a living object rather than a museum piece: you can browse the community-ranked CryptoPunks or vote on Punk matchups and watch which of the 10,000 the community actually prefers today.
Influence Is More Important Than Novelty
Suppose Project A invents an idea in 2015 and three people see it.
Project B independently discovers a similar idea in 2017 and a million people adopt it.
Which deserves more historical credit?
Project A deserves credit for precedence.
Project B may deserve more credit for influence.
Collectors often collapse those two concepts into the word "first."
That creates endless arguments.
A better vocabulary might distinguish:
Technical first — the earliest verifiable implementation.
Conceptual first — the earliest recognizable expression of an idea.
Cultural first — the project that introduced the idea to a meaningful community.
Canonical example — the project history eventually uses to represent the idea.
These titles can belong to different objects.
CryptoPunks is a useful example.
It was not the first blockchain collectible.
It was not the first tokenized digital artwork.
It was not the first experiment with unique blockchain assets.
Yet it became one of the canonical objects through which NFT history is explained.
In 2021, a group of nine Punks sold at Christie's for $16.96 million. CryptoPunks have subsequently entered major institutional collections, including the Centre Pompidou.
Those events did not make CryptoPunks historically important.
They are evidence that a broader culture had decided they were.
CryptoKitties: Historical Importance Can Look Like a Broken Network
Later in 2017, people started breeding cats.
CryptoKitties allowed users to own, breed and trade unique digital cats.
It was approachable in a way many previous blockchain experiments were not.
You didn't need to care deeply about monetary policy or distributed consensus to understand the premise.
This cat is mine.
That cat is yours.
Our cats can create another cat.
People understood it.
Perhaps a little too well.
CryptoKitties became so popular that activity from the application contributed to severe congestion on Ethereum. Consensys later described total network requests increasing sixfold during the first week of December 2017 as the phenomenon accelerated. Developers from projects including MetaMask and Infura worked with the CryptoKitties team to address the resulting problems.
Normally, breaking infrastructure is not something we associate with historical greatness.
In this case, it was evidence of something important.
People actually wanted to use the thing.
CryptoKitties turned an abstract scaling problem into an immediate one.
It also helped demonstrate that unique blockchain assets could support consumer applications at meaningful scale.
Around this period, the ERC-721 standard was taking form.
The initial NFT standard proposal appeared in 2017, and the finalized EIP-721 specification was created in January 2018 by William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans and Nastassia Sachs. It established a standardized interface for tracking and transferring distinguishable assets on Ethereum.
Standards rarely become historically interesting to collectors.
But they are the reason ecosystems become interoperable.
Before standards, every experiment is an island.
After standards, wallets, marketplaces and applications can begin speaking the same language.
CryptoKitties therefore matters partly because it demonstrated demand and partly because it appeared at the moment the infrastructure for an entire asset class was being formalized.
MoonCats and the Strange Importance of Being Forgotten
Not every historically significant NFT remained famous.
MoonCatRescue launched in 2017.
According to the project's own historical account, 492 MoonCats were rescued on the first day and 1,569 during the first week.
Then interest faded.
The project sat largely dormant.
Years passed.
And then, on March 12, 2021, crypto archaeologists rediscovered it.
This story reveals another strange property of blockchain history.
Normally, forgotten digital experiments disappear.
Servers shut down.
Domains expire.
Hard drives fail.
Companies fold.
Databases are deleted.
A blockchain contract behaves differently.
It can become culturally invisible without becoming historically erased.
The artifact waits.
Someone can find it years later and inspect evidence that has been sitting in public the entire time.
That makes NFT archaeology possible in a particularly strong form.
A collector doesn't need to rely entirely on a screenshot saying:
"Trust me, this existed in 2017."
The contract itself can provide evidence.
Transactions can provide evidence.
Blocks can provide evidence.
Ownership can provide evidence.
This does not make every forgotten contract valuable.
But it makes rediscovery a legitimate force in blockchain collecting.
And it raises an uncomfortable question.
If nobody cared about an artwork for four years and then thousands of people care about it, when did it become historically important?
At creation?
At rediscovery?
Or was its importance latent the entire time?
There may not be a clean answer.
Autoglyphs: When the Blockchain Became the Canvas
By 2019, the question had changed.
The early NFT experiments had shown that blockchain could record ownership of art.
Larva Labs asked something more extreme:
Could the art itself live there?
Autoglyphs were created as a generative art system running directly on Ethereum.
A collector paid a creation fee, the algorithm generated a unique glyph, and the result became part of a collection limited to 512 outputs.
Once all 512 were created, the generator shut down.
Larva Labs describes Autoglyphs as the first generative art project created and stored entirely on-chain.
This sounds like a technical distinction.
Philosophically, it is much larger.
With many NFTs, the blockchain acts primarily as a registry.
The token lives on-chain.
The artwork may live somewhere else.
Autoglyphs pushed toward a different model:
the blockchain is not merely recording the artwork. The blockchain is participating in its creation and preservation.
Code becomes artist.
Transaction becomes creative act.
Collector becomes participant.
Blockchain becomes medium.
This line of experimentation helped establish an important branch of crypto art and preceded the later expansion of on-chain generative art through platforms such as Art Blocks.
It also solved, almost incidentally, a problem the rest of the market is still living with: art that depends on servers, gateways and companies tends to outlive none of them. That fragility is the subject of Why NFT Infrastructure Keeps Failing.
This is another useful historical test:
Did the project use the technology in a way that changed what artists thought the technology itself could be?
That is a much higher bar than simply minting early.
Historical Importance Is Not Rarity
NFT markets became obsessed with rarity for understandable reasons.
Rarity is measurable.
If 10,000 tokens exist and only nine have a certain trait, mathematics gives us something concrete to discuss.
Historical importance is messier.
Imagine two objects.
Object A
- Created in 2016
- Supply: 1
- Almost nobody saw it
- Inspired nothing
- Introduced nothing
- Had no community
- Was rediscovered recently
Object B
- Created in 2017
- Supply: 10,000
- Inspired thousands of later collections
- Became a recognizable internet identity format
- Influenced technical standards
- Built an enduring collector community
- Entered museum collections
Object A is rarer.
It may even be older.
Object B is almost certainly more historically consequential.
Scarcity can amplify importance.
It cannot manufacture importance by itself.
This distinction is similar to the problem with rarity rankings more generally.
A rarity score can tell us whether recorded traits are statistically uncommon.
It cannot tell us whether collectors like the artwork.
A floor price can tell us what the cheapest available token costs.
It cannot tell us whether the collection changed digital culture.
A community ranking can tell us which objects people prefer when compared against one another.
It cannot tell us what historians will decide matters fifty years from now.
These are different questions.
At NFTRanker, head-to-head voting is useful precisely because it isolates one of those questions: given two NFTs, which one does the community actually prefer?
That can reveal something that rarity alone cannot — and it is the same reason our guide on how to find the best NFTs in a collection treats rarity, preference and price as three separate readings rather than one score.
But even preference is only one layer of history.
History has a longer memory.
Historical Importance Is Not Price Either
Price creates another illusion.
Expensive objects feel important.
Sometimes they are.
But price is an event.
Historical importance is a process.
One motivated buyer can create a record sale.
A thin market can produce extraordinary prices.
A speculative bubble can temporarily value objects that later become footnotes.
Conversely, historically meaningful objects can remain inexpensive for years because almost nobody understands what they are.
MoonCats demonstrated this.
Rare Pepes demonstrated this.
CryptoPunks themselves were originally free to claim.
According to Larva Labs, it took eight days—and outside media attention—before all of the publicly available Punks were claimed.
Today that seems absurd.
In 2017 it wasn't.
This is why using current price to reconstruct historical significance is dangerous.
Markets know the present price.
They do not know the final importance.
A Better Framework for Historically Important NFTs
If age, price and rarity are insufficient, what should collectors look for?
A useful framework might involve six questions.
1. Did it come early?
Chronology still matters.
An experiment performed before anyone knew the category would succeed deserves different treatment from an imitation produced after the formula became obvious.
But age should be viewed as evidence, not a conclusion.
2. Did it introduce something?
The strongest historical projects usually contributed a new idea.
Quantum demonstrated blockchain-linked digital art.
Etheria explored ownable virtual land.
Rare Pepes connected blockchain scarcity with native internet meme culture.
Curio Cards experimented with collectible digital art editions on Ethereum.
CryptoPunks made generative blockchain avatars culturally legible.
CryptoKitties turned unique tokens into a viral consumer application.
Autoglyphs pushed generative art itself on-chain.
Each expanded the design space.
3. Did anyone build on the idea?
Innovation without descendants may remain an interesting experiment.
Innovation that changes what everyone does afterward becomes a movement.
This is where CryptoPunks becomes difficult to dismiss.
Look at the thousands of generative avatar collections that followed — many of them now ranked collection by collection on NFTRanker.
Their existence is evidence.
Influence leaves descendants.
4. Did a community form around it?
Technology does not create culture automatically.
People do.
Rare Pepes required artists, curators, collectors and developers.
CryptoPunks required people willing to make pixelated strangers their online identities.
CryptoKitties required people who genuinely wanted to breed digital cats.
Historical objects become powerful when people organize around them.
A community is not merely marketing surrounding the artifact.
Sometimes the community is part of the artifact's historical significance.
5. Can the provenance survive scrutiny?
This is where blockchain-native collectibles have an unusual advantage.
Claims about early NFTs should be auditable.
Contract deployment.
Transaction history.
Token issuance.
Wallet movements.
Contemporaneous websites.
Archived documentation.
Developer statements.
Old forum posts.
The stronger the historical claim, the stronger the evidence should be.
"Probably from 2016" is different from a contract irreversibly recorded in a 2016 block.
The blockchain does not eliminate historical interpretation.
It dramatically improves some of the source material.
6. Did it survive?
Survival may be the most underrated variable.
Many thousands of NFT collections launched during the boom.
Most will eventually become culturally irrelevant.
Some websites will disappear.
Communities will dissolve.
Metadata will break.
Developers will move on.
Markets will become illiquid.
Ten years later, the interesting question will not be:
Which collections launched?
It will be:
Which collections were still worth talking about?
Time is ruthless.
That is why surviving it creates information.
We Could Almost Write an Equation
Not a literal financial formula.
Historical significance is too human for that.
But conceptually:
Historical Importance ≈ Novelty × Influence × Cultural Memory × Provenance × Survival
The multiplication matters.
A project can score extremely high in one category and still disappear.
Age without influence becomes trivia.
Influence without provenance becomes disputed mythology.
Rarity without culture becomes scarcity nobody wants.
Price without survival becomes a bubble chart.
Technical novelty without human adoption becomes a clever experiment.
The projects that become canonical tend to combine several dimensions.
And they accumulate them over time.
Museums Are Late to History—And That May Be Fine
Institutional recognition adds another layer.
In 2023, the Centre Pompidou announced a group of blockchain-related acquisitions that included CryptoPunk #110 as part of its first collection of NFTs. LACMA has likewise incorporated blockchain-native works into its holdings as museums begin constructing their own histories of crypto art.
It is tempting to treat museum acquisition as the final stamp of historical legitimacy.
That gets the order backward.
Museums do not make an object culturally important simply by acquiring it.
Ideally, they recognize importance that has already emerged.
CryptoPunks did not become historically meaningful in 2023 because a museum acquired one.
The acquisition tells us that an institution responsible for preserving cultural artifacts decided the history was significant enough to preserve.
That distinction matters.
Historical importance ultimately emerges from a complicated negotiation among creators, collectors, developers, markets, critics, institutions and—most importantly—time.
No single group gets the final vote.
The Blockchain Can Preserve Facts. It Cannot Preserve Meaning.
This may be the most interesting contradiction in NFT history.
Blockchains were supposed to make provenance objective.
And to a surprising extent, they do.
We can determine which CryptoPunks contract came first.
We can inspect an Etheria deployment.
We can trace a Rare Pepe asset.
We can verify that a MoonCat contract existed long before its rediscovery.
But the blockchain cannot answer the questions people actually argue about.
Which version is canonical?
Which experiment was influential?
Which image became iconic?
Which collection deserves preservation?
Which object represents an era?
Which project future generations should care about?
Consensus mechanisms can agree on transaction ordering.
They cannot agree on culture.
That work still belongs to humans.
The Most Important NFTs May Not Be the Most Expensive Ones
Imagine the NFT market twenty-five years from now.
Most collections will probably be forgotten.
Not hated.
Not exposed.
Simply forgotten.
The same thing happens to books, paintings, websites, fashion labels, video games and startups.
Creation is common.
Cultural survival is rare.
A small number of blockchain artifacts may eventually function like early comic books, first-edition trading cards, vintage computer hardware or foundational works of internet art.
Collectors may care less about what their floor price was in 2022 and more about what they represented.
This was the first time someone tried this.
This was the collection everyone copied.
This was the meme community that accidentally built a crypto art market.
This was the contract that failed but could not disappear.
This was the digital world that existed before anyone used the word metaverse.
This was the project that made Ethereum unusable for an afternoon because too many people wanted digital cats.
This was the algorithm that turned the blockchain itself into the canvas.
Those are stories.
And ultimately, collecting has always been built around stories.
History Is a Form of Collective Memory
The NFT market spent much of its early life trying to quantify value.
Floor price.
Trait rarity.
Trading volume.
Market capitalization.
Unique holders.
Sales.
Elo scores.
Win rates.
Each measurement can be useful.
None captures the whole object.
Historical significance may be the hardest metric because it cannot be calculated from a smart contract.
It has to emerge.
A historically important NFT is not merely old.
It is an artifact that helps explain how the medium became what it became.
Quantum helps explain how digital art became connected to blockchain ownership.
Etheria helps explain how virtual property became imaginable.
Rare Pepes help explain how internet memes became collectible crypto culture.
Curio Cards helps explain the emergence of digital art editions on Ethereum.
CryptoPunks helps explain generative collections, profile-picture identity and the social grammar of NFT communities.
CryptoKitties helps explain consumer adoption, ERC-721 and Ethereum's early scaling problems.
MoonCats helps explain digital archaeology and why immutable artifacts can return from cultural death.
Autoglyphs helps explain the transition from putting art on a blockchain to making art with a blockchain.
That is the common thread.
They give us vocabulary for explaining everything that came later.
And perhaps that is the cleanest definition we have.
A historically important NFT is one you cannot easily remove from the story without making the story harder to explain.
Price can change tomorrow.
Rarity is just mathematics.
Popularity comes and goes.
But once an object becomes part of the explanation for how a culture developed, it acquires a different kind of permanence.
The blockchain can preserve the object.
The market can price it.
Collectors can rank it.
Museums can archive it.
But history decides something else:
whether we keep telling its story.
Rank the History Yourself
History is settled slowly, by a lot of small preferences accumulating.
That is the layer NFTRanker is built to capture. Instead of scoring NFTs by scarcity or floor price, it collects head-to-head community votes and turns them into an Elo-style ranking.
Start with the collection this article keeps returning to: browse the community-ranked CryptoPunks or vote on Punk matchups. Then compare it against everything else on the NFT rankings page.
The NFTRanker guides explain how to read Elo scores, win rates and battle counts once you get there.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is considered the first NFT?
Kevin McCoy's Quantum, minted in 2014, is commonly described as the first NFT, including by Sotheby's. Earlier blockchain experiments involving distinguishable or "colored" assets complicate any absolute claim about origins, which is why definitions matter when discussing NFT firsts. Our explainer on what an NFT is covers why the definition itself is contested.
Were CryptoPunks the first NFTs?
No. Blockchain collectibles and tokenized digital art existed before CryptoPunks. Etheria dates to 2015, Rare Pepes to 2016 and Curio Cards launched on Ethereum in May 2017. CryptoPunks remain historically important because of their enormous influence on generative collections, digital identity, PFP culture and later NFT projects. The question of which CryptoPunks contract counts as the original is explored in Were V1 CryptoPunks the Real Originals?
What were Rare Pepes?
Rare Pepes were blockchain-based collectible cards built using Counterparty on Bitcoin beginning in 2016. The community developed a curated directory, wallet and trading ecosystem around them, making the project an important predecessor to the later crypto-art and NFT markets.
Why are CryptoPunks historically important?
CryptoPunks combined a fixed 10,000-item supply, algorithmically generated traits, blockchain ownership and avatar-like artwork into a format that became enormously influential. The project also predates the finalized ERC-721 NFT standard and helped demonstrate the possibilities of individually identifiable blockchain collectibles. You can see how collectors rank individual Punks today on the CryptoPunks leaderboard.
Why are Autoglyphs important?
Autoglyphs, released by Larva Labs in 2019, are widely described as the first generative art project created and stored entirely on Ethereum. Rather than merely using blockchain to track ownership, the project's generative algorithm itself operates on-chain — which also makes them unusually resistant to the infrastructure failures that have erased other NFT artwork.
Does being an old NFT make it valuable?
Not necessarily. Age establishes chronology, but historical importance also depends on factors such as innovation, influence, provenance, cultural adoption and survival. An obscure early contract may be historically interesting without becoming culturally important or economically valuable.
How is historical importance different from NFT rarity?
Rarity measures scarcity within some defined set of attributes or supply. Historical importance asks whether an NFT or collection played a meaningful role in the development of blockchain art, collecting, technology or culture. A historically important NFT does not need to be particularly rare, and a very rare NFT does not automatically become historically important. For how rarity compares with community preference as a ranking signal, see NFT Rarity vs. Community Ranking.
References & Further Reading
-
Sotheby's — "A Brief History of NFTs and Digital Art."
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/a-brief-history-of-nfts-and-digital-art -
Ethereum Improvement Proposals — ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard.
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 -
Etheria — Historical FAQ.
https://www.etheria.world/faq.html -
Rare Pepe historical sources and community archives.
https://rarepepe.cloud/articles/the-rare-pepe-directory-36-series-explained/ -
Curio Cards — Official documentation and original repository.
https://github.com/curiocards/vintage.curio.cards -
CryptoPunks / Larva Labs — Official history.
https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks?section=home -
NFTRanker — "Were V1 CryptoPunks the Real Originals?"
-
Consensys — "The Inside Story of the CryptoKitties Congestion Crisis."
https://consensys.io/blog/the-inside-story-of-the-cryptokitties-congestion-crisis -
MoonCatRescue — Project History.
https://mooncatrescue.com/about -
Larva Labs — Autoglyphs.
https://larvalabs.com/autoglyphs/index -
Christie's — CryptoPunks.
https://www.christies.com/en/stories/10-things-to-know-about-cryptopunks-94347afeea234209a7739c240149f769 -
Centre Pompidou — "The Centre Pompidou in the Age of NFTs."
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/pompidou-plus/magazine/article/the-centre-pompidou-in-the-age-of-nfts -
NFTRanker — "What Is an NFT? How Non-Fungible Tokens Actually Work."
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NFTRanker — "NFT Rarity vs. Community Ranking: What's the Difference?."
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NFTRanker — "Why NFT Infrastructure Keeps Failing."
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NFTRanker — "How to Find the Best NFTs in a Collection."
This article is about historical significance, not investment value. Age, scarcity, provenance or cultural importance should not be interpreted as guarantees of future market value.