The History of NFTs, 2012 to 2026: From Colored Coins and Rare Pepes to CryptoPunks, Christie’s and MoMA

By Ryan Bethencourt, author of ZERO and PUNKS · Published October 26, 2026 · Last updated October 26, 2026

On this page

• What is the history of NFTs?
• NFT history timeline: the key dates
• How NFTs started, 2012 to 2019
• How NFTs became popular, 2020 to 2021
• The Solana NFT renaissance, 2021 to 2024
• How the NFT boom ended in 2022
• Where NFTs went in 2025 and 2026
• What happened to NFTs after 2022?
• Contested NFT firsts
• FAQ

What is the history of NFTs?

The history of NFTs is the story of one problem: how to make a digital file ownable when every copy is identical. Builders worked on it from 2012, five years before the abbreviation NFT appeared in 2017. A boom and a crash followed in 2021 and 2022, and in December 2025 MoMA added CryptoPunks to its collection.

My book PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable divides that history into five eras. In brief:

1. Before the Word (2012 to 2019): colored coins, Monegraph, Rare Pepes, CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties, as artists and hackers work out how a digital file could have an owner, before the label NFT caught on.
2. The Year Everything Sold (2020 to 2021): Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Art Blocks’ generative code and 10,000-piece profile-picture clubs turn digital art into a multibillion-dollar market.
3. The Solana Renaissance (2021 to 2024): near-free minting on Solana grows a second NFT culture of early collections, fine-art galleries, on-chain coders, typewriter art and the maximalist Avant Gay scene, and the book asks what lasted.
4. The Crash, the Marketplace Wars, and Survival (2022 to 2024): the Otherdeeds mint, a long slide in prices, the fight over creator royalties and the collapse of FTX decide who stays in the market.
5. Beyond the Acronym (2025 to 2026): the label NFT fades while museums, a nonprofit foundation and a smaller market look after the works and the history written on-chain.

NFT history timeline: what are the key dates?

The key dates in NFT history run from March 27, 2012, when Yoni Assia posted a specification for “colored bitcoin,” to March 17, 2026, when the SEC named CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles as digital collectibles. Hal Finney’s 1993 post is the prelude. Each row names the chain and a public record you can check yourself.

How did NFTs start, before the word caught on (2012 to 2019)?

NFTs started as experiments in owning digital things on Bitcoin, Namecoin and Ethereum between 2012 and 2019. None of the builders before late 2017 called their work an NFT.

What were colored coins?

Colored coins made ordinary bitcoins stand for something else. On March 27, 2012, eToro’s co-founder and chief executive, Yoni Assia, posted a specification for “colored bitcoin”: mark a batch of coins at a starting transaction, and anyone can follow that color forward. A later white paper listed a teenage Vitalik Buterin among its contributors. In practice, colored coins marked batches of interchangeable units rather than one-off artworks.

The intuition is older. On January 17, 1993, Hal Finney posted a mock pitch to the cypherpunks mailing list in which units of digital cash became “cryptographic trading cards,” from “the common 1’s” to “the seldom-seen 1000’s.” That list is the subject of our history of the cypherpunks who invented private money and of my book ZERO: The Zcash Revolution.

What was the first NFT?

Guinness World Records lists Kevin McCoy’s Quantum, registered on the Namecoin blockchain through Monegraph in May 2014, as the first NFT. The scene is worth reading, because it shows both the breakthrough and the flaw NFTs carried for years: the record pointed to the art instead of holding it.

On the first weekend of May 2014, the arts organization Rhizome held its annual Seven on Seven in New York, an event that pairs artists with technologists. Participants were not allowed to meet beforehand, so each pair had about 24 hours to build whatever it would present. Rhizome’s Michael Connor had matched the artist Kevin McCoy with Anil Dash, a technologist who knew the web programming language PHP. By the journalist Amy Castor’s account, much of the coding got done in the middle of the night.

The problem they took on is the one this book is about. A digital file copies perfectly. The ten-thousandth copy of an animation is identical, bit for bit, to the one the artist saved first, so nothing separates the original from a duplicate and nothing is left for a collector to own. A painter sells a canvas. A photographer sells a signed print in a numbered edition. An artist working in pixels had nothing comparable to offer. What was missing was a record: a public statement, which no single company controlled, of which copy counted and who held it.

McCoy and Dash called their answer Monegraph, short for “monetized graphics,” a name the two of them coined and wrote into the metadata of the first work they registered. That work was McCoy’s Quantum, a looping animation of a pulsing octagon filled with shapes, which the McCoys’ project page describes as “an ongoing, abstract, cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.” They registered it on Namecoin, a blockchain built to keep track of unique names. The record did not contain the animation. It held a web address pointing to an image hosted somewhere else. Dash built the website that let others create records of their own, and McCoy sold the record for Quantum to Dash for a few dollars. Seven years later, in an essay for The Atlantic, Dash argued that their shortcut, storing a link instead of the artwork, had survived into the NFTs of 2021.

[…]

Kevin McCoy has said he made the Quantum animation himself; Le Random’s captions credit Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and the work appears on the duo’s joint website. Guinness World Records lists Quantum as the first NFT. Treat that claim, like every “first” in this book, as a claim. Almost every one has a rival, and each arrives here with the name of whoever is making it.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter One, CC BY-SA 4.0.

TechCrunch’s May 9, 2014 story, written after McCoy and Dash demonstrated Monegraph at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, explained the workflow: an artist signed in with Twitter, submitted an image’s web address and got back a key and value to keep in a Namecoin wallet, “their digital deed, a unique claim of ownership to the piece of art.”

The rivals are real: an OpenSea collection description calls the 2015 Spells of Genesis cards on Counterparty the first NFT collection, a marketplace’s claim. McCoy told Le Random in 2024: “The reality of it is that there were multiple, multiple inventions of the idea.”

Were Rare Pepes NFTs?

Some were and some were not. Rare Pepes were trading cards issued on Bitcoin through Counterparty from September 2016. A card with a supply of one, such as HOMERPEPE, behaves as a non-fungible token; RAREPEPE, issued in 298 interchangeable copies, is scarce but not unique.

The ERC-721 standard makes the same point: it calls limited-edition cards like Rare Pepes “a collection of individual fungible tokens.” Here is how that market worked, in short.

Matt Furie created Pepe the Frog for his comic Boy’s Club in 2005, and by about 2014 people were swapping image files they billed as “rare Pepes.” In September 2016 the trade moved onto Bitcoin.

Counterparty’s records show RAREPEPE first issued on September 9 with a supply of 298, and later that month PEPECASH arrived: roughly 995 million units, then locked, which paid the fee for submitting new cards. Joe Looney’s Rare Pepe Wallet, launched in October 2016, became the main market. (Pepe’s later life as a meme and a memecoin belongs to Book Five, DOGE: Memes and the Joke That Ate Wall Street.)

A directory run by unnamed curators decided which submissions were official. Wikipedia counts 1,774 official cards in 36 series from 2016 to 2018, and many came in runs of hundreds or thousands, which makes them editions rather than unique tokens.

A few were singular. HOMERPEPE, a card based on Homer Simpson by the pseudonymous artist ICQ, was created on September 29, 2016 with a supply of one. At the Rare Digital Art Festival in New York on January 13, 2018, it sold in an auction of about two minutes for 350,000 PEPECASH, roughly $39,000, to the investor Peter Kell. A CryptoKitty changed hands at the same event for about $22,000.

PUNKS tells the full Rare Pepe story, from Furie’s frog to the festival auction, in Chapter One.

Counterparty’s registry still lists RAREPEPE with a supply of 298 and HOMERPEPE with a supply of 1, both locked. A ledger can enforce a count, but a community decides what counts. PUNKS then draws the line that settles most “is this an NFT?” arguments.

KEY CONCEPT: FUNGIBLE AND NON-FUNGIBLE

A thing is fungible when any unit can stand in for any other. Any twenty-dollar bill can replace any other twenty-dollar bill, and nobody cares which one is in their wallet. A concert ticket for seat 14C is different. It names one seat, and a ticket for 14D is not the same thing, even at the same price. Fungible units can also be divided: half a bitcoin is still bitcoin. Half a ticket gets nobody into the show.

A colored coin, in its usual form, is the twenty-dollar bill. It marks a batch of interchangeable units, shares or a currency, so that any one of them is as good as the next. A non-fungible token is the ticket: a single entry on a ledger, with one owner at a time, that can be handed on but not swapped for an identical twin. A Namecoin name, like the one that held Quantum, behaves the same way: one name, one holder.

The ledger keeps track of the token, not the picture. Quantum‘s Namecoin record held a web address, and the animation lived wherever that address pointed. If the server holding the file went dark, the record would still exist, pointing at nothing. Later chapters return to where the art actually lives.

Rare Pepes add a wrinkle. A card issued in about 300 copies, like RAREPEPE, is scarce but not unique: any one of the 298 can replace any other. HOMERPEPE, with a supply of exactly one, is unique. Scarcity and uniqueness are different properties, and every collection in this book sits somewhere between them.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter One, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Apply that test to any collection: a 10,000-piece profile-picture set is 10,000 unique tokens, while an edition of 5,000 identical prints is scarce, not unique. The same line runs through ERC-721, below, which gives every token its own ID and one owner.

What were CryptoPunks, and why do they matter?

CryptoPunks are 10,000 generated 24 by 24 pixel portraits that Larva Labs, the New York studio of Matt Hall and John Watkinson, deployed on Ethereum on June 8, 2017, New York time. They became the template for the profile-picture collections of 2021, and their contract stored a SHA-256 fingerprint of the art: public proof of which picture each token meant.

Larva Labs kept 1,000 Punks and offered the other 9,000 free for a network fee the project put at “around 11 cents”; the last was claimed about two days after a Mashable story on June 16. A contract bug forced a relaunch, which is why June 23, 2017 is the date usually given.

I missed buying a CryptoPunk early, though I loved their cypherpunk ethos. The full story is in our complete history of CryptoPunks (publishing October 30).

How did CryptoKitties change NFTs?

CryptoKitties, opened to the public on November 28, 2017 by the Vancouver studio Axiom Zen, did three things: it turned unique tokens into a mass hobby, it carried the draft standard that named the NFT, and it showed what happens when a popular collection fills Ethereum’s blocks.

On December 2, 2017, a bid in Ethereum block 4,664,261 bought token #1, a cat named Genesis, for 246.93 ETH, about $113,500 that day, with a network fee of about 8 cents. Within days the cats made up somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of all Ethereum transactions, and fees climbed for every user. The lesson outlived the game: when one hit collection crowds the blocks, the rest of the network pays more and waits longer.

Who coined the term NFT?

The abbreviation NFT entered Ethereum’s vocabulary through Dieter Shirley of Axiom Zen, the studio behind CryptoKitties. His draft “Non-fungible Token Standard,” posted as GitHub issue 721 on September 22, 2017, described “non-fungible tokens (henceforth referred to as ‘NFTs’),” and the issue number became the standard’s name. “Fungible” itself is an old legal and economic word for goods that can replace one another.

Others finished the job. William Entriken turned the draft into a formal proposal, EIP-721, on GitHub on January 24, 2018; it was accepted as a draft on March 9, and the final text names Entriken, Shirley, Jacob Evans and Nastassia Sachs as its authors.

They polled people on the name and set aside alternatives including “distinguishable asset,” “title” and “ticket.” EIP-721 went final on June 22, 2018, and its rationale still records that “NFT” was “satisfactory to nearly everyone surveyed.” The document also names the two best-known predecessors: CryptoKitties, which worked with an earlier draft, and CryptoPunks, only partly ERC-20 compatible.

What is the difference between ERC-20 and ERC-721?

ERC-20 keeps a ledger of balances for interchangeable tokens, while ERC-721 keeps a ledger of individual token IDs, each with exactly one owner. Fabian Vogelsteller proposed ERC-20 in 2015; ERC-721 became the standard for non-fungible tokens.

Because every compliant contract exposes the same functions, one wallet or marketplace can show and trade every ERC-721 collection, from cats to paintings. An optional metadata extension lets each token point to a file with its name, description and image address.

ERC-721’s quiet limitation was storage: the token usually holds a link rather than the image, which is why where NFT art is actually stored (publishing November 9) is still a live question.

Chapter Three of PUNKS follows the standard from the cat game to its final text.

How did SuperRare pay artists, and what was the 2018 crypto winter?

SuperRare, launched on Ethereum in April 2018, let approved artists mint single works and paid them 10 percent of every resale, but only for trades inside its own contract. Its token #1, Robbie Barrat’s AI Generated Nude Portrait #1, made with a generative adversarial network, sold on April 5, 2018 for 0.46 ETH, about $176.

The market was already falling: ether’s daily price went from about $1,380 on January 13, 2018 to $82.83 on December 15. In its first twelve months, SuperRare’s first contract recorded sales worth about $91,000, less than Genesis alone had fetched.

Larva Labs answered the winter with Autoglyphs on April 5, 2019: 512 glyphs drawn by code inside the Ethereum contract, with all 76.8 ETH of paid mints sent to the climate group 350.org.

How did NFTs become popular in 2020 and 2021?

NFTs became popular when three forces arrived together in 2020 and 2021: generative art on Art Blocks, the auction houses, and ten-thousand-piece profile-picture clubs. Trackers counted 2021 NFT trading at anywhere from more than $13 billion (The Block Research, through December 28) to about $22 billion (DappRadar, by mid-December).

Generative art. Art Blocks launched on November 27, 2020 with Erick Calderon’s Chromie Squiggle; on its platform the artist commits the code first, and each collector’s mint transaction determines which output appears. Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza #313, The Tulip, minted at 0.17 ETH on June 11, 2021, resold for 1,000 ETH, about $3.3 million, on August 23.

Auction houses. On March 11, 2021, Christie’s sold Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69,346,250 with fees. What the buyer received is the subject of Beeple’s $69 million NFT and what a buyer actually owns (publishing November 13). Christie’s then sold nine CryptoPunks for $16,962,500 on May 11, and on June 10 Sotheby’s sold Punk #7523, a masked alien, for $11,754,000.

Profile-picture clubs. Bored Ape Yacht Club’s sale ran from April 23 to May 1, 2021, at 0.08 ETH an ape, until all 10,000 were minted. In spring 2021 I watched founders and VCs on my feed switch to pixel faces.

I collected CrypToadz and OnChainMonkey on Ethereum and found the gas painful: minting cost hundreds of dollars, and a failed transaction still paid its fee. Gas could cost more than the art. In the public CrypToadz mint of September 8, 2021, the successful buyers paid more in gas than for the toads themselves.

The word of the year. On November 24, 2021, Collins named “NFT” its word of the year; usage of the term had risen 11,273 percent.

What was the Solana NFT renaissance (2021 to 2024)?

The Solana NFT renaissance was a second NFT culture built on cheap, fast minting on Solana. In 2021 a standard Solana NFT cost tens of cents to a few dollars, account deposits included, against an Ethereum average of about $21 per transaction across the year, by BitInfoCharts’ figures. I bridged to Solana in 2021 and have attended every Breakpoint since Lisbon.

What was the first NFT on Solana?

The answer depends on the definition: a single token or a collection. Single NFT-like tokens came first: on October 16, 2020, Bonfida created LSD, a token with a supply of one, which it said on October 25 had sold at auction for 900 SRM. The first Solana NFT collection, by the Solana Historical Society’s rule, is Kreechures, which opened its mint on March 26, 2021, more than two months before Metaplex’s NFT tools went live.

I co-founded the Solana Historical Society to document and preserve this early history. Its Council voted that “first” means the collection that opened its mint first, and it calls Kreechures “a collection claim, not a token claim.” Its methodology page is blunt: “Secondary articles alone are not enough.” The fuller case is in our history of Kreechures, the first Solana collection by the Society’s rule.

What was Solana Summer?

Solana Summer is the name for Solana’s 2021 boom; for NFTs, it took off in August 2021. My book LIGHT: The Solana Story and the Man Who Turned Time Into Code treats one sale as its start: on August 15, 2021 UTC, Degenerate Ape Academy sold 10,000 apes at 6 SOL each in about eight minutes, by the team’s count.

Before it came the Society’s First Ten, opened between March 26 and August 3, 2021, in the Society’s order:

1. Kreechures
2. Solarians
3. SolPunks
4. Solana Monkey Business Gen1
5. FRAKT
6. Solanimals
7. LegionPunks
8. ApeShit Social Club
9. Solana Monkey Business Gen2
10. Solana Mees

Each is recorded in our Solana NFT history hub and the first 20 Solana collections.

Who built Solana’s galleries and on-chain art?

Solana’s galleries and on-chain art came from galleries such as Exchange Art, coded collections such as Hyperglyphs, the artist Degen Poet and the Avant Gay movement.

• Exchange Art opened on October 31, 2021 for one-of-one digital fine art, was acquired by BONK in March 2025 and announced in July 2026 that it would close on August 1, 2026; it has since shut down. Its works were standard NFTs stored mostly on Arweave, so they stayed with their owners. I was an early investor in Exchange Art.
• Hyperglyphs, auctioned from February 2, 2023, is computed and stored on Solana by its site’s account, and PUNKS argues it is the first fully on-chain generative collection there.
• Degen Poet wrote BONK burn transaction IDs into two typewriter tributes.
• The Avant Gay art-tech movement pushed generative tools into maximalist collage.

How did the NFT boom end in 2022?

The NFT market crashed in stages: a record mint in spring 2022, a long price slide, a marketplace war that made artist royalties optional, and the collapse of FTX in November 2022.

The record mint. On the night of April 30, 2022, New York time, Yuga Labs sold 55,000 Otherdeeds, land in its planned Otherside world, for 16.7 million APE, about $317 million, and buyers spent about $172 million more on gas, by The Block’s figures.

The royalty wars. In 2022 and 2023 the major marketplaces made creator royalties optional. OpenSea switched off its Operator Filter on August 31, 2023, and Yuga Labs’ quarterly royalty revenue fell from $8.7 million in the first quarter of 2023 to $2.5 million in the third.

Survival. Six weeks after FTX collapsed, BONK’s Christmas 2022 airdrop was keyed to about 297,000 Solana NFTs. By November 14, 2023, the free-collectibles app DRiP had minted more than 68 million NFTs for “around $12,000” in total, and on September 26, 2023 Pudgy Penguins announced toys for about 2,000 Walmart stores.

What are Bitcoin Ordinals, and when did inscriptions begin?

Ordinals inscriptions are pieces of content that Casey Rodarmor’s Ordinals protocol writes directly into Bitcoin transactions. Inscription #0, a PNG image, went into block 767,430 on December 14, 2022, and ord 0.4.0 opened inscribing to everyone on January 20, 2023. On February 8, 2023, OnChainMonkey inscribed its whole collection as one 19,408-byte HTML program.

Where did NFTs go in 2025 and 2026?

In 2025 and 2026, NFTs moved into institutions. As the word faded, a nonprofit bought the CryptoPunks brand, museums took in Punks and Squiggles, regulators classified both as collectibles, and trade shifted toward tokenized trading cards.

• NODE: On May 13, 2025, the nonprofit NODE Foundation (Infinite Node Foundation) bought the CryptoPunks IP from Yuga Labs for an undisclosed sum. The tokens stayed with their holders, and the 2017 contract is unchanged.
• MoMA: In December 2025, MoMA added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles, all donated, to its Media and Performance department’s collection.
• Art fairs: Art Basel Miami Beach opened to VIP guests on December 3, 2025 with a new digital-art section, Zero 10, where Beeple’s robot dogs worked and Art Blocks showed Larva Labs’ Quine.
• The SEC: Release No. 33-11412, dated March 17, 2026, names CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles among its examples and states: “A digital collectible itself, as described in this release, is not a security.” It is an interpretation, not a statute, and a later commission can change it.
• Tokenized cards: Collector Crypt, a Solana market for vaulted, tokenized trading cards, crossed $1 billion in volume in May 2026, and a tokenized Charizard sold there for $825,000 in September 2026. That token is a title to a graded card in a vault, a “digital deed” for cardboard.

What happened to NFTs after 2022?

NFT trading shrank by about nine-tenths after 2022, while the standards, the records and the best-known collections survived. The Block’s data puts 2025 trading near $5.5 billion, down from more than $50 billion in 2022.

Each tracker counts differently, so compare figures only within one tracker. Using Ethereum also became cheap: its average transaction fee was $0.146 on October 17, 2026, by BitInfoCharts’ figures, against about $21 across 2021.

The full market picture, from sales volumes to the platforms that closed, is in our data-led answer to whether NFTs are dead (publishing November 4).

Who claims which NFT “firsts”?

Almost every NFT first has a rival, so an honest answer names the claimant and the definition. The table sets each claim beside its rival and the test PUNKS applies.

Frequently asked questions about NFT history

When were NFTs invented?

There is no single date. Colored coins, proposed in 2012, let bitcoins stand for other assets. Kevin McCoy registered Quantum on Namecoin in May 2014, which Guinness World Records lists as the first NFT. The abbreviation NFT entered Ethereum in September 2017 with Dieter Shirley’s draft standard, and ERC-721, the standard most Ethereum NFTs follow, became final on June 22, 2018.

Who invented NFTs?

No one person. Yoni Assia and Meni Rosenfeld worked on colored coins in 2012. Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash built Monegraph in 2014. Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs launched CryptoPunks in 2017, and Dieter Shirley, William Entriken, Jacob Evans and Nastassia Sachs wrote ERC-721. McCoy himself has said there were “multiple, multiple inventions of the idea.”

Is Quantum the first NFT?

Guinness World Records says so: it lists Kevin McCoy’s Quantum, registered on Namecoin through Monegraph in May 2014, as the first NFT. Rivals exist, including colored coins on Bitcoin from 2012 and the Spells of Genesis cards on Counterparty, which an OpenSea collection description calls the first NFT collection. Quantum’s record also held only a link to the animation, not the animation itself.

What is ERC-721?

ERC-721 is the Ethereum standard for non-fungible tokens. Each token has its own ID and exactly one owner, and every compliant contract answers the same questions, such as ownerOf, so any wallet or marketplace can display and trade it. It began as Dieter Shirley’s September 2017 draft and became final on June 22, 2018. The token usually links to its image rather than containing it.

Are Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs?

Functionally, yes. An Ordinals inscription is a unique, transferable record whose content is written into the Bitcoin blockchain itself. Casey Rodarmor, who created the protocol, set out to make NFTs on Bitcoin without the problems he saw in Ethereum NFTs, including art stored off the chain. Inscription #0 went into Bitcoin block 767,430 on December 14, 2022.

What is the best book on NFT history?

It depends on the angle. Token Supremacy by Zachary Small (Knopf, 2024) covers art, finance and the 2022 crash. On NFTs, edited by Robert Alice (Taschen, 2024), is a large survey that The Art Newspaper compared to a catalogue raisonné. PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt (2026) tells the Ethereum and Solana stories side by side, from on-chain records, through October 2026.

Sources and further reading

1. Hal Finney, “Crypto trading cards.,” cypherpunks list, January 17, 1993. Archive
2. Yoni Assia, “bitcoin 2.X (aka Colored Bitcoin): initial specs,” 2012. yoniassia.com
3. Josh Constine, Monegraph story, TechCrunch, May 9, 2014. TechCrunch
4. Guinness World Records, “First NFT.” guinnessworldrecords.com
5. Counterparty asset records, RAREPEPE and HOMERPEPE, read October 20, 2026.
6. Dieter Shirley, “ERC: Non-fungible Token Standard,” GitHub issue 721, September 22, 2017. GitHub
7. “ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard.” eips.ethereum.org
8. Ethereum block 4,664,261 (Genesis sale) and the CryptoPunksMarket contract. Block; contract
9. Decrypt, Beeple’s Christie’s sale, March 11, 2021. Decrypt
10. TechCrunch, CryptoPunks at Christie’s, May 11, 2021. TechCrunch
11. Collins Dictionary, word of the year 2021, November 24, 2021. Collins; usage figure via InfoDocket
12. Solana Historical Society, methodology and LSD record.
13. Casey Rodarmor, “Inscribing Mainnet,” January 20, 2023. rodarmor.com; Inscription #0
14. NODE Foundation, “CryptoPunks join NODE,” May 13, 2025. nodefoundation.com
15. The Block, MoMA adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles, December 21, 2025. The Block
16. SEC and CFTC, Release No. 33-11412, March 17, 2026. SEC (PDF)
17. The Block, NFT volume figures, June 3, 2026. The Block
18. Further reading: Zachary Small, Token Supremacy (Knopf, 2024); The Art Newspaper on On NFTs and a decade of NFT books, April 1, 2024.

Related reading: the Grey Area Labs guide to NFTs and crypto art | about PUNKS | CryptoPunks, from the 11-cent claim to MoMA (publishing October 30) | the NFT market in 2026 (publishing November 4) | what the Beeple buyer owns (publishing November 13) | Abstratica and early AI art on Solana | all of Ryan’s books