After a few years of fermentation, NFT has shed its obscure shell and most people have a good idea of "what it is". So what was the first NFT? And who created it?

     The Birth of NFT

NFT didn't start with Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, the first NFT evolved from the artwork Quantum, created by digital artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, which was later transformed into NFT by McCoy in 2014. then transformed into NFT by McCoy in 2014.

This particular artwork was originally created for the purpose of ownership. After creating Quantum, McCoy wanted to sell the work digitally. But then came the most critical problem - he had no way to determine the provenance of the digital artwork.

"Provenance is a document that proves the creator, ownership history, and appraisal value of a particular work of art, but at the time, no provenance document existed for digital art. There was no way to verify the creator or ownership history of a digital work. With this problem in mind, McCoy teamed up with tech entrepreneur Anil Dash and began exploring blockchain technology.

In the early 1920s, blockchain technology was still a small field. Bitcoin was valued at just $630, ethereum had just been launched, and digital currencies were frequently over-promised and under-delivered, and thus frequently sued. But McCoy and Dash didn't let that stop them, and it finally paid off.

Blockchain technology is known to have attributes that facilitate the buying and selling of digital art. With it, individuals have a trust-free way to identify the creator and track the ownership history of any item on the blockchain. This was a perfect fit for McCoy and Dash, and McCoy registered Quantum on the blockchain.

"Quantum is the first to be documented in this way - using blockchain technology to create tamper-proof provenance and ownership for such digital images." McCoy later said.

Shortly after the first minting, McCoy and Dash demonstrated how "monetized graphics" like these can be used to establish provenance and sell digital art. During the demonstration, McCoy used blockchain to sell a digital image to Dash for $4. McCoy and Dash inadvertently laid the groundwork for what has since grown into a multi-billion dollar market.

     Controversy over Quantum

Unfortunately, Quantum was quickly forgotten after its birth in 2014. This was due to the fact that it was originally hosted on Namecoin (the Bitcoin branch that preceded Ether), and Quantum sat "in the dust" on Namecoin block 174923 for many years - until the NFT bull market of 2021.

In 2021, when NFT comes to a head and sells for millions of dollars, McCoy realizes that Quantum may be worth a lot of money at this point, and he starts promoting Quantum, turning to mainstream media outlets such as Axios to discuss its significance in the history of NFT.

The publicity eventually paid off, and in June 2021, Quantum was eventually sold at Sotheby's for over $1 million. (The winning bid was an anonymous NFT bidder. (The winning bidder was the anonymous NFT collector sillytuna.)

     Legal problems soon followed

Shortly after Quantum was sold for millions of dollars, experts pointed to a stipulation about Namecoin that called into question who actually owned Quantum at the time of the sale: Namecoin required users to update what was minted on the Namecoin blockchain every 250 days in order to retain ownership of the digital project. Notably, McCoy never renewed his Quantum subscription, which allowed veteran collector EarlyNFT to take ownership of Quantum prior to the Sotheby's auction.

Ironically, EarlyNFT acquired these rights only one day after the article about Quantum was published in Axios. Eventually, EarlyNFT challenged the validity of the Sotheby's auction through litigation.

In March 2023, a federal judge in New York dismissed the lawsuit.

While the controversy surrounding Quantum remains, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy continue to innovate in the field, and in April 2023, the pair will release their first NFT series via the Web3 platform.