The standard story of NFT history starts with CryptoPunks in June 2017 and accelerates from there. CryptoKitties later that year. The ERC-721 standard finalized in early 2018. The 2021 boom, the Beeple Christie's auction, the OpenSea valuation, the Bored Apes. This is the story you'll get from almost every retrospective written after 2021, including most of the ones written by people who hold the relevant tokens.

The story has the rough shape of the price action right but the rough shape of the technology history wrong. Every component of the 2021 NFT market existed in working form by late 2016. The Rare Pepe community built it in roughly four months, between Mike's first card in early September 2016 and the close of the year. By the time the people now writing NFT history first encountered the concept, the inventory was complete.

The 2016 inventory

By late December 2016, the Rare Pepe community had shipped:

  • A token format for individual collectibles. Counterparty asset issuances on Bitcoin. Named, supply-fixed, transferable, on-chain.
  • A native marketplace currency. PEPECASH, airdropped to early holders, used for trading and submission fees.
  • A user-facing wallet and marketplace. Joe Looney's Rare Pepe Wallet, browser-based, no commission, with buy/sell/trade/edition/gift/destroy functionality.
  • A verification system for image authenticity. Pepechain, Looney's Merkle tree of SHA-256 hashes, replacing the earlier MD5 approach.
  • A community-driven curation process. The Scientists reviewing submissions, the directory accepting or rejecting cards, the format conventions standardizing.
  • Token-gated bonus content. DJ J-Scrilla's DJPEPE (October 2016) gating audio behind token ownership. Effectively the first music NFT.
  • An on-chain decentralized exchange. Counterparty's DEX, which had been running since 2014, matching orders entirely through Bitcoin transactions.
  • A market that cleared real money. Sales were happening. The marketplace was functional.

This is what the term "NFT" came to refer to four years later: a non-fungible token, with an off-chain image and on-chain provenance, traded on a marketplace, curated by a community. All of those primitives existed and were operating in the Rare Pepe community by Christmas 2016.

What hadn't been invented

Two things, both labels rather than primitives:

The acronym "NFT" didn't exist. The term comes from EIP-721, which Dieter Shirley and others proposed in September 2017 and which was finalized as ERC-721 in early 2018. Before then, the concept was referred to variously as "cryptoart," "digital collectibles," and (in the Rare Pepe community) just "cards."

Mainstream awareness didn't exist. CryptoKitties in late 2017 generated the first mainstream press coverage of the category at scale, and the 2021 macro cycle generated the actual mainstream awareness. But neither of those reflected new technology being built. They reflected the existing technology becoming visible.

The Ethereum timeline, compared

For comparison, here's the public Ethereum NFT timeline:

  • June 23, 2017. CryptoPunks launches. The first widely-known Ethereum NFT project, though it predates ERC-721 and uses a custom contract.
  • September 2017. ERC-721 proposed.
  • November 2017. CryptoKitties launches, generates mainstream press, congests the Ethereum network.
  • January 2018. ERC-721 standard finalized.

The first widely-cited Ethereum NFT (CryptoPunks) launched ten months after Mike's first Rare Pepe and well after the Rare Pepe Wallet had shipped. The standard that defined Ethereum NFTs was finalized fifteen months after PEPECASH was airdropped. By the time CryptoKitties was making headlines, the Rare Pepe community had been operating a working cryptoart market for over a year.

This is the empirical record. It's not in dispute. What's in dispute is whether it matters, and the answer to that depends on what you think NFT history is for.

Why the standard narrative gets it wrong

Three factors compress the actual history into "CryptoPunks invented it."

The 2021 audience. Most of the people writing NFT retrospectives in 2021 and 2022 were Ethereum-native. They came in during the boom, learned the Ethereum-side history, and reported what they knew. Counterparty was a footnote in their resources because it was a footnote in their experience.

The Pepe association. Pepe the Frog had been politically co-opted in 2016, three days after Mike's first card. Mainstream press coverage of Rare Pepes from 2017 onward had to spend half its words on disclaimers about the character. CryptoPunks didn't carry that baggage. The path of least resistance for journalists writing about NFT history was to start the story with the Punks.

The chain. Counterparty is a metaprotocol on Bitcoin. It's slower than Ethereum NFTs, harder to integrate with, and culturally distant from the Ethereum-centric NFT marketplace ecosystem that grew up between 2017 and 2021. Sites that index NFTs across chains often skipped Counterparty entirely until 2023, by which point the standard narrative had set.

None of these is a good reason to misrepresent the technology history. They're explanations for why the misrepresentation became dominant.

Why it actually matters

This isn't an academic dispute. The history matters for three practical reasons.

First, it affects what gets built. Communities that believe Ethereum invented NFTs build their next projects on Ethereum-centric assumptions. Communities that know Bitcoin had functional NFTs in 2016 think more carefully about which chain is actually best for which use case. Ordinals' arrival in 2023 partly resulted from people inside Bitcoin recognizing that the chain had been quietly hosting NFT-style assets for years and asking what else was possible.

Second, it affects valuations. The Rare Pepe market is small in 2026 compared to Ethereum NFTs, but the historically significant cards have appreciated substantially because the market eventually recognized the provenance. The 2021 $500,000+ NAKAMOTOCARD sale wasn't speculation; it was the market acknowledging documented history. As awareness spreads, that pattern is likely to continue.

Third, it affects the institutional narrative being constructed in real time. Sotheby's, Christie's, and other auction houses are now writing the "official" history of NFTs through their catalogs. The early entries in those catalogs will set the canonical record for decades. Getting the 2016 history right while it's still recoverable matters more than it would if NFTs were a less consequential category.

The defensible claim

The argument isn't that Rare Pepes are objectively better than CryptoPunks. They're different projects on different chains with different design choices. The claim is narrower and more durable: Rare Pepes demonstrated, in 2016, every primitive that the NFT category later codified. The community built the format, the marketplace, the verification system, the community-driven curation, and the working market before the ERC-721 standard existed.

That isn't a hot take. It's the documented record. The standard NFT history has been telling a different story because the people telling it weren't there. The story in this archive is the one the participants told at the time, sourced to the contemporaneous interviews and the on-chain record.

Mike, on a Telegram, in early September 2016, with a Pepe. That's where the category starts. Everything since is iteration, and the trading infrastructure that holds those original cards today is the same kind of nft marketplace plumbing that the rest of the industry eventually adopted, just running on Bitcoin from the start.