Were NFTs born in 2021? No, this is wrong. The first experiments began well before that year, however the very first real project of NFTs, that were appropriately called with this acronym, is the CryptoKitties.
Born in 2017, CryptoKitties is a game based on the Ethereum blockchain and developed by the Canadian studio Axiom Zen. These are NFTs based on the ERC-721 standard. The game is similar to a Tamagotchi so, once the users buy an NFT representing a cute kitten, they have to feed it, look after it and if they want to, they can get it paired with other kittens to have evolutions.
Not only were CryptoKitties the first real project to be successful in the NFT field, so much so that their popularity caused the Ethereum blockchain network to block for days due to the numerous transactions, but it is also one of the first blockchain video games.
In February 2018, an interesting article by Consensys entitled “The Inside Story of the CryptoKitties Congestion Crisis” was published. It was an article about the backstory told by the developers of Ethereum to solve the blockage caused by the game.
The article explained that even MetaMask, Infura and Grid+ had taken part in the CryptoKitties technical team to try to unlock the network, in order to find solutions to make everything more scalable in the short, but also in the long term.
