Popular auction house, Sotheby’s, is set to auction the first-ever non fungible token; Kevin McCoy created the NFT in 2014.
In recent months, NFTs have seen increased adoption in the music, arts, film and sporting industries. However, NFTs have actually been around for nearly seven years at this point.
Auction house Sotheby’s will auction the first-ever NFT, created by Kevin McCoy the piece is called ‘Quantum’ and was hosted on the Namecoin blockchain back in 2014. The NFT has been recreated on the Ethereum blockchain, and it is now up for sale at Sotheby’s.
Although it wasn’t tagged as an NFT back then, ‘Quantum’ was created as a digital artwork before the rise in popularity of NFTs. According to McCoy, the piece was created from a code, and was the first autonomous artwork that was inscribed into a blockchain. He added that he developed the artwork based on his interest in Bitcoin.
He first learned about Bitcoin in 2013 and was fascinated by the cryptocurrency. “I thought about how the scarcity mechanism that Bitcoin presented could be a way for digital artists to create provenance and ownership systems around digital works,” McCoy added.
According to McCoy, he had the idea of NFTs when he created ‘Quantum.’ However, people didn’t understand his vision back then since the cryptocurrency market was still in its early days. “It was a pretty abstract idea at the time, and no one really understood what I was talking about, but when I finally put the pieces together to make an initial effort with that, Quantum seemed like the perfect piece to do that with,” he said.
The ‘Quantum’ NFT is up for auction at Sotheby’s, with bids beginning at $160,000.
