NFTs

Dieter Shirley, Jordan Schalm, William Entriken, and Nastassia Sachs's ERC-721 (finalized January 2018, drafted from CryptoKitties' contract) is the standard for unique tokens on Ethereum. Each token has a unique ID, an owner address, and metadata typically pointed at JSON on IPFS. tokenURI returns the metadata location. Approve, transferFrom, ownerOf are the core methods. The standard's durability is the actual story: every NFT marketplace, every L2 NFT collection, every game item that calls itself an NFT speaks ERC-721. The substrate beneath the bubble.

ERC-721 royalties are honored at the marketplace layer, not the protocol layer — the contract emits a creator-fee preference; the marketplace decides whether to enforce it. Blur (2022) launched zero-royalty trading and captured share from OpenSea on speed and efficiency. Creator royalties collapsed across the market within months. Operator filter (Limit Break, 2022) tried to make royalties enforceable by blacklisting non-compliant marketplaces; mostly failed. ERC-2981 standardized the royalty signal but couldn't mandate enforcement. The economic fight reshaped NFT primary-sale economics permanently.

Casey Rodarmor's January 2023 release introduced ordinal theory: each satoshi gets a unique number based on mining order, and arbitrary data inscribed into the witness section of a Taproot transaction is bound to a specific sat. The inscription rides the sat through future transactions. Created an NFT-like primitive entirely on Bitcoin without altering consensus rules — just a new way to interpret existing data. Drove Bitcoin transaction fees to multi-year highs in 2023, sparked the BRC-20 token experiment, and split Bitcoin culture along monetary-purist vs artifact lines.

Story Protocol (S.Y. Lee, 2024) is an EVM-compatible L1 specifically for IP rights. Creators register IP as Programmable IP Assets, attach licensing terms (commercial use, derivative works, royalty splits), and downstream users can license programmatically — the contract enforces the rights. Targets a specific gap: existing IP licensing is bilateral, slow, and gated by lawyers. Story makes it composable. Founded by the team behind Radish Fiction. Backed by a16z's largest round of 2024. The bet: AI-generated content needs a programmable rights layer or it doesn't have rights at all.

Pudgy Penguins launched July 2021 as a 8,888-piece PFP collection, nearly died in 2022, and was acquired by Luca Netz who pivoted it into a consumer IP play — plush toys in Walmart, branded partnerships, the PENGU token launch on Solana in December 2024 with a major airdrop to holders. The thesis: an NFT collection can be the seed for a real consumer brand if the operator treats it like a consumer brand. The penguin plushies move actual retail volume. The reference example for NFT-IP commercialization.

Sound.xyz, Catalog, and Royal launched 2021-2022 with platforms for artists to mint music NFTs — songs as collectibles, sometimes with revenue-share rights attached. Daniel Allan, RAC, 3LAU shipped influential drops. The pitch: streaming pays artists fractions of cents per play; NFTs let one engaged collector pay $50 for a song and own a piece of it. Volume cratered with the NFT market generally. Sound.xyz pivoted, smaller platforms shuttered, the primitive lives on at lower volumes among artists who treat collectors as patrons rather than fans.