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Tech Entrepreneur Anil Dash and Artist Kevin McCoy created the first example of a non-fungible token, or NFT, expanding the possibility of owning digital items.

An artist and a tech entrepreneur invented the non-fungible token, or NFT, in 24 hours.

How the NFT Was Invented

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Tech Entrepreneur Anil Dash and Artist Kevin McCoy created the first example of a non-fungible token, or NFT, expanding the possibility of owning digital items.

An artist and a tech entrepreneur invented the non-fungible token, or NFT, in 24 hours.

Tech & Engineering

How the NFT Was Invented Published December 2, 2022 NARRATOR: While most chased profits, one early Bitcoin user a saw different kind of potential and helped invent what would become one of crypto’s most famous uses.KEVIN MCCOY: I’m an artist and have been an artist for a long, long time, but I wasn’t always. I studied philosophy and literature, and that was my main interest.NARRATOR: In the early 2000s, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy were successful digital artists, their works shown by prestigious galleries. But unauthorized copies were appearing all over the internet. They realized there was no such thing as a digital “original” that they could actually own and control.KEVIN MCCOY: In a digital environment, of course, it’s always a copy, and it proliferates, you know, everywhere. And, you know, and so, there is no original.NARRATOR: But Bitcoin gave Kevin an idea.KEVIN MCCOY: That system created, for the first time, an idea of digital scarcity. All of a sudden, the everyday norm that you had about digital technology, that it’s infinitely reproducible, that it’s…everything was just copy and paste, that didn’t apply in this case. If I send you my Bitcoins, I don’t have them anymore and you have them. That’s scarcity in a sense that it’s not everywhere. It’s only somewhere. And so, I had this realization that if it was possible, via Bitcoin, to create uniqueness around currency, then there had to be a way that you could create uniqueness around a digital artwork. But I didn’t know how.NEW YORK CITY 2014 CONFERENCE SPEAKER: I’m really excited about this last pairing.NARRATOR: Kevin attended a conference where each artist was paired with a tech partner and given 24 hours to develop a new idea they’d present to an audience.ANIL DASH (At New York City, 2014 conference): What we want to talk to you about today is this idea we have: monetized graphics and how we can put digital artworks in chains. So, almost immediately after I was paired up with Kevin McCoy, he and I sat down and started sketching out ideas for how could you make an assertion on a blockchain to say that a certain digital work was an original, unique item.NARRATOR: After an all-night coding session, Anil Dash and Kevin announced that they had registered a video on a blockchain.ANIL DASH: It was a segment of a video work that Kevin and Jennifer McCoy had created together, and I actually found it mesmerizing.KEVIN MCCOY: This was our on-stage example of taking this file and creating a blockchain-based record of that. We’ve created a system that will establish verification and provenance over digital files, digital artworks. That provenance is a chain of ownership.NARRATOR: Anil and Kevin created a record of ownership that would live on the blockchain. Whoever held the key to access it owned the digital original.ANIL DASH: We did pull it together in a couple of hours. So, given that it was something we sort of did over the course of an evening and into a late night, it was a pretty good first version. And we, sort of, said that we’d negotiate a price for it.KEVIN MCCOY: You got 20 bucks?ANIL DASH: Can I pay you in U.S. dollars?KEVIN MCCOY: Sure, that’s cool with me.ANIL DASH: I have four dollars.KEVIN MCCOY: Jesus, really?NARRATOR: It was the first transaction of something that would eventually come to be called a non-fungible token, or N.F.T.

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How the NFT Was Invented

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