Thread by @LeonidasNFT

1/ A brief history of tokenized domain names on ENS and Namecoin 🧵

Few know the real origin story of NFTs so let’s set the record straight.

2/ The first NFTs were neither profile pictures nor pieces of cryptoart. They were neither gaming assets nor sports cards. The first NFTs ever were domain names. 11 years ago, on April 21st, 2011 the first Namecoin domains were minted, and thus NFTs were born.

3/ Namecoin was an experimental technology that was attempting to bring human-readable domain names to the blockchain. In fact, Namecoin was the only other blockchain that Satoshi worked on (yes Satoshi helped create the first NFTs).

4/ Only a month in people began experimenting on Namecoin. Someone decided to use the Punycode standard to make ASCII art with their domain name and thus we got the first Art NFT.

xn--_-ncfb.bit converts to:

ϾϿ

Yes, the first art NFT ever is exactly what you’re thinking it is.

5/ Fast forward several years after @Punycodes2011/@HistoricDomains and yet again a bunch of nerds like us did some more experimenting. They created a service called Onename that allowed you to tokenize your Twitter or GitHub profile picture onto Namecoin.

6/ The service took the URL of your current social media pfp and tacked it on as metadata to your Namecoin domain. Totally unintentionally the first pfp collections were born.

7/ The first collection is referred to as Blockheads by the historical community. It’s a set of less than 60 eightbit avatars tokenized on Namecoin in 2014. (interestingly @addison and @courtstarr, the artists behind these avatars, just released a new collection called @eightbit)

8/ After Blockheads the second pfp collection emerged. This time from Twitter users who had never bothered to change their default pfp which at the time was an egg. And thus these 277 lazy Onename users unintentionally created the @Eggs_Namecoin pfp collection.

9/ Also in 2014 a twenty-year-old named Vitalik released a whitepaper for his promising new general-purpose blockchain called Ethereum. On the first page of the Ethereum Whitepaper VB specifically called out Namecoin domains as important because they were “non-fungible”.

10/ A year later Ethereum would mine its genesis block and then two years after that on May 9th, 2017 the creator of ENS, @nicksdjohnson, would mint the first Ethereum based domain name, rilxxlir.eth, on a new dapp he built called the Ethereum Name Service.

11/ Many still think that CryptoPunks are the first NFTs on Ethereum, however along with several other projects, ENS domains actually came a month before.

12/ It’s likely no coincidence that the first pfps on Ethereum (CryptoPunks) and the first domain names on Ethereum (ENS) were both created at roughly the same moment in time.

13/

IRL: We all have a name and a face.

Web2: We brought our identities into the digital world with usernames and pfps.

Web3: From the very start we desired to use blockchain technologies to tokenize and own our digital identities.

14/ None of this was an accident. In both the instance of ENS/CryptoPunks and the instance of Namecoin/Blockhead there was a clear emergent behavior and even a hunger to tear down the walled gardens of Web2 and take ownership of our digital selves.

15/ It may or may not be with ENS/CryptoPunks or Namecoin/Blockheads but over the coming decades, one by one, all eight billion people on this planet are going to take the same first step into the metaverse that these early pioneers by tokenizing their digital identities.

16/ The future is unknown but there is no question that the historical moments and assets from this story are culturally significant as our civilization journeys further into the digital frontier.