On Building - our essay from the NFT Taschen Book

Maria Paula Fernandez, Simon Denny and Adina Glickstein argue that NFT infrastructure was built through an iterative, critical process by artists and technologists rather than by a single inventor. They trace its lineage from Mosaic and Hal Finney's 1993 "cryptographic trading cards" idea to Counterparty's 2014 token issuing and Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy's Monegraph, presented at Rhizome's Seven on Seven that May. The authors say they do not aim to identify the first true NFT project, focusing instead on the community work that expanded what NFTs could become. The essay was written in early 2022 and is being republished in a newsletter because the book's high cost may limit its readership.