Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash created the first known non-fungible token in May 2014. McCoy registered a video clip made by his wife Jennifer on the Namecoin blockchain and sold it to Dash for $4 during a live presentation at the New Museum in New York City. McCoy and Dash called the technology "monetized graphics."
Beeple's composite work "Everydays: the First 5000 Days" sold at Christie's on the 11th of March 2021 for $69.3 million. It was the first NFT auctioned by a major traditional auction house. The most expensive NFT ever sold is "Merge" by artist Pak, which fetched $91.8 million.
The NFT market collapsed in 2022. By May 2022, daily NFT sales had fallen 92 percent from their September 2021 peak, and the number of active wallets in the market had dropped 88 percent from November 2021. By September 2023, one report claimed 95 percent of all NFT collections had zero monetary value.
Owning an NFT does not automatically grant copyright or other intellectual property rights over the associated artwork. Legal scholar Rebecca Tushnet stated that buyers "definitely do not own the copyright to the underlying work unless it is explicitly transferred." Some NFT projects, such as Bored Apes, do explicitly assign intellectual property rights to buyers.
ERC-721 is a technical standard published in 2018 on the Ethereum blockchain that established rules ensuring no two non-fungible tokens share the same attributes or ownership details. Lead author William Entriken, writing under the moniker "Fulldecent," drove a stakeholder vote during drafting that chose "NFT" as the term, over alternatives including "deed," "title," and "distinguishable asset." In 2021, ArtReview's Power 100 ranked ERC-721 at number one, calling it "the most powerful art entity in the world."
Wash trading in the NFT market involves sellers using multiple wallets to generate fictitious sales, artificially inflating apparent trading volumes. The platform Looksrare, created in early 2022, was associated with approximately $400 million per day in volume during its earliest period, much of it attributed to wash trading. NFT trading is largely unregulated, making such practices difficult to pursue legally.