Learn · NFT History
The story of NFTs
Real pieces, real sales, real prices — all in dollars. Swipe →





Learn · NFT History
Real pieces, real sales, real prices — all in dollars. Swipe →




Start
A digital collectible you can truly own. Anyone can save the picture — but a public record says which wallet owns the real one, and nobody can fake that record.

CryptoPunk #7804 · one owner, verifiable by anyone
Start
The record keeps the whole chain: who created it, who bought it, who owns it today.
The picture
Anyone can save it. Free, always.
The certificate
This trail is called provenance
Kind 1 of 2
One image, one artist, one owner — collected like a painting. Fidenza #313, by Tyler Hobbs, sold for 1,000 ETH in August 2021.

3.3M USD
Fidenza #313 — Tyler Hobbs
Kind 2 of 2
Thousands of characters, each one different. People wear them as their profile picture, and real communities form around them. This is the world everything below lives in.




June 2017 · Ethereum
Two developers made 10,000 pixel punks and let anyone claim one for FREE. Almost nobody cared.

1 of 10,000 — free in 2017
CryptoPunks
The free pixel punks became the most expensive NFTs on Earth.



CryptoPunks
The cheapest punk you could buy, from day one to today.
Jun 2017 — launch day
Free
a few cents to claim
Oct 2021 — the peak
423,000 USD
and that was the CHEAPEST one
Today — live
64,363 USD
31.00 ETH
Free
a few cents to claim
Jun 2017 — launch day
423,000 USD
and that was the CHEAPEST one
Oct 2021 — the peak
64,363 USD
31.00 ETH
Today — live
The oldest hobby, on a new shelf
Stamps. Football stickers. Sneakers. First editions. Pokémon cards in a binder. The instinct is thousands of years old: own the thing, know exactly which one you have, and know how few of them exist.
176,315
peoplehold a piece of the collections we track64%
own exactly onemost collectors are not traders3.2
pieces eachon average, across everybodyThe part you cannot screenshot
You do not hang an NFT on a wall — you WEAR it. It becomes your face online, and everyone else wearing one from the same collection is instantly recognisable to you. That is the real product: belonging.

CryptoPunks

Bored Apes
Solana Monkeys

Degen Apes

DeGods
Okay Bears
Six faces. Six rooms you are instantly recognised in.
And the honest reason
Nobody pretends otherwise. Same bear, same wallet, twenty-two days apart:
Okay Bear #5054
26 April 2022 · launch day
≈ 460 USD
4.8 SOL
18 May 2022 · 22 days later
≈ 110,000 USD
1,150 SOL
×240
Two rows of our own sale table. Nothing about the bear changed.
And a thought, clearly labelled as one
People have always paid fortunes for things that were never useful — only agreed. Three times, three centuries:

1637
A flower
One Semper Augustus bulb cost more than a canal house in Amsterdam.
The price never came back
1889
A canvas
Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his life and died broke.
Now it is priceless
Today
A file
Anyone could claim a CryptoPunk for free in 2017. Nobody wanted one.
Still being writtenTwo of these stories are finished. The third is nine years old. Life is more digital every year, and we think digital art will be worth more in the future.
The mint
You pay a fixed price and receive a SEALED, random piece. Only when you open it do you find out how lucky you got.
1
You paya fixed price2
Sealed boxa random piece3
You open ithow lucky were you?So how do you actually get one?
Practically every NFT anybody owns was bought on a MARKETPLACE, not at a mint. A mint happens only once, when a collection launches. After that, you buy from whoever owns the piece:
99.99%
of NFTs are bought this way — on a marketplace, from whoever owns the piece
The mint
Every pull is a real CryptoPunk, with its real traits and what that kind of punk is worth today.
You will usually get a common punk. Sometimes something much better comes out.
The mint
Every piece of a collection lands in one of four buckets, by how much the market pays for what it is wearing. In CryptoPunks, this is how the 10,000 split:
Traits
Artists draw PARTS and a program stacks them, one on top of the other. Each part is a TRAIT — and the skin is a trait too:





Traits
The rarer a part is — and the more the community loves it — the more buyers pay for the piece wearing it.

Harambe's Halo
11 of 8,166 apes

Crown
27 of 8,166 apes

NB-Ape Yellow
95 of 8,166 apes

Police Uniform
188 of 8,166 apes
The trap in every rarity list
Each row is two traits from the SAME slot — skin against skin, head against head — worn by almost the same number of apes. Rarity says they are worth the same. The market says otherwise:
Skin vs Skin

Acid Trip
13 apes
×41
the floor

Gold
17 apes
×19
the floor
Both under twenty apes. One pays more than double the other.
Head vs Head

Crown
27 apes
×10
the floor

Roman Helmet
18 apes
×8.1
the floor
The Roman helmet is RARER — 18 apes against 27 — and it is worth less. Scarcity lost.
Clothing vs Clothing

Space Suit
22 apes
×50
the floor

Biggie Sweater
26 apes
×7.8
the floor
Four apes apart in scarcity. Six times apart in price.
Multipliers read live from our own trait engine · Degen Ape Academy
A real sale, from our own records
There were plenty of cheap apes for sale that day. Someone paid ten times more for THIS one — because of how the whole character reads, not because of one rare part:
3,047 USD
Aug 2026 · 18.9× the floor of that day
cheapest ape today: 134 USD — live

Harambe's Halo
11 of 8,166

Biggie Sweater
and nothing fights it
CLEAN
it reads as ONE character
Rare parts get you noticed. The COMBINATION is what gets paid for.
The combination, at its most extreme
22 Degen Apes wear the space suit. 10 wear the space helmet. Only 10 wear BOTH — and those ten are ranks 1 to 10 of all 8,166. The twelve with the suit alone start at rank 15 and fall away fast:



814,696 USD
6,988 SOL · 31 August 2021
135× the floor of that day
Suit alone: rank 15 at best. Suit + helmet: the top ten.
Traits
Taste cuts both ways. In Degen Ape Academy, an ape wearing the dress sells BELOW an ordinary one — even when the rest of the piece is good.

×0.9
"Dress"
439 of 8,166 apes
detractorOfficial rank
Rank #1 is the rarest piece of the collection. Here are the five rarest Solana Monkeys — and why:
Solana Monkey Business · 4,993 monkeys
Official rank
DeGods, 10,000 pieces. Every one of the top five carries something almost nobody else has:
DeGods · 10,000 pieces
DeGod #4534Mythic HelmetTranscendent skin
#8628
#4420
#9177
#6709The thing beginners find out late
A marketplace shows you 12 SOL, or 56 ETH. That number can sit perfectly still while what you own doubles in dollars — because the coin moved, not the NFT:
8 January 2024
56.2 ETH
the price tag
131,004 USD
what it is worth
1 ETH = 2,330 USD
8 March 2024
56.1 ETH
the price tag
217,729 USD
what it is worth
1 ETH = 3,883 USD
Same piece. Slightly FEWER coins. +66% in dollars.
CryptoPunks · the cheapest one
Payday one of two
The creators sell all 10,000 pieces sealed, at a fixed price, before anybody knows what is inside any of them. That sale is how the project gets funded. An example, with round numbers:
10,000
piecesall sealed, nobody has seen them200USD
each, fixedthe same price for everyone2MUSD
raised in a dayno investors, no boardPayday two of two
A ROYALTY is a small percentage of every future sale that goes back to the creators automatically — not just the first one. On a 1,000 USD resale it looks like this:
1,000 USD
someone buys your piece for this
925 USD
you, the seller
50 USD
the creators
25 USD
the marketplace
An example with a 5% royalty and a 2.5% marketplace fee. Both percentages change from collection to collection.
The two words you are about to read constantly
A BULL market is when money is pouring in and everything rises. A BEAR market is the long hangover after it. Same collections, four years apart — our own sale records:
BULL
2021 → 2022
BEAR
Last 90 days
NFTs vs the coin they are priced in
When crypto rises, NFTs rise. When crypto falls, NFTs fall — only much harder. Same five years, same months, same turns:
both start at 100 in June 2021 · each line has its own scale · Up and down in the same months — NFTs just swing about thirteen times harder
Everything ever paid, in dollars
Ten collections. Every sale of them we hold, added up — and the number of separate purchases it took:
8.10B USD
paid for these ten collections
499K
separate purchases to get there
26,499 sales · 116K USD each
51,588 sales · 21K USD each
58,396 sales · 14K USD each
45,587 sales · 15K USD each
56,522 sales · 12K USD each
43,021 sales · 9,711 USD each
50,978 sales · 7,753 USD each
39,879 sales · 9,795 USD each
76,666 sales · 4,039 USD each
50,190 sales · 5,425 USD each
And the part people get wrong about a bear
Every sale in our database, by year. The tallest bar is 2023 — the deepest year of the crash, and the busiest year NFTs have ever had:
bars = sales · the row underneath = dollars · 2026 is a year still running
Nine years, in order
Four cycles. Gold is a bull market, grey is a bear — you just learned both words. TAP ANY MILESTONE to open what really happened that day, with the pieces and the prices:
Tap any milestone to open it — the pieces, the prices and what actually happened.
2017 → 2020QUIET
The birth
free → ≈ 3,600 USD
Claimable for the network fee in 2017. By the end of 2020 the cheapest punk cost 4.86 ETH — about 3,600 USD — and a year after that, 423,000 USD. Almost nobody was watching.

2021 → April 2022BULL
THE bull
1.36 BILLION USD in one month
Fourteen months in which everything happened at once — and the busiest month the market has ever had.




June 2022 → 2024BEAR
The bear
−83% in a single month
The crash, and then four years of quiet. But almost everything NFTs can point at today was built inside it.


2025 → todayBEAR
Where we are
13M USD a month
The quietest the market has been since the boom started — and the first genuinely new thing in years arrived anyway.

The story is over. Now the useful part.
You now know what NFTs are and how they got here. These four are what people actually mean when they say somebody "understands the market", and the next cards are them, in this order:
1
Liquidityalmost nobody is selling — and almost nobody is buying2
The floor pricethe number everyone quotes, and what it hides3
FOMOwhy prices run, and who is left holding4
Whalesthe wallets that move a floor on their ownInsight 1 of 4
Ten thousand pieces exist. A few hundred are for sale. Almost nobody is selling — the typical collection has between 2% and 6% listed at any moment, and those few pieces ARE the market:
Azuki exists 10,000 times.
302 are for sale
that is 3.0% of it — live, right now
Azuki302 of 10,0003.0% for sale
DEGODS619 of 10,0006.2% for sale
6.5% for sale
CryptoPunks1,151 of 9,99411.5% for sale
gold = the pieces you could actually buy today
Insight 1 of 4 · the other half of it
You cannot sell without a buyer. 1,149 CryptoPunks are listed right now and about 2 sell a day — so the owner who NEEDS to sell today has one lever, and pulling it moves the price for everyone:
Insight 2 of 4
The cheapest piece on sale right now. That is the whole definition — and it is what people mean by "how much does one cost":




The four cheapest Azuki for sale right now — live.
Insight 3 of 4 · 24 hours, 7,410 real sales
The moment buying stops being a decision. The price is running, everyone is posting about it, and the only thought left is that tomorrow it costs more. Okay Bears launched at 19:00 on 26 April 2022 — this is the next 24 hours, hour by hour:
the cheap end of Okay Bears, hour by hour, in US dollars · ×9.3, overnight
Twenty-four days · our own floor records
The 24-hour version you just saw is rare. This is the shape you will actually meet: DeGods on Solana, the cheapest one, every day of March 2022 — up four and a half times in under a month, almost in a straight line:
2,314 USD7 March 202210,662 USD24 days laterthe cheapest DeGod, day by day, in US dollars · ×4.6 in 24 days
The word for how much a price moves
Volatility just means: how much the price jumps around. Here is ONE real collection — Solana Monkeys, every week of the last year. Not one crash: a permanent sawtooth.
Every one of those spikes is a week somebody bought at the top and somebody else bought at the bottom.
And that is not one unlucky collection. Across all 66 of them, out of every 100 days:
days it was at least 10% cheaper than its best price that month
days it was at least 20% cheaper
days it was at least 30% cheaper
A 20% drop sounds like a disaster. Here it happens on one day in three. That is not a crash — that is a Tuesday.
And then the quiet buyers come back
Every collection in this deck ran the same four acts. Three of them are loud and easy to see. The fourth is silent, and it is the only one that has ever made anybody money:
1
FOMOprice runs, everyone posts, nobody wants to be left out2
Correctionthe early buyers sell to the late ones3
Consolidationmonths of nothing. Most people quit here4
Accumulationprices are low and boring — and the patient wallets buyThe word you will hear before any other
An OG is a collection that was there at the beginning AND that the community still treats as founding. Both halves are required — and this is the short list almost nobody argues with:
June 2017CryptoPunksThe OG of OGs. Ethereum, four years before anyone else — it invented the format everything here copied, and no list leaves it out.
and then, four years later
Ethereum
Bored ApesMay 2021turned the picture into a membership
Pudgy PenguinsJuly 2021nearly died, came back as a brandSolana
Among the first, AND still called founding. Both halves, or it is just an old collection.
Not an exhaustive list — plenty would add Doodles, CloneX or Art Blocks. These are the ones every list agrees on.
And the word everyone uses: BLUE CHIP
Everything fell. That is not what separates them. This is the last twelve months of REAL trading — and remember these are the quietest twelve months the market has had:
Traded in the last 12 months
money moved · sales
CryptoPunks153M USD
Pudgy Penguins27M USD
Azuki17M USD
Bored Apes9.07M USDSame market, same year. The bar is the money — not how often it changed hands.
Insight 4 of 4 · from our own sale records
A WHALE is a wallet holding a big pile of one collection — big enough that what it does IS the market for a day. On 16 January 2023 one of them bought 63 DeGods in 20 seconds. Here is every piece it took, cheapest first:
63
pieces bought
20
seconds
789,660 USD
spent
first piece it bought
10,784 USD
+29%
in 20 seconds
last piece it bought
13,954 USD
DeGods · 16 January 2023 · one wallet, 56 different sellers
Insight 4 of 4 · live, from our own whale engine
For every collection in the NFT 30, the share of all supply held by whales — wallets with ten pieces or more that sit in the top 3% of holders:
17%
of the typical NFT 30 collection is held by whales
CryptoPunks73 whales of 3,757 holders21%
Azuki70 whales of 4,404 holders19%
Bored Ape Yacht Club54 whales of 5,657 holders16%
Pudgy Penguins45 whales of 5,002 holders13%The 12 most concentrated of the 8 we measure · a whale is a wallet with 10+ pieces in the top 3% of holders
Three problems, and why we exist
Every number in this deck came out of a database, and all of it is public — written on open chains anybody can read. So why is none of it usable? Because of these three problems:
All three have the same cause: the data is public, and nobody put it in one place.
That is what we built.
Problem 1 of 3 · on X
On X a profile picture is just an image file. Somebody saves a 100,000 USD ape, puts it on their account, and passes as its owner. That is how most NFT scams start:
Problem 2 of 3 · on Discord
Almost every collection runs on Discord — an app built so gamers could talk while playing. It is excellent at chat and terrible at everything a collector actually needs:
Problem 3 of 3 · on the marketplaces
A marketplace earns on volume, so it lists every collection ever made. The 66 with years of real history and the thousands that died sit side by side, looking identical:
The last thing this guide has to tell you
Five answers to those three problems. Every one of them is running right now — you are inside one of them reading this:
1
A real pictureyou can only wear what your wallet holds2
Two shelvesthe NFT 30, and everything else with a track record3
Hard data, simplytraits, holders and history you can actually read4
A curated feedwe read X so you do not have to5
One page per collectionthe team, the alerts, the posts, the priceAnswer 1 of 5 · for problem 1
Anyone can save an image. Nobody can fake a wallet. Here your face is checked against the chain — and so is everything you claim about your history:
Your wallet holds it
it shows up in your picker
You only saved the image
there is no upload button
And the same proof, applied to your whole history
What you hold
every piece in your linked wallets, right now
What you HELD
the ones you owned and let go — kept, not quietly forgotten
What you bought
every buy, the date and the price you actually paid
And what you sold
including the one you sold right before it ran
The lying is over
Answer 2 of 5 · for problem 3
A marketplace lists tens of thousands of collections and judges none of them. We carry around a hundred, on purpose, and every one of them arrives with its whole history:
The NFT 30
30 collections





+24Survived every crash and still moves real money. The deepest data we have.
Others
everything else worth reading




+78A real track record, or genuinely new. Same data, never counted in the index.
Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin and Robinhood Chain — all in one place.
Answer 3 of 5 · for problem 3
A marketplace hands you a trait list and a percentage. We cut the trait out of the art and tell you what the market actually PAYS for it — the same numbers the rest of this platform runs on:

Harambe's Halo
11 of 8,166 apes

Zombie
28 of 8,166 apes

NB-Ape Yellow
95 of 8,166 apes

Dress
439 of 8,166 apes
Answer 4 of 5 · for problem 2
Everything said about these collections, swept up, READ, and cut down to what actually matters. Then the other half nobody does: naming the people behind the good posts.
Everything X says
every post that mentions a collection we carry, swept continuously
Read, not keyword-matched
"Azuki" is also a red bean — only something that READS a post can tell
What is left is the news
8,135 posts judged · 2,209 thrown out · about one in four
And who said it
Per collection
the accounts that consistently move a single collection — including the team’s own
Across all NFTs
the voices worth following whatever you collect — our Ambassadors
Ranked on what they actually post, never on follower count.
Answer 5 of 5 · for problem 2
Three things decide whether you are actually up to date on a collection. They live in three different apps. Here they live on one page:
The Pulse of one collection
What the team said
the collection's own announcements, pinned above everything and still here next year
What just happened
a sweep, a floor move, a whale buying, a big sale — the moment it fires
The posts that matter
all of X, filtered down to the ones actually about the collection
One page. No Discord, no scrolling X, no noise.
And we are just getting started
Everything in this section is running today. It is also the smallest version of what Provenance is going to be:
Relics are the clue. Ten of them exist, most are not unlocked yet, and each one arrives with something new.
Provenance
You now know more about NFTs than most people who own one. Here is where to go next:
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