Crypto art, also known as "Rare Art" is art that is related to blockchain technology.
History
2014
Monegraph launches the first marketplace to register art on the Bitcoin blockchain.
2015
Artist Sara Meyohas launches Bitchcoin in February, "a cryptocurrency for Buying Art and Investing in the Artist." Ascribe launches in June, using Bitcoin’s blockchain to help artists claim ownership of their work Verisart launches in July to "use the Blockchain to verify the authenticity of artworks" by building a worldwide authenticated ledger of works.
2017
CryptoPunks launched in June, paving the way for rare digital art. There are ten thousand unique computer generated CryptoPunks tied to a token on Ethereum. These non-fungible tokens are the base for the standard ERC721. The Cryptokitties game to collect, breed and sell virtual cats launches in November. Within a week People had "spent over $1M buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain." It used CryptoPunks non-fungible tokens as a base and went on to proposed the ERC-721 token standard that is used for crypto art. Artnome publishes an influential article titled "The Blockchain Art Market Is Here" in December, which helped make sense of the experimentation and innovation happening with art and blockchain in 2017.
2018
Rare Art Fest, the first festival dedicated to crypto art / rare digital art is held in NYC in January. Born from a tweet by Joe Looney, the creator of the Rare Pepe wallet, it was a community organized event led by Tommy Nicholas from Rare Art Labs with the help of DADA. It brought together the art and blockchain community for the first time, a standing room only of over 400 people. Speakers included Dan Viau from Kitty Hats, Shaban Shaame from Spell of Genesis, Vladimir Vukicevic from Meural, Kieran Farr from Decentraland, Jess Houlgrave and Jessical Angel. Keynote presentations included Joe Looney from Rare Pepe's, Matt Hall from Cryptopunks and Beatriz Helena Ramos from DADA. Jason Rosenstein and Louis Parker held a Rare Pepe auction in which Homer Pepe sold for $39,200, prompting headlines from The New York Times and The Paris Review. After these events Anne Bracegirdle organized Christies's first Art+Tech Summit in London dedicated to Blockchain. Many projects were launched in 2018, including Codex Protocol, MakersPlace, SuperRare, KnownOrigin, BAE in Cryptovoxels in December 2018.
