This article is about the origin of limited edition tokens, aka 1/N NFTs.
Unlike 1/1 NFTs, which are non-fungible, 1/N NFTs are actually fungible. Ironic terminology aside, fungible collectibles are in fact a major innovation in itself.
It took more than a year from Counterparty’s inception until EverdreamSoft’s Spells of Genesis – as the first commercial project – offered limited edition crypto trading cards with the defining properties:
- Indivisible tokens, meaning you can only collect entire tokens – not fractions as with cryptocurrencies.
- Low enough supply to create scarcity. SOG typically issued 300–2000, but the highest used was 3000.
- Locked supply to guarantee scarcity.
My ebook ‘The Economics of Bitcoin’ (JPJA) already showcased this model one year prior to SOG. With EverdreamSoft’s offering of crypto tokens to finance game development, the principle now got tested on a larger scale.
Fast forward to 2022; curious to see who else may have issued limited edition tokens, I wrote a script that went through all early assets. It turns out JPJA is predated only by my own JPGOLD, which I minted to test out the system before creating the 1/1 OLGA and subsequently JPJA.
In fact, only a handful of other individuals made similar tokens on Bitcoin and Dogecoin before SOG popularized the concept.
Bitcoin (Counterparty)
| # | Date | Name | Supply | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2014-06-11 | JPGOLD | 1000 | JP Gold |
| 2 | 2014-06-22 | JPJA | 100 | JPJA Share |
| 3 | 2014-07-30 | TESTA | 10 | TEST |
| 4 | 2014-08-06 | BOOKBAG | 2000 | www.zigler.us/Bookbag/ crowdfunding books |
| 5 | 2014-09-07 | IAMRICH | 10 | I am rich and virtuous. |
| 6 | 2014-09-10 | FOUNDER | 1000 | |
| 7 | 2014-09-17 | EARLY | 2401 | Early Access |
| 8 | 2014-09-22 | CHIKUN | 10 | 1% dividend from bit-chikun.com pcm, 2015 |
| 9 | 2014-10-24 | ROMICOIN | 18 | Mazel Tov on your Bat Mitzvah Romi!!!!! |
| 10 | 2014-10-26 | INDYATM | 325 | 1st BTC ATM in Indy! bit.ly/IndyBTCATM |
| 11 | 2014-11-04 | BNPAT | 2 | BNPAT |
| 12 | 2015-01-13 | A5872512343502174000 | 5 | www.testurl.com/balabklabl |
| 13 | 2015-01-21 | FOOS | 100 | Foosball token. +1 when win, -1 when lose |
| 14 | 2015-01-27 | A10000000009000000000 | 3 | round 1 vote |
| 15 | 2015-02-16 | A9096166406548465000 | 50 | https://cointemporary.com/artwork/a909616 |
| 16 | 2015-03-02 | A18360572975539874000 | 1000 | test deriv |
| 17 | 2015-03-16 | SCARABART | 50 | Official SCARAB Artwork |
| 18 | 2015-04-15 | SHANDROS | 1000 | |
| 19 | 2015-06-01 | YIBAILINGBA | 108 | Lucky 108 Coin |
| 20 | 2015-06-09 | SJCXCARD | 1000 | Moonga SOG Storj card |
| 21 | 2015-06-23 | A714159941780378900 | 100 | Company A bond |
| 22 | 2015-06-23 | A16030064227483554000 | 100 | Company A Pty Ltd working capital |
| 23 | 2015-06-23 | A1609761890111015700 | 100 | Company A – working capital |
| 24 | 2015-06-23 | A719767273426932600 | 100 | Company A – working capital |
| 25 | 2015-07-02 | FLDCVENDOR | 1000 | |
| 26 | 2015-07-10 | XCPCARD | 1000 | Counterparty card |
| 27 | 2015-08-06 | SALVATION | 7 | SAVE UR SOUL FROM SIN & ITS CONSEQUENCES |
| 28 | 2015-08-11 | CACCHOLD | 69 | cacc |
| 29 | 2015-08-28 | BLOCKSIZECD | 300 | Battle for blocksize SOG card |
Numerical assets from 2015 without description have been filtered out. View the raw list.
JPGOLD is the first token I ever created. Although Counterparty was already half a year old and 1147 assets had been issued so far, none had a low, locked supply. None were even close. The lowest by then was 100,000 tokens – one hundred times more! Sure, you may find collectibles with earlier initial issuance. But all of these have had some economic parameters changed later, meaning been locked and/or had tokens destroyed.
On the day of issuing JPGOLD I wrote a short notice in my blog. A few months later, in October 2014, I copied the blog into a pdf, and then embedded the file’s checksum in a bitcoin transaction. A screenshot of this immutable reference is shown on Xchain.
JPJA‘s initial description was JPJA Share. A few days later I updated it to explain that each of the 100 tokens represented a share in the ebook at jpja.net. Internet Archive verifies the authenticity of the pdf. The book itself was an economics experiment where a symbolic token offering raised ‘funding’ for me to write the book, and after half a year each holder received a dividend from the book’s revenues – with full transparency thanks to bitcoin.
[B]itcoin is more than just a payment system. It is a financial platform of endless opportunities.
“The Economics of Bitcoin” (2014) p. 6
TESTA – unknown story.
BOOKBAG is inspired by JPJA and also represents a book.
IAMRICH has description I am rich and virtuous. With a supply of only 10, I wonder if the issuer predicted that by patiently waiting for a decade, his or her tokens may turn into valuable collectibles?
FOUNDER – the same address also issued a unique token called the THEADMIRAL.
EARLY – token pioneer Adam B. Levine distributed these to Let’s Talk Bitcoin contributors. Shortly after locking the supply, the description got updated with the following link: ‘Token Controlled Viewpoint (TCV) Genesis, Characteristics and Early Use Cases‘.
CHIKUN, ROMICOIN, INDYATM – unknown stories beyond descriptions.
FOOS – unknown story.
SCARABART, SHANDROS, YIBAILINGBA – unknown stories.
SJCXCARD is the first of many Spells of Genesis cards.
A[…] – Four numeric assets that represent Company A bonds and working capital.
FLDCVENDOR – unknown story but likely related to Folding Coin (FLDC).
SALVATION – A social experiment, launched by me anonymously, I was curious to see people’s reaction to this ultra rare 1/7 token. Discussed in a XCP Weekly podcast by Chris DeRose and Junseth. SALVATION was technically never locked, but had the issuance right transferred to a burn address instead. This is effectively the same, except the description field is locked as well.
CACCHOLD – unknown story.
BLOCKSIZECD – another Spells of Genesis card. After this there were more SOG cards before several other projects, like Rare Pepe, joined the party.
The list is open source. You can recreate it from source or tweak the variables in the web interface.
I understand that setting N at 3000 may seem arbitrary, but any number up to 99,999 would not have changed the top of the list.
Maybe 3000 is a bit too high. I chose this number to include all SOG cards, including BEARWHALECD. The creator of SOG, EverdreamSoft, has lately destroyed some supply of these high-issuance cards. For Rare Pepe cards the supply is often 100-300. Apparently the economic sweet spot is in the hundreds, not thousands.
Dogecoin (Dogeparty)
| # | Date | Name | Supply | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2014-08-13 | TWENTYTHREE | 23 | |
| 2 | 2014-08-14 | BLAZEIT | 420 | |
| 3 | 2014-08-15 | MONALISA | 100 | |
| 4 | 2014-08-16 | GROOL | 1000 | (|) |
| 5 | 2014-08-16 | DINOSAUR | 1000 | |
| 6 | 2014-08-16 | WIZARD | 23 | |
| 7 | 2014-08-16 | JUPITER | 100 | OG |
| 8 | 2014-08-16 | SPOON | 100 | Yes, people collect these. |
| 9 | 2014-08-16 | FLOWERPOWER | 69 | ’69 |
| 10 | 2014-08-18 | A1159901218488330478 | 42 | There are only 42 |
| 11 | 2014-08-18 | PSTZ | 100 | Project Z Early Tokens |
| 12 | 2014-08-23 | BAECOIN | 100 | For your bae |
| 13 | 2014-08-30 | NARSILSHARD | 2 | |
| 14 | 2014-10-06 | MYVOTESB | 1900 | |
| 15 | 2014-10-09 | BADLUCK | 13 | BAD LUCK TOKEN |
| 16 | 2014-12-17 | OZCOIN | 1000 | Share of Celebrated Agricultural |
| 17 | 2015-02-15 | PAPAGRANDE | 10 | Award for papas who WOW! |
| 18 | 2015-09-30 | PLDDRT | 50 | for regression testing purposes |
This is the complete list of historic 1/N NFTs on Dogeparty. No more were issued until the 2021 reboot.
Almost all of these were issued on the first few days after launch. Since the costs were lower than on Bitcoin, these seem more impulsive. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
None feature a url or a hash, so there are no dead links or missing files to worry about. Many of these don’t even have a descriptive text, so the token is literally linked to a single word.
I don’t know the story of any of these more than a few hints from their descriptions. My few insights are:
MONALISA is indisputably refers to Leonardo DaVinci’s artwork. It also predates the first two with explicit url links – BACKPACK and JOLLYROGER.
SPOON‘s description Yes, people collect these. says it all.
View the full timeline of Dogeparty 1/N NFTs.
Tokens Not on the List
The tokens listed above is a complete set, meaning they include all assets on Counterparty and Dogeparty with the defined properties.
Does this mean historical 1/N NFTs not listed are insignificant? No, not necessarily.
Some innovative tokens may have had an undefined supply. These were unlikely to have been released to the market at the time, as scarcity is an essential property.
One such example is my Weird n’ Wild collection. I minted the tokens and broadcasted their image hashes in 2015 – but never announced them publicly. Only when people started showing interest in 2021 did I lock the supply.
Notice
1/1 NFT = Unique Non-Fungible Token.
1/N NFT = Supply of N Fungible Tokens.
If you’re interested only in 1/1 NFTs, you should view my timeline of non-fungible tokens.
Did you know that …
… the very first SOG card – FDCARD – is divisible and therefore not on this list.
Don’t trust, verify
To make it easier to verify a historical asset, I created the Timeline Tool.
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