The First NFTs Pre-existed the United States
Published in
16 min readJun 5, 2022
The first NFT was a long, beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple beads.
At the time when Europeans made first contact with North Americans, beaded belts of wampum were something like blockchain tokens — employing proof of work as authentication of value. They were not really used as a substitute for barter, as Europeans then and many historians today still…
