A Fully On-Chain NFT From 2018 That Nobody’s Heard Of

Crypto tasks evolve. Generally they pivot. Generally they die. And generally they arrive full circle. That is the story of Cryptodate—an NFT undertaking deployed to Ethereum mainnet in June 2018, making it older than 99% of the NFTs in existence.

2017: The World Discovers Digital Cats

In the event you had been being attentive to crypto in late 2017, you bear in mind the second CryptoKitties launched and promptly clogged the whole Ethereum community. Gasoline costs spiked. Transactions backed up for hours. And all of the sudden this obscure idea of “non-fungible tokens” had a use case that individuals may wrap their heads round: distinctive collectibles. The ERC-721 customary was nonetheless being finalized, however it was clear that digital shortage was a factor. Provable possession of distinctive property on a public blockchain was actual. And the place there are collectibles, there’s commerce.

Constructing a Market

A small workforce noticed what was occurring and realized folks had been going to wish to commerce this stuff, and so they’d want a spot to do it. In order that they began constructing an NFT market. They purchased the area Etherbay—sure, Etherbay—as a result of why not. The idea was simple: create a secondary market the place folks may checklist, public sale and purchase NFTs. This was earlier than OpenSea had any actual traction, earlier than anybody knew what the market would appear to be or how the tech would work. They had been figuring it out as they went.

They Wanted Their Personal NFT

Here is the factor about constructing a market: you possibly can’t develop itemizing flows, switch mechanics, and public sale logic with out precise property to check towards. The workforce did not wish to depend on CryptoKitties or another person’s NFTs. They wanted one thing they managed, one thing easy sufficient that they may give attention to {the marketplace} mechanics with out getting distracted by complicated recreation logic or breeding algorithms. In order that they began excited about what sort of NFT they may create that will function a check case but additionally stand by itself as a legit undertaking.

The thought they landed on was Cryptodate. The idea is straightforward: each calendar date is a token ID. July 4, 1776 turns into token ID 17760704. The Bitcoin genesis block on January 3, 2009 turns into 20090103. Your birthday, your anniversary, the day you met somebody—each maps to an eight-digit quantity, and each can solely ever have one proprietor. One date, one NFT, perpetually. That is the entire thing.

The workforce appreciated this concept for causes past simply needing a check NFT. Most NFT tasks depend on off-chain information—the token ID is on Ethereum, however the precise content material (the picture, the metadata) lives on some server someplace. If that server goes down as a result of somebody did not pay the invoice, the NFT factors to nothing. And IPFS is not precisely a assure. Collectors can simply find yourself proudly owning a receipt for one thing that now not exists.

The Cryptodate workforce by no means beloved that strategy. If you are going to put one thing on the blockchain, put it on the blockchain. Cryptodate solved this elegantly: the token ID is the date. There isn’t any picture to host, no metadata server to take care of, no dependency on exterior infrastructure. The date is the NFT. Absolutely on-chain, utterly self-contained, and everlasting for so long as Ethereum exists.

The Cryptodate smart contract was deployed on June 24, 2018—block 5,841,428. This was 9 days after ERC-721 was formally finalized.

Etherbay Dies, Cryptodate Lives

After which {the marketplace} undertaking fell aside. It seems eBay’s attorneys haven’t got a humorousness about domains. A stop and desist letter arrived, and all of the sudden the intelligent branding was a legal responsibility. The workforce may have rebranded, however by that time the aggressive panorama was shifting. OpenSea was gaining traction and had extra assets. Between the authorized stress and the market dynamics, they made the decision to close Etherbay down. The timing wasn’t proper, the title was legally radioactive, and so they had different issues happening.

However Cryptodate was already deployed. The contract sat there on mainnet, quietly current. A simple website went up the place anybody may mint for a small payment, after which the workforce moved on with their lives. They did not promote it, did not construct a neighborhood round it, did not do any of the stuff you’re alleged to do with an NFT undertaking. It simply… existed.

2022: The DeFi Detour

Quick ahead 4 years. DeFi summer time had come and gone, and the whole panorama seemed totally different. Layer 2s had been proliferating—Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, Moonriver and dozens of others promising low-cost transactions and Ethereum safety. The Cryptodate workforce had bandwidth to experiment once more, having spent the intervening years on different tasks.

Then they’d what appeared like a intelligent concept: yield-bearing NFTs. The idea was to tie an NFT to an ERC-20 token that generated curiosity, combining the collectibility of NFTs with the passive revenue mechanics that DeFi customers beloved. They constructed an ERC20 Cryptodate token (CDT) that was immediately tied to the NFT. They prolonged the Cryptodate ERC721 contract to assist the idea of yield-bearing NFTs such that holders would earn CDT as curiosity. A proportion of the ETH from every NFT sale went immediately into the CDT liquidity pool, which made the CDT invaluable with out artifice. The contracts comprise some technically strong concepts and might nonetheless be seen on Github for these curious in regards to the strategy.

The workforce deployed the “new” Cryptodate to a number of Layer 2s. They embraced the place NFTs had gone within the intervening years—paintings, generative collections, the entire playbook. They labored with artists to create SVG collections for every date, together with a “Cryptopupper” sequence with genetics.

The pivot gained some traction, however the undertaking by no means actually took off. The yield-bearing NFT idea was maybe too difficult, or the timing was mistaken, or the advertising simply did not land. That is life in crypto—most issues do not work, and also you study what you possibly can from the expertise.

2026: Again to Fundamentals

Right here in 2026, the panorama has shifted once more. Layer 2s are consolidating as Ethereum makes progress on scalability. The NFT market has contracted onerous—most tasks from the 2021-2022 growth are lifeless, their Discord servers silent, their OpenSea pages gathering mud. The tasks that survived are inclined to share sure traits: conceptual readability, real shortage, and verifiable provenance. Cryptodate, it seems, has all three.

So the workforce decided: strip it again down. They’ve eliminated the yield-bearing NFT mechanics, which had been by no means deployed to Ethereum mainnet anyway. They’ve sundown the Layer 2 deployments. They’ve dropped the CDT token. What’s left is the unique worth proposition from 2018: personal a date. One NFT per date, totally on-chain, from one of many oldest NFT contracts on Ethereum.

With that in thoughts, the workforce has up to date the frontend dapp.io/. The rebuild is a clear break: Subsequent.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui for the element library. For pockets connectivity and contract interplay, they’re utilizing wagmi and viem, which have grow to be the de facto customary for Ethereum frontend work, changing the ageing ethers.js/web3.js patterns.

The structure is intentionally minimal. No multi-chain assist. No token swaps. No staking mechanics. Simply: join pockets, choose a date, examine availability, mint. The contract itself hasn’t modified—it is the identical code sitting on the identical deal with since block 5,841,428. Solely the frontend wanted modernizing.

For collectors who care about historic NFTs—the type who personal early CryptoKitties or Curio Playing cards or have opinions about which tasks need to be on Leonidas’s timeline—Cryptodate could also be value a glance. The undertaking’s been on-chain for eight years, quietly ready to be rediscovered.