NFTs go mainstream

In March 2021, a Beeple collage sold at Christie's for $69M. A month later, Bored Ape Yacht Club minted. For a year, NFTs — ownership records for digital items, mostly via the ERC-721 standard — were everywhere: art, profile pics, music, tickets, memberships.

Past the hype

What ERC-721 actually is

Under the JPEGs is a dead-simple standard: a contract mapping a unique token id to an owner address, with a transfer and an approve. That's it. The "art" is usually just metadata pointed at by a URI — which is why *where* that metadata lives (fully onchain, on IPFS, or on some startup's server) quietly decides whether your NFT outlives the company that sold it.

The royalty fight

NFTs promised creators a cut of every resale — royalties enforced "forever." Then marketplaces discovered royalties were a *social* convention, not a protocol guarantee: nothing in ERC-721 forces a buyer to pay them. A race to zero-royalty trading followed, and it taught a sharp lesson about the gap between what a standard *enables* and what it can *enforce*.

Plenty of it was a speculative bubble that deflated hard. But the durable bit is the primitive: a standard way to represent unique, ownable, transferable onchain items, with royalties and programmable behavior. That primitive outlived the mania — and it's the surface my NFT-utils kit was built to make safer and richer.