Crypto tasks evolve. Typically they pivot. Typically they die. And typically they arrive full circle. That is the story of Cryptodate—an NFT venture deployed to Ethereum mainnet in June 2018, making it older than 99% of the NFTs in existence.
2017: The World Discovers Digital Cats
For those who have been being attentive to crypto in late 2017, you keep in mind the second CryptoKitties launched and promptly clogged your complete 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 might wrap their heads round: distinctive collectibles. The ERC-721 normal was nonetheless being finalized, nevertheless 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 group noticed what was occurring and realized folks have been going to wish to commerce this stuff, and so they’d want a spot to do it. So that they began constructing an NFT market. They purchased the area Etherbay—sure, Etherbay—as a result of why not. The idea was easy: create a secondary market the place folks might listing, 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 have been figuring it out as they went.
They Wanted Their Personal NFT
This is the factor about constructing a market: you may’t develop itemizing flows, switch mechanics, and public sale logic with out precise property to check in opposition to. The group 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. So that they began serious about what sort of NFT they may create that will function a check case but additionally stand by itself as a authentic venture.
The concept they landed on was Cryptodate. The idea is easy: 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—every one maps to an eight-digit quantity, and every one can solely ever have one proprietor. One date, one NFT, without end. That is the entire thing.
The group favored this concept for causes past simply needing a check NFT. Most NFT tasks depend on off-chain knowledge—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 group by no means beloved that method. 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 is no 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 sensible 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} venture 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 group might have rebranded, however by that time the aggressive panorama was shifting. OpenSea was gaining traction and had extra assets. Between the authorized strain 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 present. A easy web site went up the place anybody might mint for a small price, after which the group moved on with their lives. They did not promote it, did not construct a group round it, did not do any of the stuff you’re alleged to do with an NFT venture. It simply… existed.
2022: The DeFi Detour
Quick ahead 4 years. DeFi summer season had come and gone, and your complete panorama appeared completely different. Layer 2s have been proliferating—Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, Moonriver and dozens of others promising low cost transactions and Ethereum safety. The Cryptodate group 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 beneficial with out artifice. The contracts comprise some technically strong concepts and might nonetheless be considered on Github for these curious concerning the method.
The group 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 venture by no means actually took off. The yield-bearing NFT idea was maybe too difficult, or the timing was flawed, or the advertising and marketing simply did not land. That is life in crypto—most issues do not work, and also you study what you may 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 laborious—most tasks from the 2021-2022 increase 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 group decided: strip it again down. They’ve eliminated the yield-bearing NFT mechanics, which have 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, absolutely on-chain, from one of many oldest NFT contracts on Ethereum.
With that in thoughts, the group 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 part library. For pockets connectivity and contract interplay, they’re utilizing wagmi and viem, which have change into the de facto normal for Ethereum frontend work, changing the growing old ethers.js/web3.js patterns.
The structure is intentionally minimal. No multi-chain assist. No token swaps. No staking mechanics. Simply: join pockets, decide a date, examine availability, mint. The contract itself hasn’t modified—it is the identical code sitting on the identical handle 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 venture’s been on-chain for eight years, quietly ready to be rediscovered.
