LOG 001 — "PROTO-SIGNALS" OF LIFE ON-CHAIN
I start writing this while researching in parallel, which already feels like a statement for why I'm doing this. Until now, I never properly documented Solana’s proto-history for myself. I took things for granted, and it took me long enough to grasp the full picture of crystallized communities and other niches of internet culture, especially since I wasn’t really an "internet-native" person before that, not culturally anyways. I moved through it instinctively, following the chain’s rhythm rather than its timeline. Looking back at those first experiments now, I realize how much was already being so enthusiastically built, long before anyone “agreed” on what this ecosystem was supposed to become.
@solana mainnet beta went live in March 2020. At that point, the chain wasn’t “an art scene.” It was infrastructure trying to prove it could stay upright, probably a project far ahead of its time from a technical point of view (I don’t have the knowledge to properly judge the tech side). Nevertheless, a new public machine with a very specific attitude: speed first, fees close to nothing, and a kind of ruthless pragmatism that felt almost offensive if you came from slower, more expensive chains.¹
If Ethereum’s early NFT era often felt like a ceremony, Solana’s proto-NFT era felt like a workshop, you better knew the drill. People weren’t waiting for permission or perfect standards. They were testing the floorboards while still building the house.
By late 2020, you start seeing the first sparks.
@Bonfida drops Solible in October 2020, effectively the first NFT marketplace experiment on Solana. It’s early, rough, and honestly kind of alien compared to what we now call a marketplace. But it matters because it signals intent. It shows that people were already thinking about the chain as more than a place for finance.²
Then there’s that weird little moment that feels like a memeble event in hindsight, but it’s historically important: the “Bitcoin Tram” NFT, tied to a physical redeemable. That’s not “fine art,” sure. But it’s a clear proto-signal of what this space was attracted to from day one: novel ownership, composable meaning, digital objecthood with real-world hooks. People were poking at the boundary between “token” and “object.”³
Still, none of that is the actual birth moment.
...It was raw and it was fun, and I wish I had been there to feel the tension of that moment firsthand. No redeemable gimmick, no “utility,” no institutional wrapper. Just an object that exists because someone wanted it to exist on-chain. Proto-signals of forces and shared interests starting to coagulate.
THE FIRST OFFICIAL MINT: KREECHURES (MARCH 26, 2021)
That’s when Kreechures minted what is widely recognized as the first original NFT collection on Solana.⁴
There was no comfortable “NFT standard” that everybody agreed on. No polished creator tooling. No default playbook. The modern muscle memory wasn’t installed yet.⁵
So minting a collection wasn’t just “launching a drop.” It was closer to building a small bridge by hand and then walking across it in front of everyone.
@kreechures were small generative alien creatures. Cute enough to be collectible, but most importantly, they demonstrated that Solana could host uniqueness as a native behavior, built within the constraints of the chain itself.
The initial plan was ambitious. The collection aimed for a much larger supply, with a slow cadence. Something closer to a steady drip than hype. That detail matters because it shows the mindset. This wasn’t engineered as a viral event. It functioned more like a living experiment, testing whether the chain could sustain it and whether anyone would come to look.
And then the quiet truth hits: people didn’t show up in the way we’re used to now. Not at first.
There’s something almost tender about that. The first Solana NFT collection wasn’t celebrated with spectacle. It emerged into slow curiosity and a very small circle of early participants who understood that being early rarely looks glamorous in real time. Most of these conversations happened in Twitter threads and small Discord servers, not in headlines.
Eventually, what we can say cleanly is this: the original schedule-based vision did not translate into a single, fixed “obvious final supply” narrative the way later collections do. Public trackers today show a minted count in the low-thousands, which already tells you the same story without mythology.⁶
It wasn’t simply a supply adjustment. It revealed a way of operating.
It shows a community and a creator team making decisions in public, under imperfect conditions, without a safety net. It shows that early Solana NFT culture was built on conviction and responsiveness.
And responsiveness becomes a second principle: the chain moves, the community adapts.
Kreechures also did something else just by existing. And don't get me wrong, nothing but respect from what I've read so far, usually history is brutal to "firsts", yet this ""wine" aged well. Anyways, wat was I saying, yes, it forced people to start thinking about what “NFT on Solana” even means. How do you represent metadata? Where does the image live? How do wallets display it? How do you prove it’s unique in a way that marketplaces can interpret consistently?⁵
Every one of those questions later became infrastructure. But in that first moment, they were simply problems to solve because someone decided to mint a creature and give it something.
That’s the pioneering spirit in its purest form.
THE VALUES THAT COAGULATED AROUND THOSE FIRST MINTS
When people talk about “Solana culture” now, they usually mean the loud era. The PFPs, the memes. The velocity. The mass drops. The chaos. The fun. The rugs. The “everything chain” framing shows up later as a piece of ecosystem language, and it’s useful as a summary even if it was never a formal doctrine.⁷ Anatoly Yakovenko himself has used closely aligned language publicly, though not always in that exact two-word slogan.⁸ Over time, things crystallize.
But the early NFT period had a quieter backbone at its origin, and you can trace it directly from Kreechures onward. I’m noting here, somewhat hastily, a few essential ideas that stayed with me from what I’ve covered so far. This matters as collective memory. We need to keep updating it.
Speed as creative freedom Cheap, fast transactions changed the psychological cost of experimentation. You could try things without feeling like every attempt needed to be a masterpiece worth a gas fee. It felt possible, and it felt democratic. At least that’s how it felt to me. Ethereum is great, but I couldn’t have lived my artistic life there, especially in its early stages, while still splitting time with my architecture practice.
A DIY, builder-first temperament Tools were missing, so people built them. If something didn’t exist, you roll up your sleeves and build it.
Community as an engine, not an audience Early collectors weren’t “customers.” They were participants. Sometimes they were the distribution, the support desk, and the historians all at once. I only understand the importance of that in hindsight, and communities that have survived for years are still doing the work of supporting on-chain art and culture.
The chain as habitat Not just a settlement layer. A place where objects live and slowly accumulate layers of meaning over time.
This is why Log #1 matters. It starts with a handful of people and a small collection of creatures, minted on March 26, 2021, in a world where nobody was sure if any of this would last.
On-chain, the ledger proves it happened. Off-chain, what we’re really documenting is the moment Solana started behaving like culture.
And once that switch flips, it doesn’t flip back. FOOTNOTES
Solana Foundation / Solana Labs newsletter archive notes Mainnet Beta launch on March 16, 2020 (May Newsletter; June Newsletter). Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
Solana Foundation / Solana Labs, “October Newsletter” (published Nov 1, 2020): “On October 22nd… launched Solible, the first NFT marketplace built on Project Serum and Solana.” Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
Solana Foundation / Solana Labs, “October Newsletter” (Nov 1, 2020) describes “Bitcoin Tram” as a redeemable NFT with a physical model mailed to the buyer. Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
Kreechures official documentation states: “Kreechures are the 1st NFT project on Solana” and “1st Mint: March 26th, 2021.” Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
Kreechures documentation explicitly notes early ecosystem constraints, including the absence of mature standards and wallet UX (e.g., references to early-era tooling/wallet display issues). Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
For present-day minted supply as reported by a public tracker (not a first-party statement), CoinGecko lists Kreechures minted count in the low-thousands (e.g., 3,977 minted at time of access). Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
“Solana is the everything chain” appears in Solana ecosystem promotional/educational surfaces (e.g., Superteam hub page reflecting Solana ecosystem messaging). Accessed Jan 20, 2026.
Anatoly Yakovenko (“toly”) has used adjacent public phrasing consistent with the “everything” framing (example tweet: “The everything.”). This supports alignment with the meme framing, not strict authorship of the exact slogan. Accessed Jan 20, 2026.