Information
Created: 12 June 2014
Creator: JP Janssen
Blockchain: Bitcoin / Counterparty
Description
Long before NFTs became a worldwide phenomenon, before CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties and the 2021 NFT boom, someone had already created a one-of-a-kind digital token on Bitcoin. Its name was OLGA. But this wasn't created as an investment or as part of a collection. It was created as a love letter.
A gift made from Bitcoin
In June 2014, Dutch Bitcoin enthusiast and Counterparty pioneer JP Janssen was experimenting with a new idea: Bitcoin could be used for much more than simply sending and receiving money. A young platform called Counterparty allowed people to create their own tokens using the Bitcoin blockchain. Most of the early tokens behaved much like coins, with large supplies and the possibility of creating more later. Janssen had already experimented with the idea. On June 11, he created JPGOLD, a scarce token with a supply of 1,000. The next day he tried something completely different.
On 12 June 2014, he created a token called OLGA. There would be only one. It was indivisible, meaning it could not be broken into smaller pieces. Its description was: “Моя Вечная One & Only” which means: “My Eternal One & Only.”
Janssen later explained that he had discovered crypto tokens while writing his book The Economics of Bitcoin. He realised that a unique, symbolic token could make the perfect gift for his girlfriend, Olga. The story was therefore wonderfully simple: he used a new technological invention to create something that represented the person he loved.
Making sure there could never be another OLGA
There was one more important step. Creating a token with a supply of one was not enough. Janssen then made a second Counterparty transaction and locked the supply permanently. Once locked, no additional OLGA tokens could be issued.
That small technical decision is what makes OLGA historically important. It transformed the token from something that merely could be unique into something that was permanently limited to a single unit.
Counterparty's own historical timeline describes OLGA as the first truly non-fungible Counterparty asset: a 1/1 token with a clear symbolic purpose. Janssen's research into the early Counterparty database also places OLGA at the beginning of the 1/1 NFT timeline. In simple terms, Janssen had created something remarkably close to the idea that would later become known as a 1/1 NFT and he did it in 2014.
OLGA was not originally a picture
There is an interesting detail that is sometimes lost when OLGA is described as an early NFT. When the token was first created, it did not contain a picture. At first, OLGA was essentially a unique digital token carrying a message of love. The artwork came later.
On 11 August 2015, more than a year after the token was created, Janssen took the idea one step further. He drew a small pencil sketch of himself and Olga kissing, scanned it and embedded the image data directly into a Bitcoin transaction.
The accompanying message read: “Моя дорогая вечная Ольга! Поздравления с именинами!” or: “My Dear Eternal Olga! Congratulations with your Name Day.”
The drawing was deliberately tiny and faint. Janssen wanted it to resemble an ancient petroglyph, as though he were carving a message into stone. The symbolism was obvious: instead of carving their names into a rock, he was trying to leave their image on what he believed could become an even more permanent medium, Bitcoin.
An early attempt at truly permanent digital art
The way Janssen stored the picture was extraordinary for its time. Instead of putting the image on a normal website and placing a link to it in the token, he encoded the image as Base64 data and placed the resulting data directly into a Bitcoin transaction. The transaction became enormous by the standards of the time. Janssen later documented how the data had to be split across 173 scripts and then reconstructed to recover the image. That distinction matters. A normal NFT can contain a link to a picture stored somewhere else. If the website disappears, the image may disappear with it. With OLGA, Janssen deliberately tried something different: the artwork itself was recorded in Bitcoin's transaction history. Janssen later described the image as being fully on-chain and published instructions allowing others to extract and verify it from the blockchain.
Then OLGA disappeared into history
And that was essentially the end of the story for several years. OLGA existed on the blockchain, but hardly anyone knew about it. Janssen did not market it as a valuable collectible. It was a private experiment and a personal gift. That changed in 2021.
The discovery
On 26 March 2021, someone examining old Counterparty assets found OLGA and decoded the unusual data associated with it. The discovery happened in a Telegram discussion, where the find was announced by @C0rnh0li0. A commemorative NFT was later created to preserve a screenshot of that moment.
For Janssen and Olga, it was an extraordinary surprise. The token they had created almost seven years earlier had suddenly been recognised as a potentially important piece of NFT history. Janssen has pointed out that this was really a discovery rather than a rediscovery: although OLGA had existed on the blockchain since 2014, it had not been publicly known as an important historical NFT. Suddenly, a private love token had become an archaeological discovery from the earliest days of blockchain collectibles.
The $4 million asking price
The NFT boom of 2021 created another chapter in the story. On 10 July 2021, Janssen and Olga moved the token to a Counterparty dispenser and offered it for 88.88888888 BTC. At the Bitcoin price they used at the time, about $45,000 per BTC, that was approximately US$4 million. The repeated eights were not accidental. Janssen described the price as having symbolic meaning, matching the almost mythical idea of an “eternal” collectible. Importantly, this was an asking price, not a sale. Nobody bought OLGA for $4 million.
Just seven weeks later, on 31 August 2021, the offer was withdrawn. The dispenser was closed and the token was moved to a secure multisignature address. In later comments, Janssen said the couple had decided to step back and reconsider what to do with something that had originally been created as a personal gift rather than a commercial artwork. His public FAQ subsequently stated that the original Bitcoin OLGA was not for sale.
So OLGA has an unusual market history: it became famous enough to receive a multimillion-dollar asking price, yet it was never actually sold.
Is OLGA really the first NFT?
This is where the story becomes more complicated. Janssen describes OLGA as the oldest known NFT because it satisfies a very specific definition: one unique, indivisible token with a permanently locked supply of one. Under that definition, OLGA has an extremely strong historical claim. Janssen's research of the Counterparty blockchain places it at the beginning of the 1/1 NFT timeline, with the next 1/1 Counterparty NFT appearing weeks later.
But the broader claim that OLGA was “the first NFT ever” is more controversial. Earlier blockchain experiments already existed. Namecoin had unique records and domains, while the artwork later known as Quantum was created in 2014 using a different approach. Some NFT histories therefore use a broader definition of NFT and place one of those earlier experiments first.
The disagreement is largely about what counts as a token. Namecoin records and domains are unique blockchain objects, but they were not token standards in the same sense as Counterparty assets. Janssen's argument is therefore quite specific: OLGA was not merely a unique piece of data on a blockchain, it was a unique transferable token with a supply of exactly one. That distinction is why OLGA remains such an important milestone in the history of NFTs.
The OLGA family
The original Bitcoin OLGA also inspired several later versions. In August 2014, Janssen created 1,000 additional OLGA tokens on Dogeparty, Counterparty's equivalent on Dogecoin. That version is different from the original: there was a larger supply and therefore it is not the same 1/1 NFT.
Over the following years, OLGA appeared in other projects and historical tributes, including references on Ethereum and commemorative NFTs created after its discovery.
Then something particularly fitting happened.
OLGA becomes a technology
In 2024, the name OLGA was adopted by the Bitcoin Stamps community for a new image-storage technique: Octet Linked Graphics & Artifacts.
The method was based on Janssen's earlier Counterparty proposal for storing files in Bitcoin P2WSH outputs. It was designed to make permanent Bitcoin artwork more efficient than the older method of storing Base64 images in multisig transactions. In other words, the name of a tiny love token created in 2014 had become the name of a later generation of Bitcoin artwork technology.
Janssen subsequently created an OLGA STAMP Minter for Electrum, continuing the same idea of turning Bitcoin itself into a medium for permanent digital art.
Why OLGA matters
OLGA is fascinating because it sits at the intersection of several different histories. It was a personal love token, created years before NFTs became fashionable. It demonstrated that a token on Bitcoin could be deliberately made unique and permanently scarce. Its artwork was later placed directly into a Bitcoin transaction, years before “fully on-chain art” became a major theme in the NFT world. It disappeared into obscurity and was then unexpectedly discovered during the 2021 NFT boom and finally, its name was reused for a later Bitcoin image-storage technology.
Perhaps the most remarkable part is that none of this was planned as a multimillion-dollar NFT project. When JP Janssen created OLGA in 2014, he simply wanted to give his girlfriend something that would say: “My Eternal One & Only.”. More than a decade later, those words remain recorded on Bitcoin.
And that may be the most fitting story of all.