The APENFT Story, From Launch Day to AINFT

APENFT Asia editorial team · Fact-checked against official sources

Where the APENFT story begins

Most crypto projects start with a token and look for a use case afterwards. APENFT pitched itself the other way round. Its stated mission was to “register world-class artworks as NFTs on the blockchain”, in other words to take paintings and sculptures that normally live in auction catalogues and give them an on-chain record that anyone could inspect. The project was built on TRON and Ethereum, and the artwork files were stored on the BitTorrent File System (BTFS), the decentralized storage layer that came out of Justin Sun’s BitTorrent acquisition.

According to the project’s own white paper, the APENFT Foundation was officially incorporated in Singapore on March 29, 2021. CoinMarketCap names Justin Sun and Sydney Xiong as founders. Sydney Xiong was later listed as Director of the APENFT Foundation on a TRON DAO hackathon page. Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, became the public face of the project, and you can read more about his wider role on our Justin Sun profile.

The timing was not an accident. Spring 2021 was the peak of NFT mania: Beeple had just sold a collage at Christie’s, Sotheby’s was preparing its first NFT sale, and every major chain wanted a piece of the art market. APENFT was TRON’s answer. Early on, the Foundation also announced a US$100 million “Art Dream Fund” to support artists, which helped it get attention in the art press as well as in crypto media.

APENFT launch date and the token sale

If you are searching for the APENFT launch date, there are really three dates worth knowing, and they are often mixed up.

The TRON smart contract, TFczxzPhnThNSqr5by8tvxsdCFRRz6cPNq, was created on May 13, 2021, according to Tronscan. You can still check that creation date yourself with our TRON explorer tool, and it is one of the simplest ways to confirm you are looking at the genuine token.

The public sale ran on Huobi Prime (Huobi is now called HTX) from May 14 to May 20, 2021. Participants needed to hold at least 300 HT to take part, and trading went live on May 20. A day later, on May 21, Poloniex relaunched its LaunchBase platform with NFT as its first project.

People often ask whether APENFT had an ICO. Strictly speaking it did not run a classic, self-hosted ICO. The white paper allocates 2% of the supply to an IEO, an exchange-run sale, and that is what the Huobi Prime round was. The initial price is a murkier question. Huobi Prime round one was reported at 0.000000072 USDT per token, while the white paper lists an “initial issuing price” of 0.000012 USD. Those two numbers are far apart, and we have not found a primary source that settles which one should be treated as final. Treat any single “ICO price” you see quoted online with caution.

The full timeline at a glance

Two years of holder airdrops

For millions of people, APENFT was not something they bought. It simply showed up. From June 2021 to June 2023, the project ran a monthly airdrop to holders of TRX, BTT and JST, with snapshots on the 10th of each month. The plan called for 1,666,650,000,000 NFT per month for 24 months, roughly 4% of the total supply in all. A secondary source mentions an extra 1% in the first month, but we have not seen that confirmed in a primary document.

The ratios were generous in raw token terms. In the first round, KuCoin credited about 39.3 NFT per TRX, 3.03 NFT per BTT and 202 NFT per JST. Because NFT has such a huge supply, those numbers sounded impressive while the dollar value stayed tiny.

In October 2021, Binance announced a strategy change effective from November 10, 2021: minimum holdings were introduced (100 TRX, 2,000 BTT, 100 JST or 15,000 WIN) and WIN holders were added. After the BitTorrent redenomination in December 2021, both old and new BTT counted, with different minimums. Our page on BitTorrent and BTT explains that redenomination in more detail.

This is also the origin of one of the most common questions about the token: “why do I have APENFT in my Binance account?” Binance credited the airdrops straight into eligible users’ balances but never opened NFT for spot trading. If that is how you ended up holding NFT, read our APENFT airdrop explainer for what you can do with it now.

Picasso, Warhol and the big burn

The art purchases are what made APENFT famous outside crypto circles. In April 2021, Justin Sun’s JUST NFT Fund bought Picasso’s Femme nue couchée au collier for a reported US$20 million and Andy Warhol’s Three Self-Portraits for about US$2 million. Both were tokenized, and the Picasso NFT still sits on a TRC-721 contract on TRON.

The Warhol had a shorter life in the collection. In June 2021, its NFT was sold on Binance NFT for 2.8 million BUSD. Holders then voted on what to do with the money (the vote opened on July 7 and passed on July 10), and on July 16, 2021 about 1.03 trillion NFT were bought back with 2.52M BUSD and burned. It remains the best documented burn in the token’s history. Today about 9.88 trillion NFT sit in the TRON black hole address; how the rest of that amount was burned over time is not broken down in any source we could verify. Our tokenomics breakdown covers supply and burns in full.

Other pieces followed. Sun donated Beeple’s Ocean Front, bought 1,686 Pak cubes, and in August 2021 paid 120 million TRX for TPunk #3442 “Joker”, which he also handed to the Foundation. In November 2021 he bought Giacometti’s Le Nez at Sotheby’s for US$78.4 million and announced it as a donation to APENFT. That last one later turned into a legal dispute: in 2025 Sun sued collector David Geffen, saying the sculpture was sold without authority, and Geffen countersued. The outcome has not been confirmed, and Le Nez does not appear in the current white paper’s collection list. The APENFT art collection page walks through each work.

Building the marketplace

Owning art was one thing; trading it on TRON was another. After a testnet developer sprint, the APENFT Marketplace launched on mainnet on April 15, 2022, presented in a livestream with Justin Sun and billed as the first official NFT marketplace on TRON. At launch it promised zero initial transaction fees and gas costs under US$1. Later, the white paper reported a gas subsidy covering up to 90% of costs, over US$10 million in cumulative volume and more than two million NFT assets.

Honesty matters here: activity is very low today. In February 2026, Protos reported that the marketplace, now running at marketplace.ainft.com under the name “AINFT Market”, was averaging about US$6 a day in volume. If you want the full picture of features and alternatives, see our APENFT marketplace review.

The quiet years: unlocks, NFT Pump and new listings

The period from 2023 to 2025 was less about headlines and more about slow structural change.

• May 1, 2023: according to the white paper, all NFT tokens were fully unlocked. From that point, no scheduled vesting remained.
• June 2023: the final scheduled airdrop snapshot. The white paper now marks airdrops and mining as “Concluded”.
• September 2024: NFT Pump launched, a launchpad that combines the TRC-404 format with “pump” bonding-curve pricing. Justin Sun said its trading fees would be used to buy back and burn NFT.
• March 20, 2025: Kraken added APENFT/USD and APENFT/EUR.
• July 11, 2025: NFT was added to Binance Alpha, which is not the same as a Binance spot listing.

Exchange history also includes earlier listings on KuCoin (around June 2021), OKX (November 2021) and Bitfinex (July 2022). Bitfinex later delisted the token on November 27, 2025. For where NFT actually trades today, check our exchange overview.

The rebrand to AINFT

On October 9, 2025, the project officially announced its transformation into AINFT, describing it as a shift “from NFT trading to building crypto AI infrastructure”. The white paper (version 2.0, dated September 2025) calls it an “evolution from APENFT to AINFT” and moves the vision from an “on-chain art hall” to a “distributed AI industry foundation”.

What matters for holders is what did not change. The ticker is still NFT. The TRON contract is the same one deployed in May 2021, and the on-chain name() function still reads “APENFT”, which shows the contract was never redeployed. No swap or migration was required. Exchanges followed at their own pace: Bithumb renamed the asset on December 24, 2025, and KuCoin published its rebrand notice on January 13, 2026. Our AINFT rebrand guide explains what this means for your wallet.

Key milestones in one table

Price history in context

The price chart tells a story that matches the timeline. NFT hit its all-time high of about $0.00000753 on September 4, 2021, just a few months after launch, during the peak of the NFT boom and while the monthly airdrops were still running. More recently, NFT has traded near its all-time lows, below $0.0000002. At that level the token is worth less than 3% of its peak, a drawdown of roughly 97%. For current data, check the live widget on our APENFT price page.

Part of the reason is supply. With about 990 trillion NFT in circulation and two years of airdrops putting tokens into wallets of people who never chose to buy them, steady selling pressure was built in. Part of it is the wider NFT market, which cooled sharply after 2021. You can follow the live chart on our APENFT price page and read balanced scenarios on the price outlook page.

Roadmap: what was promised and what was delivered

It is fair to judge a project by comparing its roadmap with what actually shipped.

The newer AINFT roadmap revolves around AI: an Agent Framework, the Nova agent launch platform, the AgenTX trading framework and the Grid training network. A related project, Bank of AI, an on-chain finance layer for AI agents, was reported live in early 2026. Whether the four core AINFT products have launched since February 2026 is not confirmed. If you want a neutral read on the risks, our is APENFT legit page lays them out.

How to follow APENFT news without getting fooled

The safest way to keep up with the project is through the channels listed by Tronscan and CoinGecko: the official site ainft.com, X accounts @OfficialAINFT and @AINFTcom, Telegram t.me/ainftEN, the Medium blog and the GitHub organization. Cross-check anything big, such as a “new airdrop” or a “token migration”, against at least two of those. Since both the airdrop program and the rebrand are finished business, any message promising a fresh claim or a swap deserves suspicion by default.