The development of the standard was a community-driven effort that was formally published into a paper of the same name in 2018 and is accredited to William Entriken and co-authors Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, and Nastassia Sachs.

[10][9] The blockchain game CryptoKitties by Dapper Labs of which the CTO Dieter Shirley is a fellow co-author of ERC-721, is recognized as the earliest pioneering and popular instance of the ERC-721 standard.

[16] CryptoKitties is regarded as among the first NFT applications to achieve widespread adoption, earning millions of dollars initially and taking up to 70% of Ethereum's usage capacity at its height in some moments.

[20][21] In 2017, one of the earliest and most successful NFT marketplaces, OpenSea, was launched by co-founders Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer who intended to capitalize off of the emergence of ERC-721 NFTs on Ethereum.

They initially focused on capturing the market activity around the blockchain NFT game CryptoKitties, which was one of the first use cases of ERC-721, and ultimately planned to scale the platform for other emerging projects utilizing it.

[23][24] Also, a mechanism to implement a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) to the contract, is defined in the standard, providing functionality to assign each NFT unique metadata.

[28] The influence of the paper ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard that Entriken lead authorship of spans across various sectors, profoundly shaping the landscape of digital collectibles and the use cases within the broader NFT eco-system.