I think the social consensus for the “cryptopunks” of ordinals is nodemonkes but there are a number of 10k projects that had unique claims for being “first”, including bitcoin punks, honey badgers, OCM, and mega punks— natcats is also a first if you believe DMT will be significant in the future.

I would also point to 10k pfps on bitcoin stamps, which has a punks derivative collection as well as an original art stampepes collection, these store data in the utxo, unlike ordinals which live in witness data I think. Stamps development and popularity is way behind ordinals, however.