#TMBT or Take-Me-Back Tuesdays will be NFTing’s featured articles that will discuss the history of NFTs, cryptos, metaverses, blockchain, and everything that is about the web 3.0.
Our eighth #TMBT feature will discuss a real experiment on the digital art that later became a piece of web 3.0 history — the CryptoPunks.
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs were only popular with long-time crypto traders. It took the pandemic and a series of lockdowns before the NFT craze went global with some jaw-dropping headlines.
Nowadays, people are used to hearing or reading news about NFTs sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions. They have proven to be a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. Even celebrities and sports personalities are getting into the spotlight of this lucrative digital movement.
Before NFTs became what they are today, they all started as an idea with their creators not knowing exactly their value. When tracing back to the earliest known date where NFTs begin to gain traction outside the crypto community, CryptoPunks appear to be the pioneer and founding father of the CryptoArt movement — and that’s what we will cover in this article.
What are CryptoPunks NFTs?
CryptoPunks are a set of 10,000 uniquely generated digital collectible characters living on the Ethereum blockchain which come in the form of 24-by-24, 8-bit-style pixelated headshot images. No two CryptoPunks are exactly alike and each one has its own profile page that shows his, her, or its attributes and ownership status, has a distinct number, and can only be officially owned by a single person. As one of the first NFT projects, CryptoPunks forged the way for subsequent NFT projects, like Bored Apes Yacht Club and Art Blocks.
The digital collectible characters were created by Larva Labs, which was founded by programmers John Watkinson and Matt Hall. The two creative technologists launched the CryptoPunks art project on June 23, 2017, posing the conceptual question: “What does ownership mean in the digital age? Will people have any interest in paying for the equivalent of a digital certificate of authenticity?” And now people are willing to pay ridiculous amounts just to own one CryptoPunk.
Originally, Larva Labs offered 9,000 CryptoPunks for free to anyone who had an Ethereum wallet during that time, keeping the final 1,000 for themselves. It took some time for the project to gain traction and be discussed in different crypto communities, but after Mashable published a story explaining the entire project, the 9,000 free punks were all claimed within 24 hours.
CryptoPunks began as an experiment
Way back 2017, John Watkinson and Matt Hall were developing a software program that would generate thousands of different, strange-looking characters. They thought of it to be used in a smartphone app or game, but results turn out to be a paradigm-altering model for the digital art market and a challenge to the concept of ‘ownership’ itself.
To the creators of CryptoPunks, they wanted their experiment to be a reflection of the blockchain’s raucous and anti-establishment spirit, which speaks of how each punk looks. ‘They needed to be a collection of misfits and non-conformists,’ they explain. ‘The London punk movement of the 1970s felt like the right aesthetic.’ The dystopian grit of cyberpunk as typified by the film Blade Runner and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, was also the influence.
Became the talk of the community
After all the 9,000 free punks were claimed, one of which was sold the day after for around $3,500 in ETH (2017 pricing).
Three years and nine months after the launch, on March 10, 2021, a pipe-smoking, blue-skinned CryptoPunk known as “Wise Alien” was sold at Christie’s auction house for about $7.5 million — one of the highest NFT sales during that time.
On June 10, 2021, another rare alien CryptoPunk — No. 7523, wearing a beanie and a very timely medical mask that gave it the nickname “Covid Alien” — sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $11.8 million. The month prior to CryptoPunk No. 7523’s auction, Larva Labs itself auctioned off nine (9) of the 1,000 reserved CryptoPunks in another Christie’s auction for $16.9 million.
In an unorthodox move, Larva Labs printed out physical lithographs of 24 reserved punks with the signature of co-founder Watkinson in all of them. Inside the physical envelope containing the physical lithographs of the CryptoPunk was a “wallet” that endowed ownership of said CryptoPunk to the person that possessed it. Nine (9) of the 24 reserved punks were auctioned in Sotheby from June 24 — July 1, 2021, and five (5) of them sold between $210,000-$315,000 each.
CryptoPunks in the future
CryptoPunks have been sold 17,000 times in more than four years, according to CryptoSlam! The top NFT seller by volume is NBA Top Shot, digital video highlight clips that have sold and been resold nearly nine million times. The top seller overall is Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn video game which has 3.4 million sales for $1.5 billion, nearly twice CryptoPunks’ $835 million.
While CryptoPunks have been surpassed in terms of sales, their only unique selling point is that they soared in value — what people got for free in 2017 can now be sold in no less than five digits. Larva Labs says the lowest price paid for a CryptoPunk in the past two weeks was $49,000, with no other sale under $100,000.
Then Visa purchase hit Twitter and crypto news outlets. CryptoPunk sales jumped 1,000% on August 23, 2021 from 39 the day before to 380, at an average price of $267,000. Halfway through August 24, sales numbers were heading back to normal normalizing but prices had skyrocketed, averaging $446,000.
While that’s far higher than the beginning of the year, when CryptoPunks were averaging $12,000, if you go back a year to August 2020, the average price was under $500, and if you go back to 2017 where anyone who has an Ethereum wallet can own it at no cost.
