They spent $35,000 on another one several hours later. Their public wallet shows they paid more than $37,000 for a punk in the minutes in between our question and their answer. “I own all the punks I ever really want,” they typed back. In a Discord chat with the pseudonymous mr703, we asked whether they felt they had enough or if there were any punks they still intended to buy. Another user who goes by mr703 claimed some 703 punks in total at launch, hundreds of which they are still holding onto years later in a collection similarly worth tens of millions. One user that went by the username hemba has become something of a cautionary figure in the CryptoPunks community, claiming more than 1,000 punks at launch and selling every one of them before the market took off this year, missing out on tens of millions of dollars in profits at current prices. Then a week later Mashable wrote a story about the fledgling crypto art project, and within hours every punk was gone. The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed? Hall said that about 20-30 punks were claimed in the days following launch. It was a novel idea, pre-dating the NFT platform CryptoKitties by months and NBA Top Shot by years, but it arrived at the cusp of crypto’s 2017 wave during the early throes of initial coin offerings, where scams were plentiful and attention was hard to come by. They launched to modest interest from a small community of blockchain enthusiasts who only had to pay a few pennies in Ethereum “gas” transaction fees to own their own punk.
#SPACE PUNKS REDDIT GENERATOR#
While the creators had a hand in curating some elements, they let their generator take control of the creativity. Some punks had a handful of attributes, some had none, some were apes, some were aliens. By June, they had created 10,000 characters with different hairstyles, hats and glasses for a project called CryptoPunks that would be hosted on the nascent Ethereum blockchain. Image Credits: Lucas Matney A ‘more honest’ stock marketīack in early 2017, John Watkinson and Matt Hall were playing with a pixelated character generator they built, and they were pretty enthusiastic about the fun little pop art portraits they had been cooking up.
When you look at CryptoPunks, are they art? Are they collectibles? Are they… you know, well… what are they exactly?” “In NFT world, people are talking about selling Jack Dorsey tweets, Top Shots and Beeple in the same sentence right now,” Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart told TechCrunch in an interview.
Today, the cheapest punk you can buy will run you about $30,000 in Ethereum cryptocurrency, while the rarest may be worth just shy of $10 million.ĬryptoPunks have captured plenty of attention, but even with all eyeballs on the project, people still aren’t sure exactly what they’re looking at. The sudden rise in punk prices is owed to an explosion of interest in NFTs largely brought about by climbing cryptocurrency prices, the rise in popularity of Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot and the resurgence of the physical collectibles markets, all of which have made some investors more comfortable with the idea of betting on digital goods. The platform has seen nearly $200 million worth of transaction volume in official deals since launch, according to NFT tracking site CryptoSlam, with 98% of that volume flowing through the platform in the past few months. That’s when it suddenly exploded, dragging into the fray Silicon Valley CEOs, prominent venture capitalists, famous YouTubers, poker stars and major business personalities. Since then, the economy built around trading these images has sauntered on with a small but passionate community, at least until a few months ago.
#SPACE PUNKS REDDIT FOR FREE#
There are 10,000 punks, all of which were procedurally generated and claimed for free when the project launched in 2017. In the world of NFTs, the platform is as close to ancient history as it gets, meaning it’s almost four years old. The pixelated alien portraits belonged to an NFT platform called CryptoPunks. Punk #7804, which recently sold for 4,200 Ether (about $7.5M at the time of sale)