Ethereum fell this week despite recently setting the highest price in more than two years, but the market lull didn’t stop someone from spending big on Wednesday: A CryptoPunks NFT was just purchased for over $16 million worth of ETH.
Punk #7804, one of only nine Alien Punks in the influential Ethereum NFT collection, traded hands for 4,850 ETH on Wednesday afternoon, or $16.42 million at the time of the sale. That makes it the second-largest CryptoPunks selloff ever, measured in ETH and USD.
The sale comes just weeks after another Alien Punk (#3100) sold for 4,500 ETH, which was worth $16.03 million at the time of the transaction on March 3. As with that purchase, the buyer of this latest Punk has yet to be publicly announced. identified. The Ethereum wallet used for the purchase was first funded through Coinbase on Wednesday.
The seller of Punk #7804 – who bought it in 2021 for 4,200 ETH, $7.57 million at the time –posted a message on Twitter, lamenting that they didn’t “raise” that particular punk’s profile during the time they held it.
End of an era. I’ve felt like an impostor for a long time. Holding punks and possibly NFTs a whole hostage by not elevating 7804 in the way he deserves.
After more than a year of looking around, I feel I have found the right buyer with the right vision to take this asset to the next level in the right way https://t.co/onngtTumrJ
— Peruggia (@peruggia_v) March 20, 2024
“End of an era. I’ve felt like an impostor for a long time. Holding punks, and possibly NFTs [as] a whole hostage by not elevating 7804 in the way he deserves,” wrote the pseudonymous Peruggia. “After more than a year of looking around, I feel I have found the right buyer with the right vision to appropriately take this asset to the next level.”
The largest CryptoPunks sale of all time took place in February 2022, when the CEO of a crypto startup I bought another Alien Punk (#5822) for 8,000 ETH, or $23.7 million.
Today’s purchase now ranks fifth most expensive NFT sale of all time. The record is still held by Mike “Beeple” Winkleman, whose digital artwork collage “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” made international headlines when it was auctioned by Christie’s for $69.3 million in March 2021, spreading the initial fever around NFTs were fueled.
Launched in 2017 by Larva Labs, CryptoPunks helped establish the standard for tokenized profile photos – one that would later be expanded by the Bored Ape Yacht Club and countless other collections that followed. The NFTs were originally given away for free, but have generated nearly $2.8 billion in secondary trading volume to date, according to data from CryptoSlam.
Even the cheapest available CryptoPunks NFT on a marketplace is listed at around 51 ETH, which equates to a value of $177,000. The CryptoPunks IP was eventually acquired by Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs in 2022.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
