A hallmark of the last cryptocurrency bull market was the remarkably high selling prices for several non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The world has largely moved away from NFTs, with enthusiasm for crypto products embellished with quirky images now aimed squarely at memecoins – so many memecoins.
Still, a sign of bull markets returned on Thursday: a CryptoPunk NFT just sold for a record price of $56.3 million. The previous all-time high of $23.7 million was set in February 2022, months before the crypto winter really went dark.
Punk 1563, featuring an image of a pixelated woman with dark hair and blue eyes, netted 24,000 ether (ETH) in the transaction. As recently as September, it was put up for sale for less than 30 ETH – meaning the latest deal represented a huge gain from recent prices.
NFTs have historically seen all kinds of weird things surrounding their sale. There was a time in 2021 when another CryptoPunk technically sold for $532 million, even though blockchain data clearly shows the same person was on both sides of the trade.
And there are allegations that NFT was used for money laundering.
However, it is not clear what the motivations for Punk 1563 were.