CryptoPunks is one of the most recognized NFT collectibles. Created by John Watkinson, Matt Hall, and Andy Milenius back in 2017, this collection is a set of 10,000 24x24 pixel images.
Each image represents a unique punk (alien, robot, ape, etc.) that can be purchased and owned by whoever possesses the asset on the blockchain. These punks are unique and many look like distinct celebrities. The non-fungible token world has seen significant growth over the past few years. This growth has been dominantly driven through the purchase and sale of NFTs on Ethereum which started with CryptoKitties in December 2017 and has since expanded to the millions of tokens that exist on the network today.
CryptoPunks were created with a similar purpose in mind; to show off what is possible with non-fungible tokens on Ethereum via ERC-721, just as CryptoKitties showed what you could do with ERC-20/ERC-233 reproducible tokens.
In 2021, CryptoPunks and NFT market as a whole experienced a massive surge in their values. Several NFTs were sold for $1 million each. The total transaction volume in the first six months of 2021 was $2.5 billion.
CryptoPunks remains one of the earliest NFTs – primarily a collection of pixelated avatars. It is currently the most sought-after NFT collection, with several NFTs being sold for millions of dollars.
Believe it or not, Larva Labs (the creator of CryptoPunks) released the collection for free – as an experiment. The two-person team behind CryptoPunks had no idea that this would go on to become the leading name in the NFT space. Back then, ERC-721, which is now a standard for NFTs, wasn’t even created. When Larva Labs released CryptoPunks, 9,000 of them were snatched by Ethereum wallet owners while others were held onto by Larva Labs.