If you’re not sitting down, it is time you do it because we have amazing news: We now own a Cryptopunk!
Since our team has added a cryptopunk to our treasury, we thought we should make an episode in which we look in detail at this collection, finding out how did it appear, how did it get to be worth so much, and, finally, why did we decide to join this community as well.
Regardless of whether you’ve explored in depth the NFT niche or not you still must have probably heard about cryptopunks and the price tags attached to these pieces of digital art.
So stay with us, as we try to find out how a 10,000 NFT collection managed to surpass two billion dollars in transactional volume.
What Are Cryptopunks?
The collection was launched on 23rd June 2017 by Larva Labs, a New York-based company founded by Matt Hall and John Watkinson. The two created a soft which allowed NFTs to be generated algorithmically and randomly, each one with different features.
This means that each and every one of those 10,000 cryptopunks is a unique piece of digital art recorded on the blockchain.
The collection was created on Ethereum as ERC-721 tokens, and one of the most interesting aspects is the fact that many of them were offered for free to the public.
Out of the 10,000 NFTs, 9,000 were offered this way, and 1,000 were kept by Larva Labs and are known as Dev Punks. Looking at the value that a single punk has at the moment, we don’t even need to do the math to understand the profit the company has registered with this collection.
How Is the CryptoPunks Collection Organized?
The collection is divided into five categories: male, female, alien, zombie, and monkey. The value of each of them is derived from the category it is part of, but also from how unique its features are.
For example, there are 24 ape punks, 88 zombie punks, 6,039 male punks, and 3,840 female punks.
At the same time, each punk can have a maximum of seven features but only one of them has this number. Punk #8348 is not listed as having any price but we can imagine it wouldn’t be sold for less than $10 million in Ether since another cryptopunk was sold for $11.7 million.
It is interesting to mention that the entire collection was inspired by the London punk scene. From the outfits to the features to how every punk looks, the creators choose the 1970s London punk scene as the inspiration.
Why Does A CryptoPunk Cost So Much?
Ok, now we know how CryptoPunks appeared, but why are they so expensive? There are several elements to talk about.
First and foremost is the fact that this is the first NFT collection ever created. In 2017, Larva Labs laid the basis for the way NFTs will work.
The likes of Bored Ape Yacht Club, Meebits, Cool Cats, CyberKongs were created on the basis established by cryptopunks.
This gives it a huge intrinsic value and basically makes this collection be for the NFT sphere what Bitcoin is for crypto – to a certain degree, of course.
So as the NFT sphere continues to grow and generate attention and interest from the community, cryptopunks will always represent the project that created this niche.
Why Did the Cryptomatics Team Buy A CryptoPunk?
As we established, Cryptopunks is the mother of all for any NFT collection that will follow, the Alpha and Omega of this niche.
This is one of the reasons why we decided to add a punk to our collection especially since we don’t believe NFTs to be a bubble and that they will be here for a long time.
Taking into consideration the growing popularity of the sector we’ve seen in 2021 it is very difficult to anticipate what will happen in the next 2, 3, 4 years in this area.
NFTs are a part of the community and this is what gives them value. The more loyalty there is from the community, the more chances are for a collection to succeed.
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Back to Cryptopunks – in their case, one of the things that have brought success to the collection is the high number of high-profile owners, such as Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Jason Derulo, Gary Vee, Figma, and Visa.
Every time a celebrity joins the community, the perceived value by the community grows a bit more. These NFTs are even used as profile pics on social media apps such as Twitter.
Obviously, aside from everything else, we believe in the economic side of this. Since the community believes that this collection will only increase its value in the long-run, an investment seems like a perfectly ok decision since everybody here at Cryptomatics and CryptoRobin believe it will become more valuable in time.
The fact that each punk is unique and recorded on blockchain and that new NFTs can not be added to the collection makes cryptopunks a collection with unlimited potential.
We are happy to be a part of this community and, more importantly, that we’ve joined the NFT universe while it is still early.