decrypt.co
CryptoPunks predate the modern $NFT craze by years, and that O.G. status has made the 2017 Ethereum profile picture collection a legend in the space. Dozens of CryptoPunks have sold for a million dollars’ worth of $ETH or more, but today, the collection shattered its previous record with one sale of nearly $24 million.
On Saturday, CryptoPunk #5822 sold for 8,000 $ETH, or about $23.7 million worth at the time of sale. Deepak Thapliyal, CEO of cloud blockchain infrastructure firm Chain, purchased the $NFT directly from CryptoPunks developer Larva Labs’ own online marketplace.
The previous top sale for a CryptoPunk was $11.8 million, purchased by DraftKings’ largest shareholder Shalom Meckenzie at a Sotheby’s auction in June 2021. Meanwhile, the largest on-chain sale through the Larva Labs marketplace came in December, when the pseudonymous 4156 sold his namesake Punk for $10.26 million worth of $ETH.
👽 pic.twitter.com/lQg6DzSttr
— Deepak.eth ⛓ (@dt_chain) February 12, 2022
Thapliyal tweeted that he used leverage via DeFi protocol Compound Finance to pay for the CryptoPunk, telling Compound founder Robert Leshner, “Thanks to Compound Finance I am able to still [hold] $ETH while buying this. Basically long’d $ETH to punk-in.”
His new Punk features the rarest avatar type: alien. Just nine CryptoPunks out of the entire collection of 10,000 avatars are aliens. This particular Punk last sold for 8 $ETH, or just over $1,600 at the time, back in July 2017.
Saturday's sale marks the fourth-highest sale ever for a single $NFT. Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” holds the single-$NFT sale record at $69.3 million from last March.
This week’s sale of artist Pak’s “Clock” $NFT to AssangeDAO comes in second at a USD value of just under $54 million. Beeple’s “Human One,” which pairs a physical/digital hybrid sculpture with an $NFT, sold for $29 million in November, putting it third.
According to data from CryptoSlam, the CryptoPunks collection—which Larva Labs released as a free-to-mint project—has generated more than $2 billion in secondary trading volume to date.