Wrapped Cryptopunks on the ERC-721 standard have overtaken the original versions in terms of trading volume. The Wrapped Cryptopunks, which are original Cryptopunks but wrapped into a new smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, have had 293 thousand dollars in trading volume in the past week. Compared with 197 thousand dollars for the original digital collectibles.
At the moment there are 453 Cryptpunks wrapped into an ERC-721 smart contract. This allows these digital collectibles to be traded on secondary marketplaces like for example Rarible and Opensea.
The average price for a Wrapped Cryptopunk is 3.17 ETH, which is just over one thousand dollars. However, this is well above the 1 ETH average for regular Cryptopunk trades. Trading on Rarible earns both sellers and buyers RARI tokens, which could be a reason for these price differences.
Big sales on Wrapped Cryptopunks
An anonymous user on token platform Rarible bought a Cryptopunk for more than 54 thousand dollars last week. This became the most expensive cryptopunk ever. The collector paid 140 ETH for to get his hands on this Ape Cryptopunk.
The previous highest sale was 20 thousand dollars (100 ETH) for a bald female punk. However, in recent weeks the trading volume has increased tremendously thanks to the Wrapped Punks contract.
Cryptopunks is the first digital art project on the blockchain. Only ten thousand punks have been created, and they were distributed for free. Now the most rare punks are selling for tens of thousands of dollars, while the cheapest cryptopunk are at least 400 dollars.
Cryptopunks second revival this year
The Cryptopunks project has regained the spotlight with some big sales this month. A few months ago the crypto art projects also took center stage. Currently the average CryptoPunks collectible sells for 400 dollars, but those with rare features tend to be more valuable.
CryptoPunks is a crypto art initiative that generated ten thousand different 24×24 punk-looking avatars. There are a few rares ones, like apes, zombies and an alien. Besides being a digital collectible, the project doesn’t offer any additional usage. However, Cryptopunks are often part of digital art galleries in virtual worlds like Cryptovoxels and Decentraland.
We can’t say that Cryptopunks are technically advanced non-fungible tokens. However, it’s the first collectible art project ever that used the Ethereum blockchain to mint collectibles. Because of their historical significance, Cryptopunks are valuable digital assets. There are only ten thousand punks on the market. Most likely rarity and scarcity push up the value.
