Collectors and investors looking to get their hands on the cheapest of the ten thousand Cryptopunks need to pay at least one thousand dollars. According to the official website the cheapest Cryptopunk is listed for 2.99 ETH, which currently equals $1030.68. Collectors could obtain these artistic characters on the Ethereum blockchain for free back in 2017.
A few days ago the cheapest Cryptopunks were only 400 dollars. It’s very likely that the hype surrounding these limited edition digital collectibles now goes beyond the space of collectors and traders. These 24×24 pixel creations are becoming investments.
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.
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.
Two versions of Cryptopunks available
Okay, ultimately there’s only Cryptopunks. But the original version of Cryptopunks launched as an ERC-20 token. This is the same type of contract as token projects like Chainlink, Tether USD and BNB. This means that technically the Cryptopunks function more like a crypto token than a non-fungible token. As a result many trading platforms for non-fungible tokens didn’t support Cryptopunks.
Cryptokitties introduced the ERC-721 tokens and set a standard for non-fungible tokens. Thanks to blockchain technology, owners of an original Cryptopunk are able to wrap their collector’s item in an ERC-721 package. As a result this makes these ‘Wrapped Cryptopunks‘ available on many marketplaces that support ERC-721 tokens, including Rarible.
Rarible is a story on its own. This platform gives RARI tokens to users who buy or sell non-fungible tokens on their platform. This can either be crypto art, but also game items and even DeFi insurances. Handing out RARI tokens created a strong influx of new users to the platform, which did 2864 ETH in trading volume in the past 7 days alone. That’s close to one million dollars!
