CryptoPunks History: From an 11-Cent Claim to MoMA

By Ryan Bethencourt, author of ZERO and PUNKS. Published October 30, 2026. Last updated October 30, 2026. On-chain reads and market figures checked October 20, 2026.

In this guide: What are CryptoPunks? · Timeline · Who created them · When · Were they free? · How many · Are the images on-chain? · The name · The auctions · Most expensive · Punks vs Bored Apes · Who owns them · Museums · 2026 · The copies · What changed · FAQ

What are CryptoPunks? The collection at a glance

CryptoPunks are 10,000 one-of-a-kind characters, each 24 by 24 pixels, whose ownership is recorded by an Ethereum contract that Larva Labs wrote in June 2017 and that nobody, its authors included, can edit. They predate ERC-721, the Ethereum NFT standard finalized in June 2018, which is why Larva Labs described its design as “almost an ERC20 token.”

The table below condenses the CryptoPunks history that the rest of this guide tells, from the contracts’ own records onward.

Item	Record
Creators	Larva Labs: Matt Hall and John Watkinson, two developers from Canada with a studio in New York
First contract (V1)	Ethereum block 3,842,489, 00:22 UTC on June 9, 2017 (the evening of June 8 in New York); address 0x6Ba6f2207e343923BA692e5Cae646Fb0F566DB8D
Current contract (CryptoPunksMarket)	Live June 22, 2017 at 19:40 UTC; ownership copied over on June 23; address 0xb47e3cd837dDF8e4c57F05d70Ab865de6e193BBB
Supply	10,000: 1,000 reserved for the creators, 9,000 free to claim
Census	6,039 male, 3,840 female, 88 zombies, 24 apes, 9 aliens
imageHash in the contract	ac39af4793119ee46bbff351d8cb6b5f23da60222126add4268e261199a2921b (SHA-256 of punks.png)
On-chain image data	CryptopunksData contract, deployed by Larva Labs’ address on August 18, 2021; address 0x16F5A35647D6F03D5D3da7b35409D65ba03aF3B2
IP owner	Larva Labs (2017 to March 2022); Yuga Labs (March 2022 to May 2025); the NODE Foundation (since May 13, 2025)
Museum holders	ZKM Karlsruhe, ICA Miami, LACMA, Centre Pompidou, Toledo Museum of Art, MoMA
Market, October 20, 2026	Floor 31.27 ETH, about $77,000 (CoinGecko); 3,824 owner addresses (OpenSea)

CryptoPunks history timeline: 2017 to 2026

CryptoPunks history runs from a free claim on Ethereum in June 2017 to MoMA’s collection in December 2025 and an SEC interpretation in March 2026. These are the dates that matter, in order:

1. June 8, 2017 (New York time): Larva Labs deploys the first CryptoPunks contract and opens 9,000 Punks to free claims.
2. June 16 to 18, 2017: After Mashable‘s story, 8,090 Punks are claimed in three days, and the last free Punk goes on June 18.
3. June 22 and 23, 2017: A corrected contract, CryptoPunksMarket, replaces the buggy original, and ownership is copied across.
4. December 2018: ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany acquires four Punks.
5. May 11, 2021: Christie’s sells nine Punks from the creators’ reserve for $16,962,500.
6. June 10, 2021: Sotheby’s sells the masked alien #7523 for $11,754,000.
7. August 18, 2021: Larva Labs deploys CryptopunksData, which stores every Punk’s pixels and attributes on Ethereum.
8. October 28, 2021: Punk #9998 moves for 124,457 ETH in a flash-loan transfer, not a sale.
9. December 22, 2021: The Bored Ape Yacht Club floor passes the Punks’ floor for the first time.
10. February 12, 2022: Alien #5822 sells for 8,000 ETH, about $23.7 million, setting the CryptoPunks dollar record.
11. March 11, 2022: Yuga Labs acquires the CryptoPunks IP and 423 Punks from Larva Labs.
12. May 13, 2025: Yuga Labs sells the CryptoPunks IP to the nonprofit NODE Foundation.
13. December 2025: MoMA adds eight Punks to its collection.
14. January 23 to 25, 2026: NODE opens its Palo Alto hub with 10,000, an exhibition devoted to the Punks.
15. March 17, 2026: In a release the CFTC also joined, the SEC cites CryptoPunks as an example of a digital collectible.

Who created CryptoPunks?

Larva Labs created CryptoPunks. The studio was two Canadian software developers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, working in New York.

Before crypto, the pair wrote more than twenty mobile apps. The Punks grew out of an interest in collectibles: Watkinson told the art publication Le Random in 2024 that they had been thinking about how a child might collect something that felt real. The only precedent they had heard of was Rare Pepes, the Bitcoin trading cards covered in our history of NFTs from colored coins to MoMA.

Hall and Watkinson kept building after the Punks:

• Autoglyphs (April 2019): art generated inside its own contract.
• Meebits (May 2021): 20,000 voxel characters.
• Quine: 497 works, which Art Blocks showed at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025.

When were CryptoPunks created?

CryptoPunks went live in Ethereum block 3,842,489, timestamped June 9, 2017 at 00:22 UTC, which was still the evening of June 8 in New York. Most guides give June 23, 2017 instead, because that is when a corrected contract took over after a bug.

What went wrong with the first CryptoPunks contract (V1)?

The first contract’s built-in marketplace paid the wrong person. Buying a listed Punk cleared the listing first, which wrote the buyer’s address into the seller’s slot, so the payment went back to the buyer and the real seller got nothing. Between June 13 and June 20, 2017, the contract’s logs show 96 purchases, 85 of them from one address, at nominal prices of up to 200 ETH.

Deployed code cannot be patched, so Larva Labs wrote a new contract with a bidding feature. CryptoPunksMarket went live on June 22, 2017 at 19:40 UTC. On June 23, between 13:50 and 19:37 UTC, 201 transactions copied the old ownership records across, and at 20:51 UTC the assignment closed for good.

That is why Christie’s and Sotheby’s both date the Punks to June 23, 2017. Etherscan labels the first contract “Cryptopunks: Old Token,” and Larva Labs’ repository calls the second “the main CryptoPunks contract.” Tokens left on the old contract are the V1 Punks (see the FAQ).

Were CryptoPunks free?

Yes: 9,000 CryptoPunks were free to claim. Anyone with an Ethereum wallet could claim an unowned Punk by paying the network’s transaction fee, which the project’s page put at “around 11 cents” a Punk, while Larva Labs kept the other 1,000 for itself.

Larva Labs announced the project on Reddit, and claiming was simple: pick a Punk nobody owned and call the contract’s getPunk function with its number. Amy Castor and David Gerard, in their 2022 history of the Punks, put the real cost of a claim at somewhere between 11 cents and a dollar.

How fast were the free CryptoPunks claimed?

The free Punks ran out on June 18, 2017, and 8,090 of the 9,000 went in the last three days. For a week, hardly anyone bothered, and the chain’s daily tally shows how close the experiment came to being ignored:

Date (UTC, June 2017)	Punks claimed
June 9 (launch)	65
June 10	21
June 11	166
June 12	232
June 13	208
June 14	129
June 15	89
June 16 (Mashable‘s story)	1,202
June 17	4,049
June 18 (last free Punk, 14:32 UTC)	2,839

When June 15 ended, roughly 910 of the free Punks had been claimed and more than 8,000 were still free for the taking. Then Mashable ran Jason Abbruzzese’s story on June 16, 2017, and the rest went in three days. Hall had told the reporter that the oddness of the whole project was part of the reason they made it.

The sell-out followed the press, not the launch. And because the market contract charged no commission, Larva Labs’ upside sat in its own reserve of 1,000 Punks. The day-by-day reconstruction, including the handful of addresses that claimed the most, is in Chapter Two of PUNKS.

How much were CryptoPunks worth at first?

Early CryptoPunks sold for very little. On June 29, 2017, the project page reported an average sale of 0.195 ETH, or $58.06. When PBS NewsHour reported on the Punks on September 11, 2019, their average value was “about $40 to $50,” and the highest recorded sale was an alien at $16,000.

Watkinson told PBS the project had also tested whether buyers would feel the Punks were really theirs: “And the answer was yes.”

How many CryptoPunks are there?

There are exactly 10,000 CryptoPunks, numbered #0 to #9999, and the supply can never grow. Each is a code-generated portrait, 24 pixels square, assembled from five base types and a set of accessories.

Type	Count	Share	Example
Male	6,039	60.39%	#8348, the only Punk with seven accessories (Christie’s)
Female	3,840	38.40%	#0
Zombie	88	0.88%	#2338
Ape	24	0.24%	#5577
Alien	9	0.09%	#7804, the alien with a pipe

Rarity shaped the market from the first week: Mashable reported in June 2017 that the aliens and apes were claimed first. Christie’s 2021 guide counts eight Punks with no accessories and only one with seven, #8348, whose on-chain attributes read Male 2, Buck Teeth, Mole, Big Beard, Earring, Top Hat, Cigarette, Classic Shades.

Are CryptoPunk images stored on the blockchain?

CryptoPunk images are not stored in the 2017 contract, which holds only a SHA-256 fingerprint of a single image of all 10,000 Punks. In August 2021 Larva Labs added a separate contract that does hold every Punk’s pixels and attributes on Ethereum.

The fingerprint is the part of the launch that has aged best, and PUNKS explains why it mattered more than the pictures:

Then there was the art. The images were too large to store on the blockchain, so the contract does not contain them. It contains something much smaller: a SHA-256 hash of a single composite image of all 10,000 punks.

A hash is a fingerprint computed from a file, a fixed-length string of letters and numbers. Change a single pixel and the fingerprint comes out completely different, so a match proves the file is the same one. The CryptoPunks fingerprint, stored in the contract under the name imageHash, is ac39af4793119ee46bbff351d8cb6b5f23da60222126add4268e261199a2921b.

Larva Labs published the composite, a file called punks.png, and invited anyone to compute the hash and compare, to verify that the contract managed, in the website’s words, “the True Official Genuine CryptoPunks.” The file is 2,400 pixels square, a hundred rows of a hundred faces. A copy downloaded from Larva Labs’ GitHub repository in October 2026 still produces the same 64 characters.

That was the step the earlier experiments had lacked. Monegraph’s record of Quantum held a link to an image hosted somewhere else, and the record itself could lapse. A Rare Pepe’s standing depended on a directory that certified it. The punks contract still did not hold the pictures, and the ledger alone could not show anyone a face. But it held proof of which pictures the tokens meant, and that proof could not be swapped out later by anyone, including the people who wrote it.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter Two, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The hash proves authenticity, not availability. Anyone can download punks.png from Larva Labs’ cryptopunks repository on GitHub, run a SHA-256 tool and compare the result with the contract. Grey Area Labs read the imageHash from the live contract on October 20, 2026, and it is unchanged. What a hash cannot do is show anyone a face if every copy of the file disappears.

When did CryptoPunk images go on-chain?

CryptoPunk images went on-chain on August 18, 2021, when Larva Labs put the pictures themselves on Ethereum. At 00:10 UTC that day, in block 13,045,935, the address that had deployed both 2017 contracts deployed a third, CryptopunksData.

The header of its verified source code reads “On-chain Cryptopunk images and attributes, by Larva Labs.” By 04:27 UTC the same day it had been loaded with the pixel data and sealed against further changes.

Any program can now ask the chain for a Punk. The contract’s punkImageSvg function returns an SVG image, and punkAttributes returns a text list, which for #7804 reads “Alien, Cap Forward, Pipe, Small Shades.” The source credits the community members snowfro (Erick Calderon, the creator of Art Blocks) and 0xdeafbeef for motivating the project.

The 2017 contract was left untouched, and NODE’s CryptoPunks page now describes all 10,000 Punks as on-chain. Many NFT collections instead point to files on a company server or on IPFS, and our guide to where NFT art is actually stored (publishing November 9) explains why the difference matters.

Why are they called CryptoPunks?

Larva Labs wanted a collection of misfits, so it took the look of CryptoPunks from 1970s London punk, with cyberpunk as a second influence. The privacy reading of the name came later, from Sotheby’s.

“They needed to be a collection of misfits and non-conformists,” Hall and Watkinson told Christie’s for its April 2021 guide to the Punks. “The London punk movement of the 1970s felt like the right aesthetic.” Christie’s adds that the dystopian grit of cyberpunk was also an influence. Hall told Le Random in September 2024 that the name came so early he could not recall the project ever being called anything else.

Watkinson supplied the crypto half. When crypto arrived, he told Le Random, it reminded the pair of the early internet’s counterculture, with an economic strain of cyberpunk: people trying to get out from under the financial and power systems already in place.

Sotheby’s added a privacy reading in June 2021. Its Natively Digital catalogue described the Punks as pseudonymous portraits, worn as masks by crypto pioneers who care about privacy. That is an auction house’s interpretation, not the founders’ account, but it points at a real lineage through the cypherpunks.

On January 17, 1993, Hal Finney posted “Crypto trading cards.” to the cypherpunks mailing list, a mock pitch for digital cash as collectible cards “from the common 1’s, to the rarer 50’s, all the way up to the seldom-seen 1000’s.” In January 2009 he became the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction. The movement he wrote for is the subject of the cypherpunks who invented private money, and its long fight for financial privacy is the story Ryan Bethencourt tells in ZERO: The Zcash Revolution.

What did CryptoPunks sell for at Christie’s and Sotheby’s?

Christie’s sold nine CryptoPunks from the creators’ own holdings for $16,962,500 on May 11, 2021, and Sotheby’s sold the masked alien #7523 for $11,754,000 on June 10, 2021. The two sales took the Punks into the rooms where the art world decides what counts as art.

The crypto market had moved first. By PUNKS’ count, direct sales on the Punks’ own contract went from a median of 6.0 ETH in January 2021 to 122.8 ETH that October. The auction houses then turned that market into a canon.

Christie’s: nine Punks in one lot, May 11, 2021

Christie’s went first. Its New York 21st Century Evening Sale on Tuesday, May 11, 2021, included a single lot made only of code and pixels: Punks #2, #30, #58, #532, #602, #603, #635, #757 and #768, consigned by Hall and Watkinson from the thousand they had held back in 2017. Number 635 is an alien.

Christie’s had expected $7 million to $9 million. The hammer came down at $14.5 million, and with fees the price was $16,962,500. That same night Basquiat’s In This Case sold for $93.1 million. In ether the result looked smaller: TechCrunch pointed out that the nine together brought a little less than the 4,200 ETH a single alien had fetched that March.

Sotheby’s: the masked alien #7523, June 10, 2021

Sotheby’s replied a few weeks later with Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale, an online sale co-curated with the artist Robert Alice that ran from June 3 to 10, 2021. Its headline lot was #7523, which the catalogue presented as the only masked alien of the nine; its other traits are an earring and a knitted cap. A pseudonymous collector, Sillytuna, consigned it.

On June 10 the Punk brought $11,754,000, or about 4,696 ETH, in a live auction run from Sotheby’s London saleroom, a price Sotheby’s called a world auction record for a single Punk at the time. The house named the buyer as Shalom Meckenzie, DraftKings’ largest shareholder, and all 28 lots in the sale found buyers, for $17.1 million in total.

Who sold the Punks at auction?

The creators sold at Christie’s, and a pseudonymous collector sold at Sotheby’s. At Christie’s the consignors were the people who wrote the contract, selling from their 2017 reserve.

At Sotheby’s the roles reversed: the buyer was named, as Reuters reported from Sotheby’s statement, while the consignor was known only by a pseudonym. Both houses gave traditional collectors a date, June 23, 2017, and a price.

Both sales, the rest of Natively Digital and XCOPY’s rise in the same season are told in full in Chapter Seven of PUNKS.

What is the most expensive CryptoPunk?

As of October 20, 2026, Punk #5822, an alien with a bandana, holds the CryptoPunks dollar record: it sold for 8,000 ETH, about $23.7 million, on February 12, 2022, through a private offer on the Punks’ own market contract. The larger number that still circulates, 124,457 ETH for Punk #9998 in October 2021, was not a sale.

Punk	Type	Price	Date	How it sold
#5822	Alien, bandana	8,000 ETH, about $23.7 million	February 12, 2022	Private offer to the buyer on the Punks’ market contract
#7804	Alien, pipe	4,850 ETH, about $16.4 million	March 20, 2024	Bought on the Punks’ market contract; The Block called it the second most expensive Punk ever sold
#3100	Alien, headband	4,500 ETH, about $16.0 million	March 4, 2024	Accepted bid on the Punks’ market contract
#7523	Alien, medical mask	$11,754,000, about 4,696 ETH	June 10, 2021	Sotheby’s live auction, London
#3100	Alien, headband	4,200 ETH, about $7.67 million	March 11, 2021	Accepted bid on the Punks’ market contract (resold in 2024)
#7804	Alien, pipe	4,200 ETH, about $7.6 million	March 2021	Bought on the Punks’ market contract (resold in 2024)
Nine Punks	Lot including alien #635	$16,962,500	May 11, 2021	Christie’s evening sale, one lot
#5577	Ape	$5.15 million in preferred shares	Announced July 24, 2025	Bought by the Nasdaq-listed GameSquare

Aliens dominate the list because there are only nine of them, and two of them changed hands for more than $16 million each in March 2024, The Block reported. The 2024 sale of #7804, the pipe-smoking alien, is a single buyPunk transaction on Etherscan, at 20:03 UTC on March 20, 2024.

Punk #9998 is the trap in most rankings. On October 28, 2021, it was recorded as selling for 124,457 ETH, then worth about $532 million. The owner used a flash loan, borrowed and repaid inside one Ethereum transaction, to buy the Punk from themselves, The Block reported the next day. No outside buyer paid anything, so a list that ranks #9998 first is counting a transfer, not a sale.

What is the difference between CryptoPunks and Bored Apes?

CryptoPunks were given away in 2017 without commercial rights to the art, while Bored Ape Yacht Club sold for 0.08 ETH each in 2021 and gave every holder a commercial license from the start. Both are 10,000-piece collections on Ethereum, and the apes’ floor passed the Punks’ for the first time on December 22, 2021.

	CryptoPunks	Bored Ape Yacht Club
Creator	Larva Labs (Matt Hall, John Watkinson)	Yuga Labs
Launch	June 2017	Presale April 23, 2021; sold out May 1, 2021
Supply	10,000	10,000
Launch price	9,000 free to claim for a network fee the site put at around 11 cents; 1,000 reserved	0.08 ETH each, about $182 to $229 that week
Where the art lives	Hash of the composite in the 2017 contract; pixel data on-chain since August 2021	Token metadata points to IPFS (ape #1 checked on-chain, October 20, 2026)
Holder rights at launch	No commercial license; Larva Labs kept the IP through 2021	“An unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art,” derivative works included
IP owner over time	Larva Labs, then Yuga Labs (2022), then NODE (2025)	Yuga Labs
Signature auction	Christie’s: nine Punks, $16,962,500 (May 11, 2021)	Sotheby’s: 101 apes as one lot, $24.39 million (September 9, 2021)
Floor, December 22, 2021	52.69 ETH	53.9 ETH
Floor, October 20, 2026	31.27 ETH, about $77,000	5.69 ETH, about $14,000

PUNKS sums up the difference: the Punks turned into status symbols, while Yuga marketed its apes as membership in a club. The Block’s December 22, 2021 report marked the day the club’s floor overtook the status symbol’s. By October 20, 2026 the order had reversed, and the Punks’ floor was more than five times the apes’. For what happened to the ape economy after the Otherdeed sale of April 30 to May 1, 2022, see our account of the NFT market’s fall and what survived it (publishing November 4).

Who owns CryptoPunks now?

Each Punk belongs to whoever holds its token. The brand and the intellectual property belong to the NODE Foundation, a nonprofit that bought them from Yuga Labs on May 13, 2025 for an undisclosed sum.

The rights have had three owners since 2017:

1. June 2017 to March 2022: Larva Labs. Holders owned their tokens, but the studio kept the intellectual property and, Decrypt reported, had been reluctant to grant holders a commercial license.
2. March 11, 2022: Yuga Labs. The Bored Ape company acquired the brands, art copyright and other IP of CryptoPunks and Meebits, plus 423 Punks and 1,711 Meebits, on undisclosed terms. Yuga said its first step would be to give the holders full commercial rights, and it published license terms in August 2022. In May 2024 Greg Solano, a Yuga co-founder, said the company would “no longer touch” the Punks.
3. May 13, 2025: NODE. The foundation bought the full CryptoPunks IP. Its chair, Micky Malka, said the foundation would pair museum-grade conservation with an endowment, to protect the work for the long term and “make it easier than ever for scholars, curators, and collectors to engage with it.” NODE’s Punks Advisory Board includes Hall, Watkinson, Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow and Art Blocks creator Erick Calderon.

None of these deals changed the 2017 contract. Apart from the 423 Punks in the 2022 deal, the tokens stayed with holders who were not parties to any sale. NODE’s CryptoPunks page says the foundation now develops and maintains the Punks’ marketplace.

Which museums own CryptoPunks?

Six museums hold Punks on NODE’s register as of October 20, 2026: ZKM Karlsruhe, ICA Miami, LACMA, the Centre Pompidou, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, which added eight Punks in December 2025.

Institution	Punks	Date	Notes
ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany	#1286, #2554	December 2018	Acquired four; NODE says two were accidentally burned in a wallet transfer error
ICA Miami	#305	December 2022	NODE describes it as the first Punk given to a major US art museum
LACMA, Los Angeles	#3831	Dated December 2022 by NODE; announced February 2023	Part of a 22-piece gift from the Cozomo de’ Medici collection
Centre Pompidou, Paris	#110	2023	The Pompidou describes itself as the first modern and contemporary art museum to acquire a group of blockchain-related works, its own claim
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio	#9833	November 2024	Bought on-chain
Museum of Modern Art, New York	#74, #2786, #3407, #4018, #5160, #5616, #7178, #7899	December 2025	Donated, with eight Chromie Squiggles, to the Media and Performance department; 1OF1 helped coordinate the gifts

The MoMA gift reads like a provenance chain in its own right. According to The Block, Hall and Watkinson gave #74 and #5160, Mara and Erick Calderon gave #2786, Rhydon and Caroline Lee gave #3407, Ryan Zurrer of 1OF1 gave #4018, judithESSS gave #5616, the Tomaino Family gave #7178 and the Cozomo de’ Medici Collection gave #7899.

The ZKM row carries the oldest lesson in the register, and PUNKS draws it plainly: a token can be no safer than the wallet address it goes to.

What is happening with CryptoPunks in 2026?

In 2026 the Punks became an exhibition, a payments upgrade and a regulatory example. NODE opened its Palo Alto hub with a Punks exhibition in January, added USDC payments in March, and on March 17 the SEC named CryptoPunks as a digital collectible.

• January 23 to 25, 2026: NODE opened its Palo Alto hub with 10,000, which NODE presented as the first exhibition entirely about the Punks.
• March 3, 2026: NODE added USDC payments through wallets that support EIP-7702. OpenSea’s March 5 digest reported that, according to NODE, “the underlying CryptoPunks contract, which has recorded every sale since 2017, remains unchanged.”
• March 17, 2026: In an interpretation joined by the CFTC, the SEC wrote that examples of digital collectibles “include CryptoPunks, Chromie Squiggles, Fan Tokens, WIF, and VCOIN,” and said digital collectibles are not themselves securities.
• April 18 to June 28, 2026: NODE hosted Beeple’s survey INFINITE_LOOP and auctioned Everyday #5017, which OpenSea’s digest called the first Everyday to feature a CryptoPunk, for $106,000 in USDC. Read Beeple’s $69 million NFT and what the buyer owns (publishing November 13) for the sale that made him famous.
• October 2026: OpenSea’s October 15 digest reported that NODE Studio NYC, a New York workspace, was open by appointment and planned to widen access in 2027.

What is the CryptoPunks floor price in 2026?

On October 20, 2026, the CryptoPunks floor was 31.27 ETH, about $77,000, and CoinGecko valued the collection at about $770 million. That compares with the nearly $2.5 billion it had reached earlier in 2025, as The Block reported that December.

The market has cooled since July 2025, when a week of trading passed $24.6 million and the floor climbed to 47.5 ETH, up from about 40, after GameSquare bought ape Punk #5577, The Block reported. These are dated historical figures, not a forecast. More Grey Area Labs guides on the subject are in our hub for NFTs and crypto art.

Why did so many NFT collections copy CryptoPunks?

Many NFT collections copied CryptoPunks because the Punks set the format: PUNKS argues that their first fortnight produced the template for the 10,000-piece profile-picture collections of 2021.

Solana’s first NFT year shows it. The first token of SolPunks, a 10,000-piece homage to the originals, was created on May 7, 2021, and our history of SolPunks on Solana tells the rest. LegionPunks, another early punk derivative, minted its first token on July 19, 2021.

The pixel-art Solana Monkey Business produced the crowned skeleton #1355, which sold for 13,027 SOL on October 1, 2021. PUNKS makes the point that copies, starting with SolPunks on Solana, could reproduce the pixels but never the Punks’ trading record.

What did CryptoPunks change?

CryptoPunks tied the ownership of 10,000 digital images to a contract nobody can edit, with the art’s SHA-256 fingerprint stored inside it. The 2017 contract, its hash and the 2021 on-chain pixels can all be checked by anyone with a block explorer, whatever the prices do.

There is no Punk

In spring 2021 I watched founders and VCs on my feed switch their profile pictures to pixel faces. I missed buying a CryptoPunk early, though I loved their cypherpunk ethos, and I said so at the end of the book, after listing the pieces my wallet does hold:

There is no Punk. I loved the Punks for their cypherpunk ethos and missed my chance to buy one early, and that gap belongs to my record too.

The prices beside those pieces have done everything this book describes, and I have left the numbers out, because the numbers were never the durable part. […]

The prices rose, crashed, and in places rose again, but the real revolution never reversed: before 2017, we were merely tenants on the internet. The Punks made us owners.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Epilogue, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The prices in this article will be stale within weeks. The contract, the hash and the on-chain pixels will still read the same, and anyone with a block explorer can confirm it.

Frequently asked questions

Who are Matt Hall and John Watkinson?

Matt Hall and John Watkinson are the Canadian software developers behind Larva Labs, the New York studio that created CryptoPunks in June 2017. They also made Autoglyphs, Meebits and Quine. They sold the Punks’ IP to Yuga Labs in 2022, joined the NODE Foundation’s Punks Advisory Board in 2025, and gave Punks #74 and #5160 to MoMA.

What are V1 Punks?

V1 Punks are the tokens on Larva Labs’ first CryptoPunks contract, deployed on June 9, 2017 (UTC) and abandoned after a bug sent each payment back to the buyer. Ownership was copied to a new contract on June 23, 2017, which Larva Labs calls the main CryptoPunks contract. Community members later wrapped the old tokens so they could trade again.

Do CryptoPunk holders own the copyright?

No. Owning a Punk means holding its token, not the copyright in the image. Larva Labs kept the IP through 2021, Yuga Labs bought it in March 2022 and published commercial-license terms for holders that August, and the NODE Foundation bought the full IP on May 13, 2025. Read the current license terms before any commercial use.

Are CryptoPunks securities?

In a March 17, 2026 interpretation that the CFTC joined, the SEC listed CryptoPunks among its examples of digital collectibles, a category it said is not itself a security. The release adds that a non-security asset can still be sold as part of an investment contract. It interprets existing law rather than changing it, and a later commission can revise it.

How many people own CryptoPunks?

OpenSea counted 3,824 owner addresses for CryptoPunks on October 20, 2026. That counts wallets, not people: one collector can control many addresses, and some Punks sit in wrapper or custody contracts. In April 2021, TechCrunch counted 1,889 wallets holding all 10,000 Punks, as PUNKS records.

Why are CryptoPunks valuable?

The record points to provenance more than pixels: a June 2017 launch that predates ERC-721, a fixed supply of 10,000 with documented rarity, a trading record nobody can edit, and acceptance by Christie’s, Sotheby’s and six museums. Prices still swing widely. The floor was 47.5 ETH in late July 2025 and 31.27 ETH on October 20, 2026. This is not financial advice.

Can you still buy a CryptoPunk?

Yes. Punks trade on the marketplace built into the 2017 contract, now maintained by the NODE Foundation, and on general NFT marketplaces, and since March 2026 buyers can also pay in USDC. The lowest listing was 31.27 ETH on October 20, 2026, and prices change daily. This is not financial advice.

Sources and further reading

Primary records and sources (all opened October 20, 2026)

1. Etherscan: the first CryptoPunks contract, “Cryptopunks: Old Token” (deployed June 9, 2017 UTC).
2. Etherscan: CryptoPunksMarket, the current CryptoPunks contract (live June 22, 2017).
3. Etherscan: CryptopunksData, on-chain images and attributes by Larva Labs (August 18, 2021).
4. Larva Labs, cryptopunks repository on GitHub (README, punks.png and the image hash).
5. Jason Abbruzzese, “This ethereum-based project could change how we think about digital art,” Mashable, June 16, 2017.
6. “How blockchain technology could revolutionize the art market,” PBS NewsHour, September 11, 2019.
7. “10 things to know about CryptoPunks, the original NFTs,” Christie’s, April 8, 2021.
8. Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale, Sotheby’s digital catalogue, June 3 to 10, 2021.
9. “CryptoPunk ‘Alien’ NFT sells for $11.8M at Sotheby’s auction,” Al Jazeera and Reuters, June 10, 2021.
10. “Matt Hall and John Watkinson on beginning a movement,” Le Random, September 25, 2024.
11. Hal Finney, “Crypto trading cards.”, cypherpunks mailing list, January 17, 1993.
12. “How a cunning trick made it look like a CryptoPunk sold for $532 million,” The Block, October 29, 2021.
13. “Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs flip CryptoPunks in terms of floor price,” The Block, December 22, 2021.
14. “Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs acquires IP for CryptoPunks and Meebits,” The Block, March 11, 2022.
15. “Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Yuga Labs Acquires CryptoPunks IP From Larva Labs,” Decrypt, March 11, 2022.
16. Amy Castor and David Gerard, “The early history of NFTs, part 4: Game sprites on the blockchain: CryptoPunks,” June 16, 2022.
17. Etherscan: the buyPunk transaction for #7804 at 4,850 ETH, March 20, 2024.
18. “Second-most expensive CryptoPunk ever sells, for the second time, in March,” The Block, March 20, 2024.
19. “Yuga Labs sells CryptoPunks IP to nonprofit Infinite Node Foundation,” The Block, May 13, 2025.
20. “MoMA adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles NFTs to permanent collection following coordinated donation,” The Block, December 21, 2025.
21. NODE Foundation, CryptoPunks page (institutions register and marketplace).
22. SEC Press Release 2026-30, “SEC Clarifies the Application of Federal Securities Laws to Crypto Assets,” March 17, 2026, and the interpretive release, Release No. 33-11412.
23. CoinGecko, CryptoPunks NFT floor price and market cap and OpenSea, CryptoPunks collection page (market figures as of October 20, 2026).
24. Wikipedia, List of most expensive non-fungible tokens (secondary; used for the dollar values of the #5822 sale and of the March 2021 sales of #3100 and #7804).

Related reading on Grey Area Labs

• The history of NFTs, 2012 to 2026, the timeline this article sits inside.
• Are NFTs stored on the blockchain? (publishing November 9) Company servers, IPFS, Arweave and fully on-chain art.
• Beeple’s $69 million NFT (publishing November 13) and what a buyer actually owns.
• Are NFTs dead? (publishing November 4) The NFT market after the crash, by the numbers.
• The cypherpunks who invented private money, from David Chaum to Zcash, the movement Hal Finney wrote for in 1993.
• NFTs and crypto art: the Grey Area Labs hub.
• PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable, the book, with a free excerpt.

Last updated October 2026. Floor prices, owner counts and collection values are dated where they appear; the on-chain checks in this article were run on October 20, 2026.