10 things to know about 9 CryptoPunks. The US$16.9 million sale.

Three years ago, a quirky art project called CryptoPunks, was created by two software developers. It posed a serious and provocative question: Could a few lines of code translate to a feeling of meaningful ownership? Three years later and their project is regarded as the beginning of today’s CryptoArt movement.

On May 11th 2021 in New York, this set of 9 CryptoPunks was purchased for US$16.9 million through art auction house Christies.

The CryptoPunks are a collection of 24x24, 8-bit-style pixel art images of misfits and eccentrics. There are exactly 10,000 of them, each with their own ostensible personality and unique combination of distinctive, randomly generated features.

‘The CryptoPunks are the alpha and omega of the CyptoArt movement,’ explains Noah Davis, Contemporary Art Specialist at Christie’s, New York. Behind Mike Winkelmann's Beeple US$69 million sale in March 2021, this is the second-largest NFT purchase ever made.

CryptoPunks began as an experiment.

In 2017, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, founders of New York-based software company Larva Labs, created a software program that would generate thousands of different, strange-looking characters. What they ended up with was a paradigm-altering model for the digital art market and a challenge to the concept of ‘ownership’ itself.

There are 6,039 male Punks and 3,840 female Punks. A total of 696 wear hot lipstick, while 303 have muttonchops. There are 286 Punks with 3-D glasses, 128 rosy-cheeked Punks, 94 Punks with pigtails, 78 Punks with buck teeth and 44 beanie-wearing Punks.

They were inspired by the London punk scene.

To the creators there was a raucous, anti-establishment spirit to the early days of the blockchain movement. ‘The Punks needed to be a collection of misfits and non-conformists,’ they explain. ‘The London punk movement of the 1970s felt like the right aesthetic.’

This is an image of all 10,000 CryptoPunks taken from the Larva Labs website. Anyone can save a copy of the file...

...But only one person can officially own a CryptoPunk.

Official ownership of each work is publicly accessible on the Ethereum blockchain. The ownership history of each artwork is tracked and documented in the blockchain.

Some CryptoPunks are rarer than others.

With a nod to popular culture archetypes, Hall and Watkinson tweaked their software algorithm to generate a scarcer number of fantastical, non-human works. They added 88 zombie Punks, 24 ape Punks and nine alien Punks to the series.

‘The core of the idea was that every character should be unique. The advantage of generative art is that the process, once set in motion, can produce results that are even surprising to us. We ran the generator hundreds of times, reviewed the results, and made adjustments. Then, with little fanfare, we ran it one last time, linked it to the Ethereum smart contract that we deployed, after which the CryptoPunks were completely set in stone.’

The collection of 10,000 Cryptopunks is definitive and unalterable.

The creators regard each work as individual pieces of generative art. Once on the blockchain, nobody is able to alter the existing series, even if they wanted to.

CryptoPunks inspired a community of collectors.

Once minted on the blockchain, Hall and Watkinson offered the CryptoPunks for free, not forgetting to claim 1,000 for themselves, 'just in case it becomes a thing'.

At first, there was very little interest. ‘We were starting to think, ah no, this doesn’t really have it,’. But before too long, Punks were selling for thousands of dollars.

‘For fans of collectibles, it’s clearly a version of trading cards or something similar. However, generative art fans see it as an interesting example in that category. We like that its perception is flexible and brings together several of these worlds into a single project’

The CryptoPunks market is active.

As of April 2021, over 8,000 sales had been recorded in the previous 12 months, with an average sale price of US$30,000. The total value of all sales is US$251 million. This value is growing daily.

‘Taken together, the set represents both the rarest possible CryptoPunks and highlights from the variety of attributes that are the signature of the project,’ the creators explain.

‘The advent of CryptoArt is truly upon us. Welcome to the future.'