9 CryptoPunks sell for $17M at Christie’s auction house

Published at: May 12, 2021

Despite the cooling of the recent NFT frenzy, prized nonfungible tokens with historical significance are still fetching multi-million-dollar prices.

On Wednesday, famed New York-based auction house Christie’s tweeted that an auction for nine tokens from pioneering NFT CryptoPunks had cleared for nearly $17 million combined.

Despite the tokens fetching millions, some Twitter users speculated that the winning bidder scored a bargain.

I thought they'd go for more myself also.

— VeryBadAcid (@acid_very) May 12, 2021

CryptoPunks were launched by LarvaLabs in 2017 and were limited to 10,000 tokens in total. The NFTs depict randomly generated pixelated portraits, with unique features inspired by the London punk movement, such as hairstyles, jewelry and sunglasses.

Ahead of the auction, Christie’s teamed up with nonprofit and urban art proponent SaveArtSpace to display CryptoPunks in public spaces in New York. The public exhibition, dubbed Pixelated, is showcasing 193 CryptoPunks from May 10 until June 6 and expands a similar public exhibition of CryptoPunks held in Miami during April.

Join the Punk Hunt! We've teamed with @saveartspace to present Pixelated, a month-long, New York City-wide public art exhibition of Larva Labs' CryptoPunks.Visit the link for the location of each CryptoPunk ahead of our sale of 9 CryptoPunks tomorrow: https://t.co/eGzzDKlN2R pic.twitter.com/uANRFujqCI

— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) May 10, 2021

Adult streaming platform CamSoda is also jumping on the CryptoPunk bandwagon, announcing it will host a live no-reserve auction of CryptoPunk #7060 on Thursday. Auction attendees must deposit the grand total of at least $1 worth of crypto assets into their CamSoda account to participate. 

CamSoda vice president Daryn Parker stated: “Right now we are in the midst of a NFT gold rush. NFTs are crypto’s hottest investment space so far in 2021, with millions in trades and rare collectibles like CryptoPunks selling for huge sums.”

“Given how CryptoPunks have captured the mainstream crypto zeitgeist, we wanted to make one easily accessible to our users,” he added.

In February, Christie’s auctioned famed digital artist Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” NFT artwork for more than $69 million.

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