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The advent of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, has disrupted the financial world. The quick and enormous popularity gained by the first coin has inspired thousands of people to enter into the crypto space, resulting in a wide range of cryptocurrency coins, platforms, and technologies and trading models. Non-fungible tokens are a popular one among them. A non-fungible token (NFT) is a token that has specific ownership at every point in time. Crypto Punks are NFT tokens that have raised several eyebrows in recent times, owing to a crypto punk sold for a whopping price of $7.54 million on March 11. 

An Overview of Crypto Punks

Cryptopunks are Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens representing the ownership of unique digital art images developed by a creative company Larva Labs in 2017. A crypto punk is an algorithm-generated art image with a size of 24×24 pixels. By tying each art design with a piece of code on the Ethereum blockchain, this model gives clear ownership that can be transferred. They are one of the first NFT tokens on the Ethereum blockchain before the ERC-721 standard became popular for collectibles and arts. People who buy a crypto punk will have the ownership of a unique punk associated with that NFT.

There are 10,000 unique crypto punks in total comprising punky girls and guys along with a few zombies, apes and aliens. The speciality of crypto punks is that no two punks are alike. Each punk differs in either hairstyle, skin tone, gender and accessories making them unique and rare. To be specific, there are 6039 male punks, 3840 female punks, 24 apes, 88 zombies and 9 alien punks. There are special attributes to these punks as well. For instance, 266 punks have blue eye shadows, 144 are wild blondes, 617 females apply black lipstick etc. 

How to Buy Crypto Punks?

When Larva Labs started the CryptoPunks project in 2017, the company offered all unique 10,000 punks for free to Ethereum members. So, people who received these punks are now the owners of these punks. So, you need to buy them from these owners. You can buy, sell or bid for these punks on the Larva Lab marketplace. Punks with a red background are on sale and punks with the purple background already got some active bids while blue background punks are not available for sale.

To buy a Crypto Punk:

1) Larva Labs

• To buy a crypto punk, you need a Metamask crypto wallet. You can register a new Ether account if you don’t have one and buy Ethers. Download the Metamask plugin for Google Chrome here: https://metamask.io/
• When you download and install the Metamask plugin, Larva Labs will instantly recognize it and add buttons to the plugin so that you can directly buy, sell and bid from within the interface.

2) OpenSea Marketplace

You can buy cryptopunks from the Opensea marketplace. However, Opensea only allows ERC-721 tokens which means you need to wrap them and transact here.

The State of Crypto Punks Market

Larva Labs released 10,000 unique crypto Punks into the market in June 2017. Initially, they were offered free for members who possessed an Ethereum wallet. After that, people had to buy them from their respective owners. The project quickly became a huge success wherein a crypto punk was sold for 10 Eth in July 2017, amounting to $2610 and total sales reached 176 Ethers. The prices remained steady in the following years as Bitcoin was moving up and down. 

With the advent of the DeFi model, NFT tokens became popular again. DeFi projects offered huge profits within a quick time for crypto investors. As such, these investors wanted to secure their profits into crypto assets and crypto punks turned out to be Ethereum digital gold. As such, by the end of 2020, crypto punks started seeing rapid growth. In Feb 2021, around 50 crypto punks were sold per day for a few days. On March 11, 2021, CryptoPunk #7804 was sold for a whopping $7.54 million.

Why are Crypto Punks Popular?

Capping cryptopunks at 10,000 and making two rarest punks is a key reason for the success of the Moreover, Larva Labs offered a fair deal and committed the contracts to the Ethereum chain without giving rewards to its creators. A status symbol in the digital space is another reason for the increasing popularity of crypto punks. People who own a crypto punk can display it as their profile image on Twitter, Instagram and other social media pages that gives them great recognition and trust in the digital art crypto space. So, they can make large digital art deals. 

Being the first NFT project in the Digital Art / Collectibles segment turned out to be a big advantage to CyrptoPunks. Now, the floor for CyrptoPunks is 16 ETH which means the project has turned into an elite community. So, gaining a punk will make you an elite community member and significantly increases the value of your social presence.