CryptoPunks

CryptoPunks are 10,000 portraits, each 24 by 24 pixels, made by a generator program at Larva Labs. Most are punk-looking men and women, built from 87 attributes such as hoodies, tiaras, pipes and VR goggles. A few belong to rarer types: 88 Zombies, 24 Apes and 9 Aliens. Larva Labs drew on the punk scene of the 1980s and the cyberpunk of the 1990s, and made the punks to work as avatars.

Matt Hall and John Watkinson released them in June 2017, free to anyone with an Ethereum wallet who paid the transaction fee. Uptake was slow until Mashable wrote about the project, and the last punk was claimed eight days after launch. A flaw in the first contract's market led them to move every punk to a corrected contract on June 23, the one still in use. It came before ERC-721, the standard most NFTs now use, and helped inspire it. It also has its own market built in, so owners can offer, bid and sell without any outside platform. In 2021 Larva Labs wrote every punk's pixels into a second contract, so the images now live onchain too. The rights passed to Yuga Labs in 2022 and to the nonprofit Infinite Node Foundation in 2025, and every owner holds a commercial license for as long as they keep their punk.

Six museums have punks in their collections: MoMA, LACMA, the Centre Pompidou, ICA Miami, the Toledo Museum of Art and the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Christie's sold nine from Larva Labs' own collection for almost $17 million in May 2021, and a month later Sotheby's sold the masked Alien #7523 for $11.8 million. The highest price so far is for #5822, an Alien that sold for 8,000 ETH, about $23.7 million, in 2022.