Christie’s, the auction house recently making news for auctioning Beeple’s First 5000 Days for almost $70M, announced that it will host an auction of a set of 9 early and desirable CryptoPunks. The auction will be held on May 13th, 2021, and is called “21st Century Evening Sale”. The listing for the auction is not yet available on Christie’s site, we will update this post once it appears.
CryptoPunks were released in June 2017, and are considered the inspiration for the ultimate Ethereum NFT specification, also known as ERC-721. CryptoPunks are a set of 10,000 unique 8-bit style 24×24 pixel images. The concept was developed by Larva Labs, a two-person American design duo. The individual pieces are generated semi-randomly from a set of rules, followed by some manual enhancements (Example: Here). Interestingly, the pieces were released entirely for free, they were claimable purely by paying transaction fees.
The current price floor for a CryptoPunk is just below 20 ETH.
The auction should be a blowout, Christie’s estimated going price is in the $7M to $9M range. Recent extremely rare CryptoPunks transacted in the 7 figure range. The current record stands at 4200 ETH. Once again, Christie’s will accept cryptocurrency as payment to settle the auction.
Full disclosure: NFT Culture staff owns 2 CryptoPunks.