Time for some history.
Discover the wonderful legacy of CryptoPunks with these comprehensive wiki and learn more about the original V1:
https://t.co/2OYsHRf4Ux
This morning @cryptopunks 3100 sold for 4500 ETH ($16M) which is massive, but this punk has an interesting and sometimes scandalous story around it, so I thought I'd take a moment to talk about some of the stand out moments 3100 has experienced over the last (almost) 7 years.
Lets start at the beginning. @straybits claimed the @v1punks token of 3100 (along with most of the other aliens) on June 10th, 2017. This was within the first 24 hours after @larvalabs released Cryptopunks. The claim, of course, was free.
A few days later on June 23rd @straybits was airdropped the updated @cryptopunks token for 3100 which he sold a couple weeks later for 8 ETH (just over $2k at the time). The buyer would hold 3100 until March 11, 2021 when they would accept a bid for 4200 ETH ($7.58M) which was the highest Cryptopunk sale ever at the time. That anon buyer is the one who sold it this morning, all that history can be seen here:
https://t.co/GIhLyrh0R2
All that is exciting, but things get a little crazy after that.
In June 2021, a few months after the 4200 ETH sale, an artist named Ryder Ripps would mint a copy of 3100 on @foundation and publish a (now deleted) explanation saying this was a conceptual piece questioning what it is you own when you buy an NFT. This would sell a few days later for just over 2 ETH, check out that bid history:
https://t.co/leJ3lErzKA
Just after the sale Larva Labs served Foundation a DMCA takedown notice and they delisted his 3100 copy. Ripps would then mint and sell the DMCA notice for just over 1 ETH. It's currently for sale for 3.99 ETH.
https://t.co/H5xHY6a1KQ
Ripps would appeal the DMCA, and his 3100 copy token would be reinstated a few weeks later. This was long before the RR/BAYC drama which would later ensue, though it might have been the spark of the idea, and it was directly related to controversy at the time within the Cryptopunks community about who owned the IP to the punks that would eventually lead to @punk4156 selling his Cryptopunk ape and launching @nounsdao in effort to promote CC0.
https://t.co/zyUoe5nYf9
I recognize that in light of everything that would happen after this with Ripps and Yuga this bit of the story is something some people don't like, but historically I do think it contributed to Larva Labs selling Cryptopunks to Yuga Labs the following year, and is therefor an important part of the story of 3100, and some of the legacy that the new buyer just inherited. I wrote about some of this back when it happened
https://t.co/fEI1Lvy9J9
But that's not all!
In January 2022 @frankNFT_eth would release a wrapper allowing the bugged originally claimed Cryptopunks to be sold safely. @straybits still owned the V1 token, and when he started wrapping them an OTC deal was reached with fellow punk claimer and legendary collector Mr703 for the V1 version of 3100, which he held quietly until wrapping it in Nov 2023.
https://t.co/oqLtAjuKqg
Anyone who has followed my writings on this knows I'm an advocate for pairing up V1/V2 Cryptopunk tokens. These were "born together" so to speak and are both important parts of the story, and I think the most ideal solution is that they remain together in the same wallet owned by the same person whenever possible. These two tokens have been separated since July 2017, I think it would be incredibly exciting to see them reunited in this next cycle. What a cool chapter that would be to add to the story.
I'm hoping we learn who the buyer of 3100 is, and excited to see where this leads next. 🍿
Do you like historical NFTs?
Well, you probably sleeping on the most historical provenance NFTs of the industry!
1)🧵
Not everyone knows that there are two versions of #CryptoPunks, but why is the first version worth so little in comparison?
"CryptoPunks" are the first smart contract from Larva Labs, a company founded by Matt Hall and John Watkinson.
Born as a collectible experiment on rarity and digital ownership, they are among the first NFTs ever created and the first collection of 10,000 unique pieces on #Ethereum.
It is widely recognized that they are the most influential collection in history and that they inspired the standards and the NFT industry we know today - just think that at the time the term "NFT" did not even exist.
Launched via a smart contract on June 9, 2017 and redeemable for free by anyone who had an Ethereum wallet.
At the time, Ethereum users were a niche and it wasn't as widespread as it is today. At the beginning of 2017, 1 ETH was worth $10 and the number of addresses created was around one million (to date there are over 250 million).
So the first Ethereum investors had these ETH in their wallet without knowing what to do with it, the Punks were one of the first use cases.
You could simply connect to the site, pay the gas fee (a few dollars) and redeem a Punk.
Within a week of launch, all 10,000 punks had been redeemed by over a hundred of people, with some owners managing to redeem as many as 600 - 1000.
Once they were sold out, the first trades began, but after a while they discovered a bug in the smart contract that allowed those who bought a punk for sale to get back the ETH spent!
With this flaw in the contract it was no longer possible to sell the punks safely.
CryptoPunks are modified ERC-20 tokens, which predate the ERC-721 standard, so they work completely differently from the modern NFTs we know today.
You don't use IPFS, they are not "links" to an image. There is a single image made up of all 10,000punks whose hash is encoded in the contract and each token has the coordinates of that specific punk.
Natively they can only be exchanged in the integrated smartcontract marketplace and not on Opensea-type marketplaces (which didn't even exist at the time).
The bug was in fact in a line of code in the marketplace.
With the marketplace out of games, Larva Labs warned punk owners to no longer interact with the smart contract or they would lose their punks.
@ooo000ooo@CryptoPunksOG It is not currently believed that he painted any of the early versions or copies(it was for centuries). These works are attributed to his pupils and other artists.