Non-Fungible-Tokens are crypto’s hottest investment space so far in 2021, with millions in trades and rare works like Beeple’s EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, selling at a Christie’s auction in March for $69,346,250 – setting the record for the most expensive NFT ever sold.

As the NFT market continues to explode, the nascent sector was given further legitimacy this week with an announcement that CryptoPunks are going Hollywood.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that the CryptoPunks NFT project has signed with United Talent Agency for representation across film, TV, video games, publishing, and licensing. The UTA will also represent Meebits and Autoglyphs, two other NFT projects created by Larva Labs.

It means that CryptoPunks will be the first example of blockchain-based IP to make the jump to more traditional forms of content.

The news follows last week’s announcement that Visa had purchased a CryptoPunk NFT.

Visa purchased CryptoPunk #7610 on August 18 for 49.5 ETH, valued at approximately $150,000.

Source: CryptoPunk #7610

“We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce,” said Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, in a company blog post. Visa wanted to “signal our support” for people involved in the NFT market, Sheffield said.

This week the sales volumes of CryptoPunks topped $150 million, a new record, according to data from industry website CryptoSlam. This follows a record July that saw sales volume explode.

Source: Cryptoslam

August sales have reached $373 million, a new record. The previous largest single monthly sales total was $135.2 million during July. August’s average price for a CryptoPunk is $209,000, more than double last month’s average price.

Source: Cryptoslam

The Visa purchase, dismissed by some as a publicity stunt, marks an incredible run for Cryptopunks, one of the original NFT projects. Six months ago, following the first NFT boom, the floor price for a Cryptopunk was an impressive $34,700.

Today that floor price is $395,000 and rising by the day.

Source: Larva Labs

Crypto Punks can be bought and sold via the Larva Labs website, peer to peer between traders, or on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea. The OpenSea NFT markets have seen 274,641 in ETH volume traded for CryptoPunks in the last 60 days. In total, CryptoPunks have done over 460,000 ETH in trading volume just on OpenSea – that’s over $1.4 billion based on today’s ETH price.

The Christie’s Nod

In May fine art auction house Christie’s announced it would hold a high profile NFT auction featuring a collection of nine CryptoPunks. Noah Davis, a specialist in post-war & contemporary art at the auction house, described CryptoPunks as the ‘Alpha and Omega of the crypto art world’. As with the Beeple sale, payment in ETH was accepted for the auction. A lot of 9 CryptoPunks portraits ended up selling for just under $17 million, marking a key moment for NFT art sales. The 9 punks auctioned are amongst the most unique in the series

The nine punks were sold from the personal collections of CryptoPunks’ creators Matt Hall and John Watkinson. They highlight some interesting visual features of the CryptoPunks series — including muttonchops, earrings, big shades, crazy hair, a hoodie, a mohawk, and more.

The punks come from the first 1000 punks issued – out of the 10,000 total punks. They include CryptoPunk 2, a female punk with a wild hair accessory, and CryptoPunk 635, one of the alien punks.

What are CryptoPunks?

CryptoPunks first launched in June 2017 and were developed by a two-person team of Hall and Watkinson, at American Game Studio Larva Labs. They are 24×24 pixel art images that are algorithmically generated. CryptoPunks were released before CryptoKitties. They are innovators in the NFT space and were one of the inspirations for ERC-721 tokens – which unlike ERC-20 tokens, are all one-of-a-kind.

The largest CryptoPunk sales

There are 10,000 unique collectible CryptoPunk characters with proof of ownership on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. Of the 10,000 total punks, most are human but there are also 88 Zombies, 24 Apes, and 9 Aliens that are designated as special punks.

The most valuable CryptoPunk is #3100

CryptoPunk #3100 is the most valuable CryptoPunk to date. It was sold for 4.2K ETH ($7.58M) on March 11. The owner of this punk is wallet address 0x7b8961f67382c51c389726667ef7dd7cf95fefd3
The owner of CryptoPunk #3100 has put it up for sale at the price of 35000 ETH ($116,035,150.00 USD.

There will only ever be 10,000 CryptoPunks – and all have been created and sold already. Trading now occurs on secondary marketplaces. CryptoPunks can be bought and sold on the ‘Punks for Sale’ page on the Larva Labs website. They can also be bought and sold on Opensea, the largest online digital art marketplace for crypto collectibles and NFTs. They can be found under the Art and Collectibles collections. Sites like CryptoArtPulse.com, and Cryptoslam.io track sale prices in the NFT market.

What is an NFT?

A Non-fungible token (NFT) is a type of cryptographic token which represents something unique. Or put another way, non-fungible tokens are not mutually interchangeable by their individual specification in the way that crypto-assets such as Bitcoin are. Non-fungible tokens can be used to create verifiable digital scarcity. NFTs come in various forms. Some examples include digital baseball cards, in-game items in a role-playing game, art, digital pets that resemble Tamagotchi, physical items like socks, and copyrighted music. Another popular CyberPunk NFT artwork are the Mythia NFTs.

Why are CryptoPunks so valuable?

The popularity of Hall and Watkinson’s creations has surprised many. CryptoPunks don’t do anything, there is no famous artist adding value and no popular franchise attached to them. Popular market commentator and investor, DCinvestor said about CryptoPunks on Twitter, “They have an 8-bit charm and make for fun avatars (like mine). At 10K, there are enough to sustain a broad collector base, but also scarce enough to be valuable.”

Hall told Mashable in 2017 that the project was created to test out the dynamics of scarcity and demand. CryptoPunks have been generated algorithmically from a set of templates, each one is different but some are made up of more rare template pieces than others.CryptoPunk #3586, A punk with a few unique features

Like art, pokemon, and trading cards there is a collectible nature to CryptoPunks, however Hall explains that what they really wanted to create was something that was truly scarce and not subject to the whims of anyone, even the creators. "There’s Pokémon and these kinds of things,” he says, “but it’s a weird world where everything is replicable." Once CryptoPunks went live on the Ethereum blockchain, their scarcity was guaranteed as no one could issue more punks and none could be altered.

CryptoPunks are a combination of art, technology, absurdity, and social experimentation that is analogous to radical tokenization methods used by artists like Andy Warhol. Art Historian Blake Gopnik explains these similarities in an article for The Art Newspaper. He says Warhol would turn out unlimited numbers of silk screened posters but would only sign a few. Today, only the signed copies are worth anything in art markets. Warhol would also place ads inviting people to bring any household object to his studio so that he could then “certify your WARHOL WORK" with his signature. Thus creating value out of the otherwise mundane.

Just like Warhol, CryptoPunks experiments with tokenizing otherwise seemingly valueless images. With Warhol, investors wanted the artist’s signature proving that the art was authentic. Similarly, it’s the Ethereum contract and blockchain address that gives the individual CryptoPunk its value.

Celebs Ape in as NFT art goes mainstream

The non-fungible token art space is burgeoning with celebrities getting involved and issuing and buying NFTs. On February 28th, Canadian musician Grimes, who has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, auctioned 10 exclusive digital art NFTs. The collection brought in USD5.8 million in 20 minutes. Some of the art also came with accompanying music. Other celebrities, sports stars, entrepreneurs, and VC investors are endorsing NFTs as a groundbreaking technology. Lindsay Lohan is selling NFTs of her paintings, and Rick & Morty creator Justin Rolland released an NFT series earlier this year.

Gary Vaynerchuk, popular digital marketing and social media entrepreneur said on Twitter “The creativity coming from artists in the #nft space is extraordinary & so fun to watch. Many will look at this moment from the lens of investing in assets but supporting things you love or collectibles is such a pleasure just like in real life.”

Following the Christies Beeple art auction, now Sotherby’s have entered the NFT auction space. Next week Sotherberby’s will auction 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. The collection is expected to reach a price of up to $18,000,000. Adding further legitimacy to the NFT art space, the Sotherby’s Twitter account has changed it’s avatar to a Bored Ape.

The NFT delivery system has also helped artists who have seen their normal marketplaces be disrupted by Covid-19 lockdowns. José Delbo is an 87-year old Argentine comic book artist best known for his work on the Transformers series for Marvel and the Wonder Woman series for DC. Delbo began exploring NFT marketplaces as a way to sell his art after the comic book conventions where he would set up sales booths were cancelled.

Delbo created his first NFT artwork in August 2020 and has since collaborated with crypto-centric artists like Trevor Jones and PRIMAL CYPHER who have helped digitize and tokenize his print work. He told Decrypt media “Everything seems to be moving more and more digital and art is often about evolving So this is a way of me evolving even this late in my career.”Source: makersplace.com

The above piece is Delbo’s most recent work available for purchase on Makersplace. It’s called “A WH1SPER OF DEATH”. The most recent bid for the piece was USD10,846.08.

The Creator Economy

When it bought a CryptoPunk, Visa’s NFT expert, Cuy Sheffield wrote that NFTs have the potential to become a powerful accelerator for the creator economy and lower the barrier to entry for individual creatives to earn a living through digital commerce.

"NFTs could also fuel small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in powerful new ways. The rise of ecommerce has made it possible for SMBs to sell online and reach customers around the globe. But they still have to produce and ship physical goods, which can have high upfront costs. NFTs give small businesses an opportunity to harness public blockchains for producing digital goods—which can be delivered instantly to a crypto wallet. We can envision a future in which your crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address," wrote Sheffield.

To Infinity and beyond

Finally, the other big NFT success story of 2021 is the rise the blockchain game Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity is a Pokémon-inspired digital pet universe where players can earn tokens through game play. Users can battle, collect, breed, and build a kingdom for their digital critters. Like CryptoKitties, Axies are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) represented as cryptographically unique characters that can’t be replicated. While Axie can be just a game, it has built a strong social network, passionate community, and emerging jobs platform due to the play to earn opportunities it is generating.

Axie Infinity

Axie’s 2021 popularity is why Sky Mavis, the game’s creator, has seen a surge in revenue. The Vietnam-based game studio has made $US485 ($AU663) million in revenue since July, a huge increase from the $US21 ($AU29) million it had made since debuting in 2018, reports Bloomberg. Daily active users reached more than 1 million in this month.

Users are able to earn two kinds of tokens – Smooth Love Potions and Axie Infinity Shards – by breeding, growing and battling their Axies. The tokens can be used in the game or sold on a crypto exchange. Axies NFTs can be sold or purchased. Many players come from countries such as Venezuela and the Philippines, where job opportunties are limited. The blockchain gaming play to earn revolution started to gain traction after it emerged that a large community of players in the Philippines was earning money playing Axie Infinity.

While it’s possible that the NFT market is overheated, with the likes of Visa and Sotherby’s adding further legitimacy to the market and new NFT projects dropping every week, there is no sign the market will slow down any time soon.