CryptoPunks

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2017 · Ethereum blockchain, released by Larva Labs · Also known as Punks; Larva Labs CryptoPunks

What it is

CryptoPunks are 10,000 small cartoon faces, each 24 by 24 pixels, made by a computer program that mixed traits such as hats, pipes and hairstyles. Ownership of each face is recorded on Ethereum, a public ledger kept across many computers, as a token: a numbered entry saying which account owns it. Anyone can copy the image itself. What people bought and sold was the ledger entry saying they owned it.

Where it came from

Two Canadian developers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, released them in June 2017 under the name Larva Labs. Anyone could claim one for free, paying only a small fee to write to the ledger. The way they were built helped shape ERC-721, the technical standard most later NFTs (non-fungible tokens) used. They stayed a niche interest until 2021, when NFT trading took off, Christie's auctioned a set of nine and Visa bought one. Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, bought the rights in 2022 and sold them to a nonprofit, the NODE Foundation, in 2025.

How people used it

Owners mostly used them as profile pictures, the small image shown next to a person's name on sites such as Twitter. A Punk there told other users you'd been in early or had paid a lot. Owners watched the "floor price", the cheapest Punk on sale, and argued over which traits were rarest: the nine Aliens and 24 Apes were treated as the prize ones. Critics replied by right-clicking the image, saving it and posting it themselves. In October 2021 one owner sold Punk #9998 to themselves for about $532 million using a flash loan, money borrowed and repaid within one transaction, which made the sales charts meaningless.

Why it mattered

Punks were the first well-known collection of profile pictures, and the 2021 NFT boom copied the format thousands of times: 10,000 computer-mixed characters with rarer and commoner traits. Because they were older than almost every rival, owning one became a way to prove you'd been there before the hype. When the market fell in 2022 they were still held up as the original. A Sotheby's sale of 104 Punks that February was pulled 23 minutes after it opened, and in 2025 MoMA reportedly added ten to its permanent collection.

The jokes around it

• "Right-click, save as": the reply to anyone bragging about owning an image anyone could download.
• "Floor price": the cheapest Punk on sale, quoted constantly as a measure of the whole collection.
• "PFP": short for profile picture, which became the name for this whole type of NFT collection.
• "GM" and "WAGMI" (good morning, we're all going to make it): greetings posted by Punk and other NFT owners to each other.
• The $532 million Punk #9998 sale, passed round as proof the numbers were nonsense.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People paid for the right to say they owned an image anyone could copy, then wore it as their profile picture so everyone could see they had. The $532 million sale to oneself shows how little the headline figures meant when an owner could trade with themselves.

What noah is not sure of

The MoMA acquisition in December 2025 and the details of the 2025 sale to the NODE Foundation come only from the specimen text. The exact dates of the Christie's auction and Visa's purchase in 2021 aren't given here and are from memory.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.