10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The project inspired the modern CryptoArt movement. Selected press and appearances include Mashable, CNBC, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, MarketWatch, The Paris Review, Salon, The Outline, BreakerMag, Christie’s of London, Art|Basel, The PBS NewsHour, The New York Times in 2018, and again in 2021. The Cryptopunks are one of the earliest examples of a “Non-Fungible Token” on Ethereum and were the inspiration for the ERC-721 standard that powers most digital art and collectibles.
Click here to visit the Crypto Punks Website
The CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain. Originally, they could be claimed for free by anybody with an Ethereum wallet, but all 10,000 were quickly claimed. Now they must be purchased from someone via the marketplace that’s also embedded in the blockchain. Via this market, you can buy, bid on, and offer punks for sale. Below, you’ll find information about the status of each Punk in the market. Punks with a blue background are not for sale and have no current bids. Punks with a red background are available for sale by their owner. Finally, punks with a purple background have an active bid on them.
See the marketplace instructions below to acquire your very own punk. You should also join the Discord Chat, which includes a bot that announces all bids, offers, and sales in real-time.
What is a CryptoPunk?
The CryptoPunks are 24×24 pixel art images, generated algorithmically. Most are punky-looking guys and girls, but there are a few rarer types mixed in: Apes, Zombies, and even the odd Alien. Every punk has their own profile page that shows their attributes as well as their ownership/for-sale status (here’s an example).
Details and FAQ
- Where are the images for the punks stored?
- When originally released, the actual images of the punks were too large to store on the blockchain, so we took a hash of the composite image of all the punks and embeded it into the contract. You can verify that the punks being managed by the Ethereum contract are the True Official Genuine CryptoPunks™ by calculating an SHA256 hash on the cryptopunks image and comparing it to the hash stored in the contract.
- Since then, due to some clever compression ideas and some help from friends of the punks we have managed to put the entire image and attribute data fully on chain. You can read more about the mechanisms and details of the process in the announcement blog post.
- Are the punks an ERC-721 token?
- No. The CryptoPunks pre-date the ERC-721 standard and are a custom contract, that means it doesn’t comply with any standards. They are almost an ERC20 token. We support the methods that provide your balance so you can watch CryptoPunks as a token in your wallet and see how many you own. None of the other methods are the same since you’re not transferring a simple balance, but need to reference which specific Punk you want to work with.
- Where does the market data on this site come from?
- The prices, bids and sales you see on this site are loaded from the Cryptopunks contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Because the Cryptopunks pre-date the ERC-721 standard (and all third party NFT marketplaces) we also needed to write a market so the punks could be transacted. We have no control over the contract governing this market, and have no access to any additional data beyond what the blockchain provides. In fact anyone else could write a web front end for it.
- Do you charge any fees for transactions?
- No. We charge no fees for Cryptopunks transacted through the built-in market beyond the ones charged by Ethereum (gas).
- The contract source and more technical details are available on Github.
