In brief

  • Nine CryptoPunks NFTs auctioned at Christie’s fetched $16.9 million total.
  • CryptoPunks are among the oldest and most coveted NFTs.

A collection of nine rare CryptoPunks sold for $16.9 million during an auction at Christie’s in New York tonight.

The auction was the venerable house’s first big NFT sale since Beeple’s EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5,000 DAYS, the digital collage that went for a record $69 million in March.

NFTs or non-fungible tokens are blockchain-based digital assets that can represent ownership deeds to digital or physical assets, from art to digital trading cards to albums to video clips. And CryptoPunks are some of the oldest.

CryptoPunks are a historic series of 10,000 NFTs from a developer called LarvaLabs. The tokens are attached to tiny, pixelated portraits of randomly generated faces, each distinct from the others. Since their introduction in 2017, they’ve become some of the most prized digital collectibles in crypto—individual CryptoPunks have sold for upwards of $7 million. Among the 10 most expensive individual NFT sales ever, three were CryptoPunks.

This NFT sold for $69 million at Christie's. Image: Beeple

The 15 Most Expensive NFTs Ever Sold

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are changing the way we think about art—and investors are starting to take notice. In the last year, NFTs have shot to the forefront of the crypto space. The cryptographically-unique tokens make it possible to create real-world scarcity for digital objects, and artists have seized on the opportunity presented by the technology. The NFT market exploded in 2021, generating some $25 billion worth of trading volume, and the momentum hasn’t slowed so far this year. This...

Deep DivesLong Reads
10 min read
Daniel Phillips, Stephen Graves, Andrew Hayward

Splashy auctions like tonight's tend to involve NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Thanks in part to the recent frenzy around crypto art, the price of Ethereum's native token, ETH, has climbed to new all-time highs.

Christie’s was the first major auction house to get in on the NFT phenomenon when it sold a Bitcoin-themed physical artwork tied to an accompanying NFT last fall. Sotheby’s has since followed suit.

Later this week, Christie’s plans to auction an NFT from the model Emily Ratajkowski.

Daily Debrief Newsletter

Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.