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Earlier this week, CryptoPunks sales volume briefly fell, and the Punk boom looked like it could be over.
Not so fast.
Today, a single CryptoPunk Zombie (Punk 6275) sold for $3.9 million. The buyer was Pranksy, a prominent NFT collector, who bought the Punk just 8 hours after it was listed for sale. Pranksy was also the buyer of a fake Banksy NFT earlier this week.
This was only the eighth highest sale for a CryptoPunk. The record for the highest CryptoPunk sale is $11.8 million, through a Sotheby's auction in June. The buyer was DraftKings board member Shalom Meckenzie.
CyptoPunks are among the oldest collections of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and their O.G. status gives them their value. The zombie that Pranksy bought today is one of just 88 Zombie Punks in the project’s 10,000 avatars. The avatar is one of 526 to sport a “shadow beard,” and only 428 others rock the same dark mohawk.
The NFT is so rare that the zombie has already received a bid for 1,600 ETH, or $6.27 million.
The sale amounted to just under a third of CryptoPunk’s daily trading volume, according to CryptoSlam, and one of only 14 that were bought today. Just one CryptoPunk has sold since: a male wearing small shades and a cap, for $371,495.
Overall, sales for Punks are cooling. It is unclear whether that is because people are holding onto their CryptoPunks, which have since become a way to flex your wealth on social media sites such as Twitter, or if they are tiring of the avatars.
Sales rose from $14 million on August 22 to $134 million on August 23, then dipped back down to $47 million on August 25. A second peak came on August 28, when trading volume increased to $195 million, the highest ever. Since then, sales have sunk to about $22 million a day, apart from a single spurt to $40 million on September 1.
People are trading other different NFT projects instead. In the past week, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, a breeding project from The Bored Ape Yacht Club, has generated $220 million. Loot, a series of randomly generated pictures of text, has rustled up $173 million in trading volume.
CryptoPunks, once the most popular project on the block, has been relegated to the fifth position on CryptoSlam’s weekly sales leaderboard.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to mention that CryptoPunk 6275 has since received a bid for $6.27 million.