Not Beeple High, But Good Enough: Nine CryptoPunk NFTs Sold For $17M At Christie's Auction House

Nine non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the CryptoPunk series created by crypto asset firm Larva Labs sold for $16.9 million at auction house Christie's on Tuesday.

What Happened: According to a Tuesday Christie's tweet, "9 rare CryptoPunks from Larva Labs' own collection makes history realizing $16,962,500."

#AuctionUpdate 9 rare CryptoPunks from Larva Labs' own collection makes history realizing $16,962,500 pic.twitter.com/qsPs5nqVYY

— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) May 12, 2021

CryptoPunks is a digital collectible NFT series featuring 10,000 pixel-art pieces mostly representing heads with clear counterculture traits, but also apes, zombies, and aliens. The images were generated algorithmically, with everyone having their own profile page showing their attributes and sale availability.

According to the Official CryptoPunks website, the top three NFTs of the series were sold for $7.57 million, $7.58 million, and $1.54 million, respectively, while the average bid over the last year was 23.73 ETH — equivalent to nearly $101,500 as of press time.

The lowest price punk currently for sale is 16.5 ETH, currently worth over $70,000.

See also: Boxing Star Floyd Mayweather Launches NFTs This Month

This is the second time that NFTs are sold at Christie's, with the first one being an artwork made by digital artist Mike Winkelmann — known as Beeple — that sold for $69 million.

The auction house will sell another one on Friday when it will offer a tokenized version of an Instagram post by American model Emily Ratajkowski.

NFTs are different from digital assets such as Bitcoin BTC/USD since there are no two that are the same. For this reason, they are particularly suitable to ensure scarcity of scarce digital collectibles or digitized representations of physical goods.

Image: Screenshot of CryptoPunks' NFT image