Over $2.5 million-worth of punks have been traded to-date.
Given it’s one of the most successful NFT projects, it’s ironic that CryptoPunks doesn’t comply with ERC721, which is the main standard for NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
The reason is simple. When CryptoPunks launched as an experimental art project in June 2017 – 10,000 unique punks were released – ERC721 hadn’t been created. That didn’t take place until later that year with the launch of CryptoKitties.
But this hasn’t stopped CryptoPunks’ rise; over $2.5 million-worth of punks have been traded to-date. Before the arrival of Wrapped CryptoPunks, however, this activity was limited to the official CryptoPunks website.
What Wrapped CryptoPunks enables is these non-standard NFTs to be ‘wrapped’ within the ERC721 standard, and hence tradable on any Ethereum marketplace such as OpenSea and Rarible.
And it’s this new freedom that’s kickstarted the recent bull-run in CryptoPunks’ trading volume and value. Since the start of 2020, the price for a generic CryptoPunk has risen five-fold, and the number of CryptoPunks traded has exceeded 100 per day for the first time.
This isn’t the only result of the Wrapped CryptoPunks project though. One interesting new feature is its Bounties option. This allows users to create a buy order price for any random Wrapped CryptoPunk.
So if you want to buy a CryptoPunk but aren’t really bothered what specific CryptoPunk you get, you can lock your bid price into the Wrapped CryptoPunk smart contract. Then if a Wrapped CryptoPunk owner wants to accept your offer, they can simply do so.
It’s a neat option that removes much of the friction of trading these individual assets, effectively allowing buyers and sellers to create a floor price for the least rare CryptoPunks.
Over time, it’s hoped this feature will mature, enabling buyers to be more specific. For example, the first attribute to be supported is ‘VR headsets’, so buyers can set a higher price to attract sellers for these rarer CryptoPunks.
For example, currently, the highest price for a VR punk is 5.5 ETH compared to 4.4 ETH for any punk.
Find out more about Wrapped CryptoPunks via the website. ANd check out our new Marketplaces ranking page.
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