CryptoPunk is one of the most popular NFT collections. In bidding on non-fungible tokens, some users show insufficient attention, and others show excessive cunning.
A user sold CryptoPunk #7557 for 4,444 ETH. However, such a token is valued at an average of 148 ETH, so it was sold for about 3% of its face value. At the current exchange rate, that’s about $19,800 instead of $660,200.
A similar CryptoPunk #8420 was sold for 196,69 ETH on October 27 on the OpenSea platform – it is approximately $841,000 at the current exchange rate at the time of the transaction. There are a total of 55 tokens of this type in the collection. Larva Labs issued the collection, the cheapest of such tokens is estimated at 350 ETH (~ $1,56 million) on its website.
The most likely reason for the incident was the mistake made by the seller, who planned to set the price at 4,444 ETH but mixed up the divider symbols. Moreover, he had previously put it up for sale for 8,888 ETH.
To complete the successful transaction as quickly as possible, the buyer appealed to Flashbots. He paid 3,33 ETH to the miners as a commission for processing his transaction urgently. In August, a similar case occurred when an NFT from the CryptoPunk collection was put up for sale for 99 Wei (less than $0,01). That time the buyer paid 22 ETH as a commission to not miss out on a good bargain.
The Most Expensive CryptoPunk Token (Not Really)
At the end of October, a CryptoPunk token #9998 became the most expensive NFT in Larva Labs’ ranking. The transaction amounted to 124,457 ETH or approximately $532 million at the time of the sale. But it quickly became clear that the user had sold the asset to himself. What is more, to purchase the token, the user had taken out a “flash loan”, which he paid off from the funds of the same transaction.
After the proceedings, Larva Labs ruled the transaction illegal. They plan to remove it from their rating. CryptoSlam will also delete the data about the transaction. The CryptoPunk creators said they would add filtering to exclude this kind of transaction in the future.
The manipulation was carried out to increase the market price of the asset. Now CryptoPunk #9998 is for sale again and is valued by the owner at 250,000 ETH (~ $1,115 billion). The last real transaction took place on August 11 – the token was bought for 110 ETH (~ $347,5 thousand).
Currently, the most expensive NFT from the CryptoPunks collection is token #7523 (“Alien”). On July 15, it was sold at Sotheby’s for $11,8 million.
The CryptoPunks is one of the most famous NFT collections realized as ERC-721 tokens. It includes 10,000 pixel images with avatars of humans, monkeys, aliens and zombies. Larva Labs released the collection in 2017. So far, all CryptoPunks sales total value has been 566,900 ETH (~ $1,57 billion).
