This week, at the NFT NYC conference, thousands of web3 fans went to Times Square. Compared to the much less fancy crypto market, the party stood out for making bitcoin investment topics. There have been boat parties, celebrity appearances, and even a person dressed up as Snoop Dogg who walked around the event.
This week on our show, we talked about the NFT market and why it seems to offer a small break from the overall negative story being told about the tech industry right now. We also talked about DAOs, which are a big part of web3, and broke down two recent news stories that were controversial because of DAOs.
Punks are worth money to collectors
This past weekend, there was a big rise in demand for digital assets, which drove up the prices of the most sought-after non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Most people agree that the CryptoPunks collection is the one they want the most out of all the NFT collections. There has been a lot of trading in this set over the last few days.
Vaynerchuk has said in the past that he owns more than 50 Punks, and he’s not the only well-known person interested in the technology. Other stars have made their own pieces, and Jay-Z caused a stir when he changed his Twitter avatar to Punk 6,095, which made it look like he’d bought it. Vaynerchuk has said in the past that he has more than 50 Punks. Snoop Dogg also seems to be very aware of the space.
A non-fungible token, or NFT, is a type of unique asset that stores information on a blockchain, most often Ethereum. This information could include a history of sales. NFTs can’t be traded back and forth like Bitcoin or Ethereum. They can be anything that can be turned into a token, like digital art, music, memes, tweets, or anything else. At the peak of the cryptocurrency bull run early this year, this got a lot of attention from artists, celebrities, and other well-known people.
The art sale at Christie’s of a piece by the digital artist Beeple for $69.34 million was the NFT event that got the most attention from the media. In CryptoPunks, they are shown as pixel art graphics that are 24 by 24 pixels. Because the information on an NFT can be used to confirm who owns an asset and how rare it is, some of the rarest Punks can sell for millions of dollars. Even though non-fungible tokens can exist in the real world, most of them are digital assets.
After Vaynerchuk bought CryptoPunks on Friday, someone known as an “Ethereum whale” bought 88 Punks in a few minutes. Vaynerchuk was one of the people who bought it. On the same day, 12 Punks were bought with a second wallet. People think that this wallet has something to do with the well-known trading and investment firm Three Arrows Capital. People say that the buyer sent some money to Mining DAO so that the transaction could be completed in a single block.
The sale took place in the United States. Also, ArtBlocks developer Snowfro sold an Ape Punk he or she bought in December 2017 for 2.5 ETH over the weekend, bringing the total number of ETH to 2,250. That’s a profit of almost $5.4 million after taxes.
Even though Apes and Zombies are some of the Punks with the highest market value, the collection’s floor price has gone up to 34.25 ETH, which is about $90,000. After the cryptocurrency market crashed in May, the cheapest Punks were worth about 15 ETH for a short time. This happened because of what happened after the disaster.
CryptoPunks was one of the first NFTs on Ethereum, which might help explain, at least in part, why they have become so popular. People are more interested in NFTs now, so the 10,000 Punks that were given away for free in 2017 are now worth more.
