CryptoPunk worth $850,000 sells for just a fraction of its price

CryptoPunk 7557 was sold for 4.444 ETH ($19,400) earlier today, a sale that was 95% below the current floor price and just a fraction of what the specific NFT was worth.

The CryptoPunk in question was one of just 55 NFTs in the collection that sports a tiara. According to CryptoPunk creator Larva Labs, the cheapest “Tiara Punk” is priced at 350 ETH ($1.5 million). The last sale of a CryptoPunk with a tiara was for 196.69 ETH ($843,000).

The listing of this Punk at this price may have been a big mistake. According to the listing history, the previous owner last put it up for sale for 8,888 ETH ($31 million). This suggests they may have been trying to sell it for 4,444 ETH ($19 million) instead of 4.444 ETH — note the comma instead of the period.

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Since the CryptoPunk was being sold so far below market price, the buyer went out of their way to snipe it. They used a messaging service called flashbots, which lets Ethereum users make deals with miners to get priority transactions. The buyer sent a 3.33 ETH “bribe” to the miner (F2Pool) to grab the NFT before anyone else did.

CryptoPunks is one of the earliest NFT collections and features 10,000 pixelated faces, with characters like aliens, zombies, humans, and apes. Since the collection was released in 2017, it has witnessed $1.56 billion in sales.

While today’s sale was unexpectedly small, last week we thought we saw the largest CryptoPunk sale ever — only it was effectively faked. What appeared to be a $532 million sale fell apart when it was revealed it was simply the owner purchasing it from themselves using a flash loan.

In August, global payments giant Visa bought a CryptoPunk for $150,000 triggering another massive wave of purchases with 90 of them changing hands in the space of a single hour.

About Author

Osato is a news reporter at The Block as part of the crypto ecosystems team that focuses on DAO governance, staking, blockchain layers, and DeFi. He was previously a news reporter at Cointelegraph. Based in Lagos, Nigeria, he enjoys crosswords, poker, and attempting to beat his Scrabble high score. Follow him on Twitter at @OsatoNomayo.