Profile of CryptoPunks, an NFT project founded by two Canadian developers in 2017, which has reached $1.5B in lifetime sales as NFTs explode in popularity
unique digital assets—on the blockchain long before NFT became a household term...Two months later, a Canadian venture firm...used elements of the CryptoPunks smart contract to launch its own line of NFTs, the CryptoKitties.” https://twitter.com/... Loonardo Joe Vinci / @wasthatawolf : In other ways, including chronologically, they were in fact not the first... The accolades this is receiving really shows me who my friends are. https://twitter.com/... @artnome : 1/ I picked the wrong day to be away from CryptoTwitter. Great article from @sandraupson came out in Wired highlighting many of the important achievements of the Crypto Punks. But the reference to @wasthatawolf and Rare Pepe Wallet felt a bit off the mark. https://www.wired.com/... Mitchell F Chan / @mitchellfchan : Probably the best & most comprehensive MSM article on NFTs I've read, by @sandraupson at @WIRED . Touches on the tech, culture, market, & connections to art history, and the market. Share with your normie friends! https://www.wired.com/... Gideon Lichfield / @glichfield : If, like me, you struggle to understand why ppl pay $millions for digital art that can be perfectly copied, @sandraupson's profile of some of the people behind the NFT craze is both a great explainer of the tech and a sensitive look at the human motives. https://www.wired.com/... Hunter Biden / @vince_van_dough : While this article highlighted many artists I am proud to have collected work from and some important aspects of the movement, CryptoPunks weren't really the first at anything. Rare Pepe is where CryptoArt began, this is unquestionable and history will reflect such in time. https://twitter.com/... @cozomomedici : A wonderful piece about our wild NFT world. Loved reading the stories of @ArtOnBlockchain & @ClaireSilver12. And many more frens mentioned too, a must read! Grazie @sandraupson for this magnificent piece🍷⚔️♥ ️ ~CdM https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Wired profile lands three months after CryptoPunks crossed $1B in transaction volume, so the $1.5B lifetime-sales figure marks an acceleration, not a debut — the cheapest Punk was already listed at $450K by late August. The profile also functions as canonization: it fixes the two Canadian developers' 2017 smart contract as the origin point of the boom that a brief history of NFTs and cryptoart traced back to its artist beginnings.
That canonization is contested inside crypto itself: Twitter users push back on the 'first' framing, citing Rare Pepe as earlier crypto art, and the lineage claim cuts both ways — a Canadian venture firm lifted elements of the Punks contract to launch CryptoKitties, making Punks both ancestor and template for everything that followed.
First-order effects
- Holders of the 10K pixel portraits get a mainstream-media provenance stamp on top of the volume record, reinforcing the scarcity premium that already put the cheapest Punk near half a million dollars.
- CryptoPunks' status as the copied template is now on the record — CryptoKitties' derivation from its smart contract becomes part of the official narrative rather than community lore.
Second-order effects
- Rival collections must compete on lineage as much as art: if 'first' claims are worth money, the Rare Pepe dispute over chronology stops being trivia and becomes a pricing argument.
- In a market where Bloomberg found most OpenSea assets go unsold after their first deal, attention and liquidity concentrate further into a handful of provenance-rich collections like Punks, thinning demand for the long tail.
Third-order effects
- As the first NFT cases reach court dockets, questions about securities regulation and contract enforcement will land hardest on high-value collections like Punks, where the sums make legal classification material.
- Mainstream profiles like this one are the legitimacy layer of the NFT cycle — the same dynamic that later drew auction houses and celebrities in, with results the art world's own reckoning with the market would come to question.
The trend: The NFT market is consolidating value and narrative authority around a small set of early, provenance-rich collections whose origin stories are being canonized by mainstream media even as their 'first-mover' claims stay contested.