Sotheby’s to Auction Over 100 CryptoPunk NFTs

Sotheby’s will auction 104 CryptoPunks in an upcoming sale, according to an announcement from the auction house.

Collection Could Be Worth $30 Million

The upcoming sale is titled “Punk It!” and will be part of Sotheby’s “Metaverse,” a series of NFT sales that began last October.

The lot of 104 tokens is expected to sell for between $20 million and $30 million, according to various estimates.

The tokens were reportedly acquired by an anonymous collector in July 2021. The sizable collection represents about 1% of the total CryptoPunks supply, which contains 10,000 tokens.

Though the original buyer purchased the collection in an Ethereum transaction last year, Sotheby’s will likely allow the successful bidder to pay with cash or crypto, as in previous NFT auctions.

The tokens will be shown in an exhibition and auction scheduled to run between Feb. 18 and 23. The exhibition will also feature a VIP dinner and DJ party, among other live events.

CryptoPunks Are Dominating NFT Auctions

Sotheby’s previously sold a CryptoPunk in June 2021 for $11.75 million as part of its “Natively Digital” collection. It also sold five hand-signed prints of CryptoPunks NFTs in July 2021.

Its competitor, Christie’s, has also sold CryptoPunks during various sales over the past year. In May 2021, it sold a collection of nine CryptoPunks for $17 million. It also sold another batch of CryptoPunks that September.

The CryptoPunks series launched in 2017 and is one of the oldest NFT collections on Ethereum. Sotheby’s co-head of digital art Michael Bouhanna has called CryptoPunks “the original [profile pic] series that created the template for other NFT projects that have followed.”

High-profile Twitter users who own CryptoPunks or have used them as their avatar include the musical artists Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg. Even Visa has purchased a CryptoPunk for its collection.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and other cryptocurrencies.