What about this NFT collection makes it so culturally powerful and desirable to folks within the crypto community? It’s not the first digital collectible or even the first digital collectible to become famous.

What makes Punks special is that, with 10,000 Punks created, they hit the sweet spot for scale—not too few, and not too many.

They also hit the sweet spot for digital identity; they are perfect for profile pictures on apps like Twitter (X) and Discord. With their generative nature, the individual Punks are different enough from each other to allow others to recognise specific Punks while also experiencing them as part of the same group.

The CryptoPunks project launched in June 2017, was created by Matt Hall and John Wilkinson, who together are the code and design studio known as Larva Labs.

Larva Labs are also the creators of many other works, including Autoglyphs, a seminal generative art project, and Meebits, a voxel digital identity project, but the 10,000 collectible CryptoPunks are what they’re best known for.

When the project launched, there was little public notice; the artwork, which comprises the ten thousand JPEGs, their corresponding tokens, and the Ethereum smart contract that provides a native royalty and fee-free marketplace for them, was slow to get attention, even though Punks were free to claim for anyone with an Ethereum address.

After an article in Mashable came out, the Punks were quickly claimed.

Then, after the Punks had all been claimed, a bug was found in the marketplace contract. So, Larva Labs wrote a fixed contract, re-minted the Punks, and airdropped them to their original claimants.

Aside from little blips and bursts of attention, the prices and trading volume for Punks were low during the deep crypto bear market of 2017-2020. But during that period, what started forming was a community. With chats happening in a CryptoPunks server on Discord, many of the biggest builders, creators, traders, and infrastructure architects in crypto decided to get Punks and use them as their digital identities.

Meanwhile, builders on Ethereum worked towards developing universal standards for non-fungible tokens. In 2018, the ERC-721 standard was introduced, meaning that non-fungible tokens could be traded with smart contracts built by third parties—not just their own custom-built contract, as has been the case for CryptoPunks.

CryptoPunks, along with CryptoKitties, were an inspiration for ERC-721, and the foundation of the standard made the creation of marketplaces like OpenSea and SuperRare possible, growing the NFT market in fine art and collectibles.

These sorts of marketplaces, alongside the gradual exit from crypto winter, paved the way for an NFT bull run in 2020-2021, following on from a 2020 DeFi bull run.

As NFTs entered mainstream consciousness, spurred by the February 2021 auction of Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for nearly $70 million at Christie’s, interest in NFTs like CryptoPunks spiked, with the floor price reaching $400k in August 2021.

In May 2022, Larva Labs sold the IP of CryptoPunks to Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collections. Yuga subsequently granted Punk holders limited rights to use and profit off of the IP of their Punks.

Alongside having inspired the design of the ERC-721 standard, CryptoPunks are a foundational inspiration in the many thousands of NFT generative digital collectible projects that have been launched since 2021.

Everything from the structure—a collection of 10,000 unique pieces, each produced by the combination of generative traits—to the concept of rarity (the rarest Punks are apes, aliens, and zombies) has powerfully influenced other notable and valuable collections, like Doodles, Pudgy Penguins, and Bored Apes.

The language of Punks is the water that the NFT space swims in. In bears and bulls, greed and fear, owning a Punk has become a passionate goal for many a builder, trader, or creator. They are a way of saying that you’ve made it; that you’re here to stay, not take the money and run back to the wider world.

Celebrities and traditional companies have dabbled with having a Punk as their brand figurehead, but those from within the crypto space who aspire to hold a Punk do so not just because of the monetary value of a Punk.

They do so because a Punk is a symbol of success and commitment to all, and an entry to the Punk community, which counts some of the biggest names in crypto and NFTs as members.

Whatever happens to companies like Yuga, as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists, Punks will exist; immutable, with provenance that can be shown onchain. They are worth a small fortune, but they are diverse enough that everyone can find a Punk that reflects who they are.

Today, people can trade Punks on marketplaces that support the ERC-721 standard by putting them in a wrapper contract. Or, they can use an independent front-end marketplace for Punks like CryptoPunks.eth.limo, Yuga’s front-end, or simply use an app like Etherscan to list, sell, or trade directly from the contract.

A look at the trading history of Punks shows that Punks have become one of the most desirable NFTs, and in this way, have attained a paradoxical fungibility. Punks have their market-makers, their flippers and holders. The transparent nature of the blockchain means that smart contracts can be built on top of Punks, fractionalising them. Independent platforms allow statistics, searches, and all kinds of data analysis to be done on the Punks market—vastly more transparent than other valuables, like fine art or high jewellery.

And they are beautiful, elegant in their simplicity. While their visual designs, 24x24 pixels each, were initially stored off-chain, the images of each Punk and every Punk attribute were encoded fully onto the Ethereum blockchain by Larva Labs in 2021. Anyone with an Ethereum client can access the artwork in its entirety, without other dependencies.

In “Quicksilver,” by Neal Stephenson, the book’s hero refers to a jewelled sword as “wealth, and the means to defend it, combined into one.” A Punk is even more powerful than that sword; it is a store of wealth that can be held and protected by an individual, unlike a work of antique art stored in a dusty vault. And, it can be used: as a figurehead, a show of bona fides, an access pass to a community of people who believe passionately that our future is onchain.

Everyone who gets their first Punk has a story to tell, and some choose to share it in public on social media like Twitter. Oftentimes, they’ve been watching for years; exploring traits, learning about crypto security so they can buy and hold valuable cryptoassets in confidence. Often, they’ve been active in the crypto space for years. Sometimes, they’re brand new and they want to dive in feet first. They come from all over the world, young and old. And they’re here because they know in their bones that crypto, and Punks, are for everybody.