Today was about as rough as crypto gets: Bitcoin fell under $81,000, roughly $876 million in long positions got liquidated across the market in 24 hours, and South Korea's KOSPI even tripped a circuit breaker. NFTs weren't spared — this is the same week BAYC and Mutant Ape loans are getting called as Blur winds down its lending book, and the whole tracked NFT market has been sliding for days. Against that backdrop, somebody went out and bought two CryptoPunks at roughly 55 and 58 ETH each — close to double whatever the floor happened to be that hour — and, by multiple accounts, picked them for how they looked rather than sweeping whatever was cheapest. A third Punk changed hands nearby at 33 ETH. That's not the behavior of a market bracing for the bottom; it's someone treating a crash day like a shopping day. CryptoPunks keep doing this: through the same stretch, the bot that tracks every sale logged Punks moving in the 29-32 ETH range, repeatedly, during a week that should have scared everyone off spending real money on pixels. Separately — and almost poetically, given the week — CryptoPunk #110 is on display at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai next to a 70-year survey of computer art, and the photo making the rounds is of a kid who ran across the gallery to hug it. No context, no blockchain explainer, just a kid recognizing something he liked. Nine years after launch and three years after its first museum appearance in Paris, that's the same reaction it's always gotten. Elsewhere, Pudgy Penguins announced two Beijing events for later this month — one open to anyone, one holders-only — the kind of real-world presence that's become routine for them even while their own floor has had a rough couple of weeks. None of this fixes the week NFTs are having. It just says some buyers aren't waiting for it to end.
The numbers
- NFT30 index: 42.18 (24h -0.01%) · 7d -5.89%
- Meebit #2116 sold for 1.05 ETH (~2499 USD) — 3.8× floor
- Nakamigos #13910 sold for 0.255 ETH (~625 USD) — 2.7× floor