With a beginning price of approximately $400,000 worth of ETH on the secondary market and dozens of sales over $1 million to date, CryptoPunks is the most valuable NFT avatar collection. When a $9.5 million offer for his CryptoPunk came through, one owner could have cashed in big, but he swiftly declined.
Richerd Chen is the co-founder of Manifold, an NFT smart contract developer, but to his 59,000 Twitter followers, he’s the Punk with 3D glasses, black “frumpy hair,” and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “My punk is not for sale,” Chen tweeted last week in a conversation. “I’m not interested in anything someone has to give.”
It’s a big statement, and someone decided to put it to the test. Chen was offered 2,500 ETH ($9.5 million) on Friday via the CryptoPunks secondary market, which developer Larva Labs administer. Chen could have accepted the offer and promptly swapped his ownership of CryptoPunk #6046 for the ETH stash because of how the site operates.
Patricio Worthalter, the author of the Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP), an increasingly popular mechanism to reward communities with NFT badges for attending events, submitted the bid. “Come on Richerd,” Worthalter tweeted from the POAP Twitter account, challenging Chen to make a move. Don’t you want to be remembered as the #1 CryptoPunk sale of all time?”
In terms of dollars, it would be the largest on-chain CryptoPunk sale to date, with the current record sitting at $7.58 million (4,200 ETH at the time). In June, a CryptoPunk sold for $11.8 million at a Sotheby’s auction; however, the transaction did not occur on the Ethereum blockchain via Larva’s platform and thus did not appear on the site’s leaderboard.
In any event, $9.5 million in ETH for a JPEG avatar is a lot of money. Chen, on the other hand, rejected.
Late Friday, he explained his reasoning on Twitter, explaining that he has “built up a significant brand around” his CryptoPunk, including the connection to Manifold, a studio behind some of the most inventive NFT projects around—including work by Mad Dog Jones and Pplpleasr—that recently raised funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Initialized Capital.
“My identity, as well as the identities of other great Punks and Apes, has worth outside of the NFT.” He tweeted, “We have our brands, just like any other brand, and they have worth. This was an easy refusal for me because I respect my brand and personality.”
That’s why NFT avatars exist: they represent people on social media and in communities, and CryptoPunks and other high-end collections (like the Bored Ape Yacht Club he mentioned) are also status symbols. On Twitter, even rapper Snoop Dogg uses a CryptoPunk, and his NFT-collecting persona Cozomo de’ Medici also uses a CryptoPunk that he owns.
Some NFT collectors and producers even go by the name of their Punk. Punk 6529, for example, is well-known for his lengthy Twitter threads describing his vision for the future of NFTs and the metaverse. Meanwhile, Punk 4156 is a co-creator of the innovative Nouns NFT initiative, in which purchasers contribute to the creation of intellectual property based on the characters. Finally, Artchick, a well-known NFT developer, has changed her identity to 2476 after her CryptoPunk alter ego.
An NFT functions as a deed of ownership for valuable digital property, such as an avatar, an image, a video game item, or something else entirely. CryptoPunks was created in 2017, long before the NFT market explosion this year, and even before Ethereum established an NFT standard. There are 10,000 CryptoPunks in all, with the majority of them being given away for free when the game first launched. Since then, they’ve generated roughly $1.5 billion in trading volume between them.
Even though $9.5 million in ETH is significantly more than the average recent CryptoPunk selling price, Chen sees more value in keeping his NFT and retaining his brand. In addition, many in the NFT community have lauded him for having “diamond hands,” a term used to describe someone who is steadfast in the face of intense pressure to sell.
“In the NFT space and Punks, I have a lot of faith. I think quite a long term when it comes to [the] NFTs space,” he tweeted. “In the long run, I believe my brand, identity, and what I’m doing in the NFT area will be far more important.”