REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
- A CryptoPunk NFT worth nearly $1 million was sold at 95% below its market value.
- CryptoPunk 7557 was sold for 4.444 ether, around $19,366 early Monday, data from Etherscan show.
- But the listing history reveals it has been sold at much higher prices in the past.
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A CryptoPunk non-fungible token worth nearly $1 million was sold Monday at 95% below its market value in what may have been a mistaken listing.
The purchase price for CryptoPunk 7557, a female punk with a tiara, came in at 4.444 ether, which was worth around $19,366 at the time, data from Etherscan show. The Block was first to report the news.
But the listing history reveals it has been sold at higher prices. It was last bought in July for 59.99 ether, or $135,213. And in September, the previous owner put it up for sale for 8,888 ether, or $31 million.
And similar NFTs suggest a market value around $1 million. Currently, the lowest asking price for a punk with a tiara is 350 ether, or about $1.5 million, while the most recent purchase of a tiara punk went for 196.69 ether, about $843,000.
Monday's transaction may have been a victim of a mistaken period or comma. Instead of 4.444, perhaps it should have been 44.44 ether, 444.4 ether, or 4,444 ether – all of which would have been substantially more expensive.
In total, there are 10,000 24 x 24-pixel CryptoPunks with no two that are exactly alike. Other characters in the collection are composed of nine aliens, 24 apes, 88 zombies, and 6,039 males.
Most recently, a CryptoPunks NFT sold for $532 million in October only for crypto enthusiasts to discover that the transaction was inflated by the owner by buying and selling it himself for higher prices, according to Larva Lab
Still, CryptoPunks have commanded eye-watering prices. In June, one alien punk fetched $11.8 million, setting a new world auction record for a single CryptoPunk, luxury auction house Sotheby's said.
In August, global payments giant Visa bought a CryptoPunk for $150,000 triggering another massive wave of purchases with 90 of them changing hands in the space of a single hour.
NFTs have soared in popularity this year. The tokens are digital representations of artwork, sports cards, or other collectibles tied to a blockchain, typically on ethereum. Each NFT has a signature that can be verified in the public ledger and cannot be duplicated nor edited.
When people buy NFTs, they gain the rights to the unique token on the blockchain, not the artworks themselves. But the fact that the information on a blockchain is next to impossible to alter makes NFTs appealing, especially to artists.