Ethereum CryptoPunks v1

Information

Created: 9 June 2017
Creator: Larva Labs
Blockchain: Ethereum

Description

The Original That Wouldn't Stay Retired

The first CryptoPunks contract lasted less than two weeks as the project's official home. Years later, collectors began paying to own it again.

For nine days in June 2017, there was no such thing as a CryptoPunk V1. There were just CryptoPunks. The label appeared later, after a replacement contract took over and the original was left behind on Ethereum.

The two versions contained the same numbered faces, but they were not the same tokens. Each had its own contract and transaction history. One would become the collection recognised around the world. The other would spend years in obscurity before collectors rediscovered it and began arguing that the discarded version was worth preserving.

The story began with Matt Hall and John Watkinson, two Canadian programmers who had run a creative technology studio called Larva Labs since 2005. In June 2017, they were experimenting with digital portraits that could be claimed, owned and transferred between people using Ethereum. The idea was simple enough. Making it work required them to build much of the machinery themselves.

Their portraits measured just 24 by 24 pixels. An algorithm combined attributes such as hairstyles, hats, glasses and other details to produce 10,000 distinct characters. The look drew on London's punk scene and the cyberpunk culture of the 1990s. Most were human, but the program also produced 88 zombies, 24 apes and just nine aliens.

There is an amusing detail about the software behind the project. According to collector and writer Sean Bonner's research, Hall and Watkinson said that CryptoPunks used the first Solidity smart contract either of them had written. Solidity was the programming language they used to build the program that would manage ownership and trading. Their first attempt would soon give them a practical lesson in the importance of getting the details right.

Nine thousand free Punks

On 9 June 2017, Larva Labs deployed the original CryptoPunks contract at 0x6Ba6f2207e343923BA692e5Cae646Fb0F566DB8D. It kept track of who owned each numbered Punk and allowed owners to transfer them. It also contained a marketplace where collectors could offer their Punks for sale.

This was before the ERC-721 standard became the established way to represent unique tokens on Ethereum. Hall and Watkinson built their own system using ideas borrowed from the existing ERC-20 token standard. It worked well enough for ownership and transfers, but CryptoPunks were not ordinary ERC-721 NFTs.

The artwork was handled separately. The contract did not contain 10,000 individual images. Instead, it stored a cryptographic hash of one large image containing the entire collection. Each Punk corresponded to a numbered position in that image. The hash acted as a digital fingerprint, allowing people to check whether the published image matched the one referenced by the contract. It could verify the image, but it could not recreate the pixels by itself.

Of the 10,000 Punks, 9,000 were available for the public to claim, while Larva Labs kept 1,000 for itself. Anyone with an Ethereum wallet could claim an available Punk by paying the transaction fee. There was no purchase price.

The launch was quiet. According to the project's later history, only a few dozen Punks had been claimed during the first week. Then Mashable published an article on 16 June 2017 asking whether the Ethereum-based project could change how people thought about digital art. Interest picked up, and the remaining Punks disappeared quickly. By 17 June, all the publicly available characters had been claimed.

One collector, known as Hemba, claimed more than 1,000 Punks, the largest single claim of the launch. At the time, claiming a thousand of them meant paying the network fees and getting there before everyone else. Nobody had a reliable way to predict what those small portraits might eventually be worth.

Once every Punk had been claimed, the marketplace's trading functions could be used. That was when the trouble began.

The marketplace that paid the wrong person

The flaw was buried in the way the contract handled a sale. Suppose you listed a Punk for one ether and somebody bought it. The contract transferred the Punk to the buyer, but it also cleared the sale listing by calling a routine intended for withdrawing an offer. That routine changed the recorded seller address to the address making the call. During a purchase, that was the buyer.

The contract then credited the sale proceeds to the address it believed belonged to the seller. By that point, it had recorded the buyer's address instead. The buyer could withdraw the ether they had just paid and keep the Punk. The actual seller received nothing.

It was not a hack in the usual sense. Nobody had broken into the contract or discovered a hidden back door. The code was doing what it had been written to do, which was precisely the problem.

Bonner's reconstruction identifies roughly 89 transactions that exploited the flaw, 63 of them involving Hemba. He also reports that Hemba later attempted to return Punks to affected sellers, with more than forty reportedly returned by 2022. These figures come from his research into the transaction history, rather than an independent audit.

The more immediate problem for Larva Labs was that the contract could not simply be patched. Once deployed, its code remained on Ethereum. The creators could warn people not to sell through the marketplace, but they could not rewrite the faulty instructions.

Their solution was to start again. On 22 June 2017, they deployed a corrected contract. The replacement, generally known as CryptoPunks V2, was ready to take over the project. Larva Labs distributed matching Punks to the original claimants and switched its website to the new contract. The migration took place around 22–23 June, depending on the date convention used.

For many collectors, the change was barely noticeable. They could still see the same faces in their accounts. Underneath, however, the tokens now belonged to a different contract, with a different transaction history.

The original Punks remained on Ethereum. Larva Labs had replaced the contract, not erased it.

The version nobody wanted

For years, the original contract attracted little attention. Its built-in marketplace was unreliable, the official website pointed elsewhere, and the wider NFT market was still developing. There was little practical reason for most collectors to go looking for the abandoned version.

Its transaction history, however, contained something the replacement could not fully reproduce. The V1 contract recorded the actual claims made in June 2017, followed by the transfers that occurred before the migration. The replacement showed the new assignments, largely dated to the airdrop. For some Punks that had changed hands during the early days, the original contract offered a clearer record of who had claimed them first.

That distinction became more interesting as people began treating early blockchain projects as historical artefacts. The original contract was not a reconstruction made years later. It was the contract the creators had deployed and the public had used.

The practical obstacle was compatibility with newer marketplaces. Because V1 did not use the ERC-721 standard, collectors could not simply list their original Punks on ordinary NFT platforms. Developers addressed this with a process called wrapping. A wrapper locks a V1 Punk in another contract and issues a corresponding ERC-721 token that can be traded through modern marketplaces. The original can later be recovered by unwrapping it.

A developer known as 0xfoobar built a wrapper in 2021. In early 2022, another developer, FrankNFT, created a wrapper that became more widely used. Wrapped V1 Punks appeared against a lavender background to distinguish them from the versions most collectors knew.

By early 2022, a small community of collectors, NFT historians and blockchain enthusiasts had begun trading these originals. Prices rose, and the V1 floor briefly reached around 20 ETH, according to Bonner. For collectors who cared about the earliest contract rather than the version endorsed by the creators, the price reflected a different sort of rarity: these were the first tokens released under the CryptoPunks name.

Larva Labs did not welcome the revival. On 25 January 2022, the company stated publicly that V1 Punks were not official CryptoPunks. It also disclosed that it owned about a thousand of them, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

The awkward part was that Larva Labs had itself begun wrapping and selling some of its V1 holdings, reportedly raising around 210 ETH. On 2 February, Matt Hall apologised in the company's Discord, calling the decision a mistake. He said the proceeds would be used to buy official Punks and that the company would match the amount with a donation to the Rainforest Foundation. At the same time, Larva Labs indicated it would take action over the V1 project's use of the artwork and name.

The episode angered many collectors, particularly those who believed the move ran against the spirit of a project built on public ownership and an open blockchain. It also exposed a difficult question: could the creators declare an earlier release unofficial after the tokens had already been claimed and traded?

Larva Labs regarded the replacement contract as the proper version to support. V1 collectors pointed out that the original contract had been deployed by the creators and distributed to the public. Neither side could change the underlying blockchain history. What they disagreed about was how that history should be understood.

The distinction between owning a token and owning the intellectual property associated with its image added another layer to the dispute. A blockchain record establishes control of a token; it does not, by itself, settle every question about copyright or commercial rights.

In March 2022, Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks intellectual property from Larva Labs, along with the majority of the developer-owned Punks. The deal included most of Larva Labs' V1 holdings. Yuga said it had no current plans for V1.

A way around the original bug

V1 found another use in 2026 when a community-built marketplace called PunksMarket introduced a way to facilitate safer sales through the original contract.

Rather than changing the old code, the new system acts as an intermediary. It temporarily handles the Punk and arranges the payment and transfer through a different sequence of operations, avoiding the original marketplace's mistake. The buyer receives the Punk and the seller receives the funds, while the old contract remains unchanged.

The workaround is a reminder that an immutable contract need not leave every problem unsolvable. Its code cannot be rewritten, but developers can build other systems around it.

Wrapped V1 Punks remain a niche collecting category. A market snapshot dated 28 September 2026 put the wrapped collection's floor at about 1.9 ETH, with roughly 5,155 Punks wrapped and around 1,161 owners. The reported trading volume was approximately 51,800 ETH. These figures come from third-party market tracking and can change quickly.

That price is far below the usual level of V2 Punks, but the difference is not simply a matter of the pictures. The competing collections carry different histories and are accepted differently by collectors. V1 appeals to those who value chronological priority and the original transaction record, despite the problems that caused its creators to abandon it.

The contract's most useful feature may be the one that made it awkward to replace: its history is still there. The website moved on, the marketplace was bypassed and the creators withdrew their endorsement. None of that removed the original release from Ethereum.

Sources

• Sean Bonner, “Top 10 Misconceptions About V1 CryptoPunks” and his later writing on V1/V2 provenance. Bonner is a collector of both versions, making his research useful while also giving him a personal stake in the debate.

• Decrypt, “CryptoPunks Controversy: Creators Apologize for ‘V1’ Ethereum NFT Sales”.

• Original CryptoPunks contract on Etherscan.

• PunksMarket, documentation of the newer system for facilitating V1 sales.