Ethereum CryptoPunks v2

Information

Created: 23 June 2017
Creator: Larva Labs
Blockchain: Ethereum

Description

How the Replacement Became the Collection Everyone Knows

The second CryptoPunks contract was built to fix a bug. It went on to become one of the best-known collections in digital art.

On 22 June 2017, less than two weeks after the first CryptoPunks contract appeared, Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs deployed a replacement. The new contract corrected the faulty marketplace and added a bidding system, letting collectors make offers rather than wait for a Punk to be listed at a fixed price.

The creators then distributed matching Punks to the people who had claimed them under the original contract. The website switched to the new version, and the replacement gradually became what most people meant by CryptoPunks.

The change seems straightforward in hindsight. Yet the portraits themselves did not need to be altered. V1 and V2 used the same numbered characters and the same underlying artwork. What changed was the contract managing ownership and trading. V2 became the version supported by the creators and used by the wider community.

The corrected contract is at 0xb47e3cd837dDF8e4c57F05d70Ab865de6e193BBB, commonly known as CryptoPunksMarket. Like the original, it was built before ERC-721 became the recognised standard for NFTs. It used a custom ownership system and its own marketplace, which meant other platforms needed special handling to work with the collection.

That unusual design is part of CryptoPunks' history. The collection was already operating before the infrastructure that later made NFTs easier to create and trade had settled into a common form. Hall and Watkinson did not build their project by following an established recipe. There wasn't one yet.

From a quiet corner of Ethereum

The Punks did not immediately become expensive collectibles. The market remained relatively quiet through the crypto downturn of 2018–2020, but a community formed around the portraits. Owners began using them as profile pictures in online discussions about Ethereum and cryptocurrency. A Punk could be a recognisable identity without being a photograph, and its public ownership record connected that identity to a particular token.

As the community grew, the limited supply became part of the appeal. There were 10,000 numbered characters, each with its own combination of attributes. The nine aliens were particularly scarce, while zombies and apes also stood apart from the more common human characters. The portraits were small, but their differences were immediately visible.

The fixed supply and public transaction history offered a clear way to establish which token someone held. That did not automatically make a Punk valuable, but it gave collectors something more concrete than a digital image that could be copied endlessly. Anyone could save a picture of a Punk. Only one address at a time controlled the corresponding token in the contract.

The profile-picture role helped turn ownership into a public signal. A Punk displayed on a social account could suggest that its owner had been involved in Ethereum before digital collectibles became widely discussed. As the collection's reputation grew, that signal became more valuable to some buyers.

The wider NFT boom of 2021 brought CryptoPunks to an audience far beyond its original community. The same features that appealed to early collectors, particularly the fixed supply, the recognisable portraits and the on-chain ownership records, were now being discussed in an expanding market for digital art and collectibles.

CryptoPunks also offered a model that other projects could adapt: a fixed collection of computer-generated characters, with different traits and a shared visual style. Many later profile-picture collections used variations of that format. CryptoPunks did not invent every element of it, but they became one of its most recognisable early examples.

Putting the pixels on Ethereum

There was a curious gap between owning a Punk and storing its artwork. For the first four years of the project, the V2 contract did not contain the pixels needed to reconstruct every portrait. Like the original contract, it referenced the collection's composite image through a cryptographic hash. That could verify an image, but it could not reproduce one.

In August 2021, Larva Labs deployed a separate contract called CryptoPunksData, which stored the artwork data and attributes on Ethereum. Rather than keeping 10,000 complete image files, the system used compact data describing the individual portraits, their attributes and the colour palette. From that information, the contract could return the raw pixels or generate an SVG rendering of a Punk.

The dataset was roughly 90 kilobytes and was sealed shortly after deployment. The artwork could now be reconstructed from data on the blockchain rather than relying solely on a separate image file.

This was a practical change, not just a technical curiosity. An NFT can record ownership while its artwork sits somewhere else, dependent on a website or other storage location. CryptoPunks had begun with a hash pointing to a composite image. The later contract put the underlying image data on-chain, making it possible to recreate the portraits directly from Ethereum data.

The timing coincided with the collection's sudden arrival in the public eye. CryptoPunks were turning up at major auction houses, where buyers were paying sums that would have seemed improbable when the portraits were first offered for the cost of a transaction fee.

In May 2021, Christie's sold a group of nine Punks from Larva Labs' own holdings for $16.9 million. The following month, Sotheby's sold alien Punk #7523, nicknamed “Covid Alien” because of its medical mask, for $11.8 million. In March 2021, alien Punks #3100 and #7804 had each sold for approximately 4,200 ETH, worth around $7.5–7.6 million at the time.

The highest-profile sale came in February 2022, when alien Punk #5822 sold for 8,000 ETH, approximately $23.7 million. The price reflected more than the pixels. It was one of only nine aliens in a collection whose reputation had grown alongside the market for NFTs.

These sales also brought CryptoPunks into a different conversation. Auction houses presented them alongside contemporary art, and the buyers were no longer confined to people who had followed the project from its early days. The collection had become a recognisable name in digital art, even to people who knew little about the mechanics of Ethereum.

Prices alone do not explain that change. The Punks had a clear visual identity, publicly verifiable scarcity and a record of ownership that collectors could examine. Their use as profile pictures had also made them familiar within online communities. By the time auction houses began selling them for millions, the collection already had a history and a group of owners who understood what they were buying.

Who owns the project?

The collection's growing profile created a different challenge for its creators. On 11 March 2022, Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks intellectual property from Larva Labs, along with the majority of the developer-owned Punks. Yuga, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, said it would grant commercial rights to individual token holders.

The acquisition did not mean Yuga had bought Larva Labs itself. Hall and Watkinson retained their studio and its other projects. Their announcement explained that profile-picture collections had developed into a category requiring community management and public-relations work they did not feel suited to.

The deal also highlighted a distinction that can be easy to miss when discussing NFTs. Owning the token is not necessarily the same as owning the copyright or having unrestricted commercial rights to the image. The 2022 arrangement gave Punk holders a clearer basis for commercial use, without changing the tokens themselves.

In May 2025, Yuga Labs transferred the full CryptoPunks intellectual property to the Infinite Node Foundation, known as NODE, a nonprofit focused on preserving and developing digital art. Hall and Watkinson joined NODE's advisory board. The transfer put the project's intellectual property under a preservation-oriented organisation rather than a commercial NFT company.

Institutional interest had been developing alongside the market. The ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe acquired CryptoPunks for its collection. In December 2025, the Museum of Modern Art acquired eight Punks for its permanent collection, according to NODE's chronology. In January 2026, NODE opened a permanent hub in Palo Alto with an exhibition devoted to all 10,000 Punks.

The exhibition treated the collection as more than a set of portraits. Its history of bids, sales and transfers was also part of the story. That record shows how an experiment created by two programmers came to be used as a form of online identity, traded as a collectible and eventually considered for preservation by art institutions.

CryptoPunks V2 did not become the accepted version because its pictures were better than those in V1. The portraits were the same. It became the collection everyone recognised because the corrected contract took over the website and marketplace, and the community continued to use it. From there, the project acquired a life its creators could hardly have planned in June 2017.

The original contract remains part of that history, but V2 is the version through which CryptoPunks entered the wider culture. The distinction began with a bug in a marketplace. It ended up shaping how collectors understand the difference between the first version of an object and the version the world comes to recognise.

Sources

• Larva Labs archival materials, including the project's contract and image records.

• Ethereum Improvement Proposal 721, which discusses CryptoPunks in the context of NFT standardisation.

• Christie's CryptoPunks records, including the nine-Punk sale.

• Sotheby's, reporting on the sale of Punk #7523.

• Infinite Node Foundation, covering the later stewardship and institutional history.