A look at cryptopunks prices

Cryptopunks is a pretty cool project I found out about recently. In essence, a cryptopunk is any one of 10,000 digital characters, or "punks" that can be brought and sold on the Ethereum blockchain. The the ownership and provenance of each cryptopunk can easily be determined by looking through transactions on the blockchain. Here are a few cryptopunks:

Table 1: Some punks

At a technical level, Cryptopunks are considered non-fungible tokens (NFTs). That is, cryptopunks are tokenized in the sense that they can be held by any Ethereum address, and can be bought and sold on chain, but each token represents a specific cryptopunk, so the tokens are not interchangeable.

I was curious to see the sale prices for the punks over time. Luckily, this is tracked at nonfungible.com. After scraping and formating the data, we get a few neat plots:

First is a plot looking over the long term, from June 2017 to earlier this month (Septemebr 2020)

Keep in mind the x-axis unit is transaction number, so it's not proportional to the date (I put some labels in there as reference points) Disclaimer that the info is as a reliable as whatever is on https://nonfungible.com/market/history/cryptopunks which i'm assuming just tracks the successful buyPunk() function calls. Note that this wouldn't account for sales of cryptopunks that involve cash or payments other than Ether.

Here is a plot containing just this years data:

If you wanna play around the data or limits etc. you can duplicate it from Google docs

To browse the sales, bids, and for general information on cryotopunks check out the main website at larvalabs.com.