NFT Craze Erupts, With CryptoPunks Trading Volume Surging 1,270% in Just One Week

The non-fungible token (NFT) project CryptoPunks is seeing a massive surge in trading volume over the last seven days.

DappRadar, which tracks and analyzes decentralized apps, shows that the punk-movement-inspired crypto project hit over $120 million in trading volume for a 1,270% surge over the last seven days.

CryptoPunks, one of the first NFT projects on Ethereum (ETH), is a collection of 10,000 24×24, 8-bit-style pixel art images of male and female characters inspired by the London punk movement of the 1970s. Each CryptoPunk is unique, but some have rarer features than others.

After launching the project in 2017, Larva Labs, the creator of the project, initially offered the CryptoPunks for free to anyone with an Ethereum wallet.

According to Larva Labs, the total value of all CryptoPunk sales stands at 263,180 ETH, worth about $670.29 million.

The CryptoPunk mania began on Friday as one unknown Ethereum whale initiated a buying spree of the digital characters. A look at the whales Ethereum wallet shows that the entity spent between 24 ETH to 29 ETH to purchase a single CryptoPunk. Larva Labs shows that the deep-pocketed investor now owns 104 CryptoPunks.

Friday also saw some of the biggest individual sales for the project, with CryptoPunk#5217 fetching 2,250 ETH, or roughly $5.45 million and CryptoPunk#2140 selling for 1,600 ETH, worth about $3.76 million. The sales are respectively the third and fourth largest in CryptoPunks history.