History of CryptoPunks
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Like any historical, ground-breaking project, CryptoPunks' history is complex, nuanced, and incredibly interesting.
The CryptoPunks launched in June 2017 to little fanfare and were completely free for anyone to claim via an Ethereum smart contract. Over a week went by before the full 10,000 were claimed by over a hundred keen crypto-goers. Soon after, a small but critical issue was identified within the smart contract once listings began to appear. The method offerpunkforsale was not correctly coded and users were able to 'purchase' a Punk, exchanging their ETH for the listed Punk, then execute the withdraw command and receive the ETH that was paid to the contract. That ETH should not have been accessible to the buyer but only to the seller (as it is today with the v2 contract). The issue with the contract was caused by just one line of code:
The well-known early Punk claimer , in the course of a legitimate purchase, discovered this exploit and used it to heist dozens of Punks listed for sale (Hemba has since returned more than 30 v1 Punks from that exploit to anyone that was affected). At the time, owners were warned not to interact with the smart contract until the developers worked out a solution to this issue.
Larva Labs alerted the public to the bug via this tweet:
In the days following, Larva Labs issued a new smart contract with the bug removed and added bid functions. On 23 June 2017, they 're-minted' all of the Punks and airdropped them back to the initial claimants.
Note that all 10,000 Punks and their IDs are identical between both versions of the contract. v1 and v2 Punks are identical in their aesthetic, though non-fungible and unique in their tokening as they are seperate contracts.
There isn't much to say regarding this time period for CryptoPunks save for a few sweeps and pumps from the minority of people who were aware of, and interested in, them. NFTs and crypto went through a deep, cold and long bear market. Buyers, bidders, sellers and attention was scarce.
It wasn't until September 2020 that there was a marked spike in social interest and sales.
For reference, here's an All-Time CryptoPunks sales volume, data, graphs, & charts:
Here is a link to some of the earliest days of the CryptoPunks Discord chat:
