Punk Whale Wakes Up

Some of them have never become active again since claiming their punks. Some punk owners believe that those inactive wallets are lost forever, effectively reducing the amounts of available punks.

CryptoPunks leaderboard (2021-01-17 14:30 UTC)

The largest holders of CryptoPunks are, unsurprisingly, the creators, Larva Labs (0xc352b534e8b98). At position three is the Wrapped CryptoPunks contract, holding these punks in escrow until they get unwrapped (0xb7f7f6c52f2e2). In between those two massive accounts sits one CryptoPunks whale (0xcbd482af76059), which until yesterday held 703 CryptoPunks (worth somewhere north of 4,000 ETH).

Ten days ago, this wallet became active by moving 0.05 Ether back into it. This was noticed by Barthazian, Redlioneye, and others, who started making bids on the account’s punks. Barthazian went so far as to send them a message via an Ethereum transaction reading »can you accept the bid on your punk please :-D«.

At 10:44:11 UTC, this whale accepted the first bid. And the punks Discord went wild. The whale accepted two more bids by Redlioneye, then took out their winnings, and besides an accidental 123 Wei sale of a fourth punk, didn’t interact more.

The punks discord is still discussing the implications of the largest unknown wallet becoming active after three years. It ranges from utter excitement of new punks being de facto available again (over 500 ETH of active bids were made on the account, most of them from today) to worries about an uncontrolled dump of 700 punks affecting the punks economy negatively.

So far, the whale has not identified themself, so we can only wait and see. I am excited! I am a believer that events like these and the colourful history of CryptoPunks is a major part of what makes them so appealing. If the whale sells 700 punks, there will be many opportunities for old and new punks collectors.