Some NFTs Have Sold for Millions - How Much Are They Worth Today?
Date: 2024-08-22 Author: Henry Casey Categories: CRYPTO PAYMENTS
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) Aren't What They Used to Be. At the height of the NFT craze, it seemed like the entire world might be engulfed in digital art mania.
NFT collections like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes have captured the cultural zeitgeist, gaining momentum in 2021 and 2022. Celebrities like Justin Bieber, LeBron James, Tony Hawk, and Madonna have purchased the pieces, sparking a flurry of headlines across mainstream media.
Snoop Dogg and Eminem Performed as Bored Ape Yacht Club Avatars at the MTV Video Music Awards. In January 2022, American socialite Paris Hilton revealed her love for NFTs on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
The market peaked a few months later in May 2022, with a market cap of $526 billion. Today, the total market value is approaching $18 billion, a drop of 97%. So, what do these NFT investments look like today?
CryptoPunks represents one of the largest and most recognizable series of NFTs ever sold. Launched on the Ethereum blockchain in 2017 by Larva Labs, the collection of 10,000 pixelated 24x24 “punk” characters pioneered the crypto art movement.
In 2021, Christie’s auction house in London put a lot of nine CryptoPunks up for auction for $16.9 million. According to Christie’s, the CryptoPunk collection was inspired by the London punk scene, the film Blade Runner, and William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.
On February 12, 2022, CryptoPunk #5822 was sold for 8,000 ETH, or $23.7 million. It was purchased by Deepak Thapliyal, CEO of blockchain banking company Chain. Just a month later, Thapliyal rejected an offer of 10,000 ETH for his punk, which would have netted him an almost immediate profit of $2 million.
CryptoPunk #5822 is one of nine alien CryptoPunks in existence. In April 2024, another Alien CryptoPunk, #635, sold for 4,000 ETH, or $12.4 million, while Alien CryptoPunk #3100 sold for 4,500 ETH in March 2024. These sales show that the value of Taplial’s investment has roughly halved in just two years.
Interest in CryptoPunks may have died down, but interest in Ether has not. Released in 2017, EtherRock is a collection of 100 “Pet Rocks” based on a free ClipArt image. All the rocks in the EtherRock series are the same size and shape, but vary in color. Most rocks are gray or brown, but the rarest type of EtherRock is blue. On November 2, 2021, EtherRock #93, a common gray rock, sold for 420 ETH. What prompted a buyer to pay an outrageous $1.8 million for this effortless JPEG? Perhaps the key to what swayed them lies in the amount of Ethereum paid.
Since EtherRock is nearly identical, it’s easy to make a price comparison. EtherRock is currently selling for around ~200 ETH, in the $750,000–$800,000 range, or $1 million less than it was in 2021.
Investors who put money into less high-profile projects have likely done even worse. In September 2023, a dappGambl report found that of the 73,257 NFT collections it identified, 69,795 had a market cap of 0 ETH. DappGambl concluded that 95% of people who own NFT collections have investments valued at zero.
However, collectors may argue that focusing solely on the price of NFTs is limiting. Art is, after all, for the soul, not for simple price speculation. And beyond the aesthetics of the technical field, the blockchain technology behind NFTs has also proven to be reliable.
