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What are CryptoPunks?
CryptoPunks are 10,000 small pixel-art characters on Ethereum, made by Larva Labs in June 2017 and given away free to anyone with an Ethereum wallet. They came before the ERC-721 standard that most NFTs now use. The project's rights passed to Yuga Labs in 2022 and to a nonprofit, the Infinite Node Foundation, in 2025.
What it means for you
CryptoPunks were made before the NFT standard existed, so they run on their own contract rather than ERC-721. Some wallets and marketplaces handle them only through a wrapped version, so check which version you are looking at.
How it works
Larva Labs, the creator, describes them as 10,000 unique 24x24 pixel characters (humans, apes, zombies and aliens), generated by an algorithm and launched in June 2017. Anyone with an Ethereum wallet could claim one free, and it took eight days for all of them to be claimed. Larva Labs says the project's intellectual property was acquired by Yuga Labs in 2022 and passed to the digital art nonprofit Infinite Node Foundation in 2025. It says the ERC-721 standard, which formally defined NFTs on Ethereum, was first proposed in late 2017, after CryptoPunks.
Source: Larva Labs: CryptoPunks · checked 5 October 2026
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