CryptoPunks come to art museums as Yuga Labs starts donating Ethereum NFTs

Yuga Labs has made a plan to donate CryptoPunks NFTs to modern art museums around the world, starting with Punk #305. Ethereum NFT will be donated to Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which offers free admission, and will be on view there after a private unveiling event takes place on December 2 during Art Basel.

Punk #305 was chosen in part because the number corresponds to one of Miami’s area codes: 305. Miami is also the hometown of two of Yuga’s co-founders, Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano, who are also known by their respective Bored Ape Yacht Club alter ego, Gordon Goner and Garga.

It’s the first donation in a larger initiative called the Punks Legacy Project. Noah Davis, Yuga’s brand manager for CryptoPunks, said Decrypt that “many more” of the NFTs will be donated to other museums in the future.

“It’s not about a certain number of punks, but rather about finding museums and legacy arts organizations that want to go into Web3 for the right reasons,” Davis said. “Quality over quantity.”

While NFT skeptics may regard such works as little more than pixels on a digital canvas, CryptoPunks have proven influential in the Web3 world in defining the template for tokenized profile picture (PFP) projects. Larva Labs launched the project in 2017 with 10,000 pixel faces, each with a randomized set of characteristics and functions.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs bought the IP from Larva Labs in March and soon after installed Davis – formerly of auction house Christie’s – to oversee their future and help establish their legacy as NFT artwork. Besides their historical significance, Davis believes that the punks are true works of art in their own right.

“CryptoPunks are contemporary art. They belong in museums,” Davis said in a statement, calling NFT’s “equal parts art, graphic design, technology and radical communal experiment.”

The legacy of punks

Since launching via a free coin in 2017, CryptoPunks has generated over $2.4 billion in secondary trading volume to date, per data from CryptoSlam. One Punk today will run a buyer at least 64.5 ETH, or $81,200 currently, while the most expensive punk sale of all time weighed in at 8,000 ETH – a huge 23.7 million dollars when it was sold in February.

Punks are a typical example of PFP avatar NFTs, which many owners use as profile pictures across social networks. Many owners see their punk as a core part of their online brand identity, and some have built large social media followings around the punk’s vision and corresponding numbers.

The pseudonymous one Punk #6529-who started a venture capital firm, 6529 Capital, based on their identity – is a good example of this. Another example is 4156a co-creator of Noun NFT project who built an identity around his punk before selling NFT for ETH worth over 10 million dollars in December 2021.

Pseudonymous NFT trader g money is another notable standout, and he told Decrypt that he has owned his CryptoPunken since January 2021. He paid about USD 170,000 in ETH for it and has described it as a “flex” like wearing a Rolex, “but digital.”

While gmoney’s Punk is a big part of his online identity, he said that’s not all. “Yeah, I could be gmoney without my punk,” he said Decrypt. “I think people follow me [because] of my thoughts around NFTs, and not just my PFP.”

Many owners have a personal connection to their CryptoPunks, but on a broader scale, Yuga Labs is clearly committed to establishing art world credentials and historical narrative for Ethereum NFTs. There is a key difference between the punks and Yuga’s own Bored Apes, as the company now monitors both.

“The communities are very different, but there is a common love for the underlying technology,” Yugas Solano told me Decrypt. “Both communities want to explore, in different ways, what it means to truly own a digital asset.”