Million-Dollar Apes

An empty auction room in the evening: rows of chairs, a podium, and beside it on an easel a gilded frame with nothing inside. — An NFT buyer gets a record saying the token belongs to their wallet. Anyone can download the picture itself.

In June 2017 two Canadian programmers from the studio Larva Labs drew ten thousand little pixel people in the style of eighties video games. Each had its own hairdo, glasses, cigarette or hat, and each was recorded on Ethereum as a separate unique token with a number. They were called CryptoPunks and given away for free, to anyone who had a wallet and was willing to pay a tiny network fee. They were all claimed within a week.

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