In Brief:
- Sotheby’s announced the auction ‘Punk It!’ of 104 Cryptopunks in one single lot sale.
- The sale is estimated to bring in about $20M-$30M and will be held at New York on February 23rd.
- Sotheby’s will host a live panel discussion on the history of NFTs following the auction.
Sotheby’s announced an auction of 104 CryptoPunks with an estimate of $20 million to $30 million, making it one of the largest collections of CryptoPunk to be ever auctioned off.
According to Sotheby’s, the CryptoPunks auction will take place in New York on February 23, 2022, at 7:00 PM EST, marking the auction house’s first dedicated live evening auction for NFTs.
The auction titled ‘Punk It!’ will accept crypto and the winning bidder will be able to pay in Ether, Bitcoin, USD Coin, or any fiat currency.
The 104 CryptoPunks was purchased from an anonymous collector known as 0x650d in a single blockchain transaction back in July 2021. They paid 2,500 ETH (approximately $8.5 million) for the punks.
Sotheby’s will host a live panel discussion on the history of NFTs in the run-up to the auction, analyzing how CryptoPunks went mainstream.
A presale exhibition will be hosted at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York from February 18–23, together with a virtual display at Sotheby’s HQ in Decentraland.
Michael Bouhanna, the auction house’s co-head of digital art, stated, “CryptoPunks are the original PFP [profile pic] series that created the template for other NFT projects that have followed.”
This is not the first high scale auction of Sotheby’s as last September the auction house auctioned off 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs for $24 million, exceeding Sotheby’s expected sale range of $12 million to $18 million with three days to go. Last November it also hosted the largest-ever NFT charity auction with the proceeds going to Sostento health care workers who fought against the Covid-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose crisis.
