As the original CryptoPunks NFT collection continues to soar in value, the unprecedented trend has sparked a debate among analysts and collectors. The floor price for a CryptoPunk has increased to 100 ETH. Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan unsurprisingly has a bullish outlook on the demand, predicting it could reach $20 billion over the next year. While all this activity has contributed to an overall bullish trend in the NFT market, analysts are watching the collection’s performance like a hawk.
In fact, a single buyer recently swept 76 CryptoPunks for about $13.5 million in a span of five hours on July 21. This became the biggest sweep since 2021, showing a resurgence in interest for the collection. On that very day, the entire NFT market cap exploded by $1 billion. It went up $5.1 billion, to a whopping $6.3 billion! Daily NFT volumes climbed as well, pushing up 287% to $37.4 million.
The surging demand for CryptoPunks, and NFTs in general, has raised the eyebrows of prominent industry figures, including BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes. Hayes thinks that CryptoPunks will do better than Ethereum (ETH) in this crypto market cycle.
"Cryptopunks will outperform $ETH this cycle in $ terms bc $ETH bag holders will flex in NFTs. It’s an internet status game." - Arthur Hayes
Hayes has named “internet status culture” as the biggest force behind CryptoPunks’ possible outperformance.
Then the CryptoPunks floor would be over 32x the net new supply. The rarity of CryptoPunks is another contributing reason for increasing its price.
"8,000,000,000 people on earth, 10,000 CryptoPunks. Do the math." - Parzival
At the same time, Ethereum has experienced bullish price action. Since May 15, spot Ethereum ETFs and corporate treasuries have collectively bought 2.83 million ETH worth over $10 billion. Currently, Ethereum is trading just at $3,672. This has caused it to skyrocket over 63% in just the past 30 days and even recently busting over the $3,800 mark earlier this week!
