Larva Labs

di Ivan Quaroni

When the CryptoPunks project was launched in June 2017, Ethereum's ERC-721 token standard was not yet something real. Creating what would later become the most popular icons in the NFT world was Larva Labs, a New York-based studio consisting of creative engineers Matt Hall and John Watkinson who tokenized 10,000 8bit graphics portraits of characters unique in type and aesthetic characteristics. Of the entire batch, 9,000 of these unique examples were released to the market, while the remaining 1,000 remained the studio's property. In fact, CryptoPunks are a set of randomly generated avatars, some of which are rarer, such as the Zombie or Alien series. Their value is more symbolic than aesthetic because not only do they represent one of the oldest examples of Non-Fungible Tokens, but they have also been able to start a thriving economy. A market that has attracted the attention of auction houses such as Christie's, which last May sold a collection of 9 specimens for almost 17 million dollars.