Web3 Watch: Someone bought a CryptoPunk for $16M, again

Two weeks after a CryptoPunks NFT sold for $16 million, a punk has sold for $16 million once again. 

Punk #7084, which changed hands for $16.42 million on Wednesday, is one of nine blueish-skinned alien punks, which are the collection’s most highly-coveted pieces. It narrowly topped the other alien punk that sold this month to become the second-largest CryptoPunk sale ever.  

Read more: Someone bought a CryptoPunk for $16M

The sale appears to have been directly brokered between buyer and seller. 

The punk’s apparent seller, known on X as Peruggia, said he “felt like an imposter” owning punk #7084 without “elevating” the collectible. 

“After over a year of looking around I feel I’ve found the right buyer with the right vision to appropriately elevate this asset,” Peruggia added. Peruggia walks away with quite the windfall, having acquired the NFT for $7.57 million in 2021. 

“Legend,” Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz replied.

First minted in 2017, CryptoPunks were ascendent during the NFT craze of 2021 and remain popular today. The cheapest punk on offer from the 10,000-piece set costs $166,242, and it’s the largest NFT collection by market capitalization, according to NFT Price Floor. 

Changpeng Zhao’s education initiative uses soulbound tokens

As former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao awaits sentencing for money laundering charges in the US, he’s already announced his first post-Binance venture. 

Read more: Judge orders former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao to ‘surrender’ Canadian passport

Zhao is launching Giggle Academy, a project focused on bringing free basic education to all, he announced via X this week. He added he is hiring for what will be a small team working directly with Zhao. 

Zhao released a “concept brainstorm” for the project dated February 2024 in which he says the Giggle Academy won’t have a native token but will use soulbound tokens — essentially non-transferable NFTs — to certify students’ progress on the platform. 

One interesting stat:

• $122.5 million-worth of Solana (SOL) tokens were raised in 27 memecoin pre-sales tracked this week by on-chain sleuth ZachXBT.

Also of note:

• Ghostface Killah, a member of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan, “put new exclusive music on bitcoin” as Ordinal inscriptions. 
• A developer behind the meme coin SLERF accidentally burnt $10 million worth of pre-sale tokens. The developer’s mea culpa went viral on X, and SLERF ballooned to roughly $300 million in market capitalization this week, per CoinGecko.
• MOONS, the former native token of the r/Cryptocurrency subreddit, was up on Thursday as Reddit debuted favorably on the stock market.

---

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.