Web3 Watch: ‘Buy Bitcoin’ sign, first post-halving satoshi go up for sale

Plus, a CryptoPunk sells for $12 million and Blockworks buys a goat

article-image

morokey/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

If something in crypto can be sold, there’s a good chance it will be.

This week, a yellow legal pad with “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it sold for 16 bitcoin, worth over $1 million. 

The legal pad was held up behind then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 Congressional hearing in an episode that’s become iconic in the Bitcoin community. The auction for the piece of memorabilia was held at PubKey, a New York City bar popular among Bitcoiners.

Christian Langalis, the then-intern on Capitol Hill who flashed the Buy Bitcoin sign, took home most of the auction’s proceeds. 

Also this week, the crypto exchange CoinEx auctioned off the first satoshi of a block mined after Bitcoin’s recent halving event. Satoshis, or sats, are Bitcoin’s smallest unit and have been popularized recently by Ordinals being inscribed on them. CoinEx got access to the satoshi by way of a partnership with mining pool ViaBTC.

The sat netted double what the “Buy Bitcoin” sign did, selling in the end for $2.1 million.

Yet another alien punk sale

Bitcoin memorabilia weren’t the only items selling this week. For the third time since the beginning of March, a CryptoPunk sold for more than $10 million. 

On Thursday, Punk #635 sold for $12.41 million, making it the fourth-most expensive punk sale ever. The second- and third-largest sales came on March 20 and March 4, respectively. 

Read more: Someone bought a CryptoPunk for $16M

As with the other recent sales, Punk #635 is an alien punk, or one of nine CryptoPunks out of the 10,000 that have blue-ish skin. 

“To me, owning a Punk has never been about the floor price…It’s about my belief that NFTs will be the future of ownership,” the punk’s apparent new owner wrote on X.

One interesting stat:

  • Crypto-focused VC firm Stratos reported that its investment in the memecoin DogWifHat yielded a 300x return for the fund in Q1.

Also of note:


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 24 - 26, 2026

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Research Report Templates (19).png

Research

Built on Solana, Loopscale is an orderbook-based lending protocol that pairs the efficiency of direct market matching with the flexibility and UX of modular protocols. We believe Loopscale can help scale NNAs in Solana DeFi and act as their foundational credit layer. Stablecoin deposits and select USD-pegged Loops on Loopscale are offering competitive yields, with an additional upside from farming the protocol and adjacent ecosystem projects (e.g., OnRe, Hylo) for potential future airdrops.

article-image

A recent mistrial illustrates how juries need more background information when it comes to judging complex systems like Ethereum

article-image

The Senate advanced a bipartisan funding package aimed at ending the shutdown, and bitcoin rose from its $100K bottom

article-image

The team is betting that a 20-minute hardware trust window beats a new alt-L1

article-image

To learn how to navigate the physical world, robots need visual data

article-image

Risks and illiquidity come to surface in the wake of a red October

article-image

Advice from Neal Stephenson, Kyle Broflovski, and Crypto Mom on building in crypto