Original title: CryptoPunks Are Heating Back Up
Original author: William M. Peaster, Bankless
Original compilation: Deep Chao TechFlow
Introduction: CryptoPunks has seen a surge in transactions recently, with two rare coins sold for a total of at least approximately US$3.9 million. Different from the past, ETH is still far below its high point when this round of heating up, and stablecoin transactions, new loans, and OTC infrastructure are also rewriting the transaction structure.
CryptoPunks trading volume is soaring, with a rare “holy grail” model from the series once again fetching millions of dollars. Here's everything you need to know.
In April of this year, I wrote Are NFTs Back , discussing the unexpected rally in the top Ethereum NFT series at the time. At the end of the article, I pointed out: in the end, it is trading volume that really plays a decisive role, not just floor price fluctuations.
Fast forward to today, and CryptoPunks is seeing the beginning of a new round of uptick in volume. Sales have exploded in recent weeks, and yesterday two of the rarest Punk sold for a combined total of at least about $3.9 million.
In addition, a new layer of infrastructure has become involved in the market: tools that did not exist in past cycles are using Punk for collateralized lending, brokering, buying and redistribution. However, this rebound also has some intriguing quirks, let’s take a look at it.
Volume surges
Last week, from September 19 to September 26, according to CryptoSlam statistics, Punk topped the sales list of the NFT series with an unencapsulated transaction volume of approximately US$8.2 million. This was approximately 11.7 times higher than the previous week.
What's the trigger? There was a wave of buying around September 23: Buyers allegedly bought about 63 Punk for about $6 million, and raised the floor price from about 29 ETH to about 34 ETH in about two days.
To put this pulse into a larger context: In the past four weeks, the official Punks market, which only counts unpackaged Punk transactions, has recorded a cumulative sales volume of approximately 4,490 ETH (approximately $12 million). In other words, about half of them occurred in the days surrounding the September 23 sweep.
As for the floor price, it is much calmer. It currently sits at about 33 ETH (about $89,000), up about 31% from January 1, but still about 39% lower than the roughly 54 ETH hit at the end of July 2025. In other words, for now at least, NFTs are moving faster than prices.
Big deal on rare models
Yesterday, October 1st, two of the rarest Punk were traded for USDC in about 12 hours, both completed through GONDI - a popular NFT lending platform whose "Sell & Repay" feature allows borrowers to sell the NFT that has been used as collateral for the loan and pay off the debt in one transaction.
The first transaction was Punk #8348, the only Punk with seven attributes. The transaction price was 3 million USDC plus an undisclosed amount, setting the largest single transaction in the history of GONDI. The seller, seedphrase, has held it since 2020 and said it was an offer he "couldn't refuse".
The second transaction was Punk #3609, one of the 88 highly sought-after zombie Punk. The transaction price was 875,000 USDC, which was approximately 326 ETH at the time; the transaction was brokered by Eli Scheinman, founder of Canon Punks.
It is worth noting that both Punk are circulated in the form of encapsulated CryptoPunks 721 tokens, and buyers also pay in USDC instead of ETH.
In addition, neither transaction threatened the record of the series - that is, the 8,000 ETH transaction of Alien #5822 in 2022; and the transaction price of #3609 was actually lower than the 440 ETH it obtained in May 2025, reminding people: rare models do not only go up.
New market “pipeline”
Punks was born in 2017, before the ERC-721 NFT standard existed, so for years they were primarily traded on their own built-in ETH-denominated market. Today, a whole suite of tools and services has been stacked around this original contract:
Put these projects together and see how they work together. Every Punk lying around in Loans, or in PunkStrategy, or in FWA, means there's one less one hanging out near the floor. The extent to which these new mechanisms have thinned the floor supply and amplified market fluctuations is still an open question, but it is worth keeping an eye on this clue.
A different round of rise
In past cycles, Punk market activity has often coincided with ETH strength. When the floor price hit about 54 ETH (over $200,000) at the end of July 2025, ETH was trading around $3,745 and hit an all-time high of about $4,954 on August 24, 2025.
This time it's slightly different. ETH is currently around $2,690, about 46% below its peak; while ETH has not been completely sluggish recently, Punk is heating up in the absence of a breakthrough ETH strength.
Either Punk is acting as an early readout of on-chain risk appetite, or they are starting to trade on their own logic.
Of course, the rare models mentioned above are traded in USDC, which points to the latter. Paying in stablecoins suggests that buyers want exposure to Punk but don’t want the volatility of ETH, or are entering via a TradFi channel.
Whatever the explanation, this batch of Ethereum-native NFTs is moving again, and there’s a new set of building blocks around. What remains to be seen is whether this volume pulse can be sustained and whether it translates into broader NFT bullishness.