Were V1 CryptoPunks the Real Originals?

By NFTRanker Editorial · 2026-08-20 · 19 min read

The first CryptoPunks contract came before the CryptoPunks the world knows today. Does that make V1 the real original—or simply an abandoned first attempt?

Imagine owning CryptoPunk #3100.

Now imagine learning that another CryptoPunk #3100 exists.

It has the same character. The same number. The same creators behind its origin. It lives on the same blockchain.

And the other one came first.

That is, in simplified form, the strange problem created by V1 CryptoPunks.

Most collectors know CryptoPunks as the 10,000 pixel characters launched by Larva Labs in 2017 that became one of the foundational collections of the NFT movement. They have appeared at Christie's, entered major museum collections, and helped establish the visual grammar of the 10,000-piece profile-picture collection.

But the contract that became famous as CryptoPunks was not actually the first CryptoPunks contract.

The first deployment went live on June 9, 2017.

It contained a bug.

Larva Labs replaced it.

And because Ethereum is Ethereum, the first contract never disappeared.

That leaves us with an unusually clean philosophical problem:

If blockchains are supposed to make provenance objective, why is there still an argument over which CryptoPunks are the originals?

The answer depends on what we mean by original.

Before NFTs Had a Standard

It is easy to look backward at CryptoPunks through the infrastructure that exists today.

In 2026, we expect an NFT collection to use familiar token standards, trade on third-party marketplaces, display correctly in wallets, expose metadata through predictable interfaces, and plug into an ecosystem of indexers and analytics platforms.

That world did not exist in June 2017.

Ethereum itself had been live for less than two years. OpenSea had not launched. The term "NFT" had not yet become standard vocabulary. (If token standards and on-chain ownership are new territory, our explainer on what an NFT actually is covers the fundamentals.) Most importantly, ERC-721—the token standard that would define how most Ethereum NFTs behave—had not yet been finalized.

CryptoPunks therefore used a custom smart contract.

The later ERC-721 specification would explicitly cite CryptoPunks as an existing example of a system tracking distinct digital assets. The archived Larva Labs site describes CryptoPunks as predating ERC-721 and being one of the inspirations for the standard.

That context matters.

The original CryptoPunks contract was not a polished implementation of an established NFT model. It was part of the experimentation from which the model emerged.

Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs generated 10,000 24×24 pixel characters. Nine thousand were made available to the public to claim for free, while Larva Labs retained 1,000.

According to the current official CryptoPunks history, the first contract launched on June 9, 2017. It took more than a week for the Punks to be claimed.

Then, on June 17, someone discovered a serious problem.

The First CryptoPunks Contract

The first deployment is now generally called CryptoPunks V1.

Its contract address is:

0x6Ba6f2207e343923BA692e5Cae646Fb0F566DB8D

Historical contract records place its deployment at Ethereum block 3,842,489 on June 9, 2017. A useful technical archive of the contract history is maintained in the CryptoPunks contracts repository.

The important point is simple:

V1 was not a later imitation of CryptoPunks. It was the first deployment of CryptoPunks.

That makes V1 fundamentally different from the thousands of Punk-inspired collections that came later.

It wasn't a derivative project trying to reproduce the aesthetic.

It was the initial smart contract deployed by Larva Labs for the project itself.

And then the marketplace broke.

The Bug That Split CryptoPunks in Two

CryptoPunks did something unusually ambitious for 2017: its smart contract contained its own marketplace.

That was necessary because the third-party NFT marketplaces we now take for granted did not exist.

Unfortunately, the first contract handled sale proceeds incorrectly. When a Punk was purchased, the buyer could end up able to withdraw the ETH associated with the transaction rather than the seller receiving it as intended.

The official CryptoPunks timeline describes the bug plainly: sale proceeds were redirected back to buyers instead of sellers.

Think of it like selling someone a Pokémon card for $1,000, handing over the card, and then discovering that the register also gives the buyer their $1,000 back.

The collectible still exists.

The ownership transfer still happened.

But the marketplace is economically broken.

This distinction matters because the bug did not somehow erase the original token records. It made the built-in trading mechanism unsafe.

In hindsight, it was also an early preview of a recurring theme: NFT assets tend to outlive the infrastructure built around them, a pattern we trace in Why NFT Infrastructure Keeps Failing.

In a normal web application, Larva Labs could have patched the software and redeployed the backend.

But this was a smart contract.

The contract had already been deployed to Ethereum.

The whole point of the system was that its history could not simply be rewritten.

So Larva Labs did what was practical: they deployed a replacement.

CryptoPunks Are Born Again

The corrected CryptoPunks contract is the one most people now think of simply as CryptoPunks.

Its address is:

0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865de6e193bbb

Contract-history records place that deployment at Ethereum block 3,914,495 on June 22, 2017. The official public history commonly dates the corrected CryptoPunks release to June 23.

Larva Labs migrated the project to the corrected contract, assigning replacement Punks to the appropriate holders.

From that point forward, the second contract became CryptoPunks in essentially every socially important sense.

The market formed around it.

The famous sales occurred through it.

The identities, communities, auction-house appearances and museum acquisitions centered on it.

When the Infinite NODE Foundation acquired the CryptoPunks intellectual property from Yuga Labs in 2025, the official CryptoPunks license continued to identify the 0xb47... contract as the CryptoPunks smart contract.

So the vocabulary we use today is slightly misleading.

Nobody on June 9, 2017 thought they were launching "V1 CryptoPunks."

They thought they were launching CryptoPunks.

"V1" and "V2" only became useful names after history forked.

The Blockchain Did Not Forget V1

For years, there was little reason for most collectors to care.

V2 was CryptoPunks.

V1 was the broken old contract.

The cultural and financial history of the collection accumulated around V2, while V1 mostly sat in the background.

But there is a peculiar feature of putting mistakes on an immutable ledger:

abandoned does not mean nonexistent.

Ethereum continued to preserve the V1 contract and its ownership history.

Anyone could inspect it.

Anyone could prove when it was deployed.

Anyone could compare it with the replacement.

No company needed to keep a database online for the record to survive.

This is where V1 CryptoPunks stop being merely an old software bug and become something more interesting.

They are digital artifacts of a failed first version whose failure itself became permanent.

Wrapping the Forgotten Punks

The original V1 marketplace problem made the tokens awkward and dangerous to trade directly. Community developers eventually created wrappers that could custody a V1 Punk and represent it through a more modern ERC-721-compatible token.

An early V1 wrapper appeared in 2021. The wrapper most commonly associated with today's V1 market was deployed on January 17, 2022:

0x282bdd42f4eb70e7a9d9f40c8fea0825b7f68c5d

The wrapper does not travel back to 2017 and repair the original contract.

It does something more modest.

A V1 Punk can be placed into the wrapper, and the wrapper issues a modern token representing the underlying V1 asset. The process can be reversed.

This distinction is worth keeping straight:

The V1 CryptoPunks contract is from 2017.
The modern wrapped V1 token is not.
The wrapper is infrastructure built later to make the old asset usable in a modern NFT ecosystem.

That resurgence turned an obscure piece of Ethereum history into a tradable collectible again.

It also reopened a question that the market had mostly considered settled.

Larva Labs Rejects V1—and Then Things Get Strange

Larva Labs did not accept the revived V1 collection as official CryptoPunks.

In early 2022, the company publicly argued that V1 Punks should not be treated as legitimate CryptoPunks.

That position was straightforward enough: V1 had been abandoned because of a critical flaw, V2 had been deliberately created as its replacement, and almost five years of CryptoPunks history had accumulated around V2.

Then Larva Labs itself interacted with the V1 wrapper and sold a number of V1 Punks.

The company later apologized.

Contemporary reporting from Decrypt documents the controversy, including Larva Labs' statement that interacting with and selling the V1 tokens had been a mistake. Larva Labs subsequently pursued a copyright complaint against the wrapped V1 project, and OpenSea temporarily removed the collection.

The episode became sufficiently unusual that it was later discussed in the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy in an analysis of NFTs, incentives and control.

The legal details are their own subject.

The philosophical problem is simpler:

Can a creator determine which immutable object is authentic after creating both objects?

A creator can certainly say which version they intended to continue supporting.

A community can decide which version it recognizes.

A trademark or copyright holder can define what it considers official.

But none of those actions can make the June 9 contract have been deployed after the June 22 contract.

Chronology is the one part that social consensus cannot edit.

The Pokémon Card Problem

This is easier to reason about if we leave Ethereum for a moment.

Consider Pokémon cards.

Collectors do not treat every printing of the same card as interchangeable. They construct detailed taxonomies around edition, print run, errors, corrections, scarcity and provenance.

For the 1999 English Base Set, collectors distinguish among 1st Edition, Shadowless and Unlimited printings.

PSA's Pokémon collecting guide explains that 1st Edition cards represent the first printing, while Shadowless cards came after the 1st Edition run but retained several characteristics of the earlier design. Later Unlimited cards added further visual changes.

The underlying character can be identical.

The card number can be identical.

The manufacturer can be identical.

Yet collectors care deeply about which physical history produced the object.

Errors make the analogy even more useful.

PSA maintains an entire Pokémon Error Guide covering cards with printing mistakes, incorrect text, missing elements and other production anomalies.

A manufacturer correcting an error does not cause the erroneous printing to cease to exist.

Sometimes the mistake becomes part of what collectors value.

Now imagine a hypothetical case.

A company prints Charizard Batch A.

The cards are released.

Then the company discovers a major production error, recalls the release and prints Charizard Batch B.

Batch B becomes the version used by players, advertised by the company and recognized for decades.

Twenty years later, collectors rediscover surviving Batch A cards.

Which ones are the originals?

There are several defensible answers:

Batch A is the first printing.
Batch B is the canonical release.
Batch A is the more historically primitive artifact.
Batch B is the version that actually created the cultural phenomenon.
Both belong to the history, but they represent different categories.

This is not a perfect analogy. A physical trading card and an Ethereum smart contract are different kinds of objects.

But the collector logic is useful.

Chronology and canon are not the same thing.

And collectible markets have been separating them for decades.

So, Are V1 CryptoPunks the Real Originals?

We can make the question easier by decomposing the word original.

1. Which contract came first?

V1.

This is the least controversial part of the story.

The V1 contract was deployed on June 9, 2017. The replacement contract came later.

Ethereum provides unusually strong evidence for this claim because both histories remain publicly inspectable.

If "original" means first deployed CryptoPunks contract, V1 wins.

2. Which collection reflects Larva Labs' intended corrected product?

V2.

Larva Labs discovered a critical bug, replaced the contract and migrated the collection.

If "original" means the version the creators deliberately chose to continue, V2 has the stronger claim.

3. Which collection has cultural continuity?

Again, V2 by an enormous margin.

The CryptoPunks that became an icon of the NFT movement are the canonical Punks.

The multibillion-dollar historical trading volume, major auction sales, museum acquisitions, identities and years of community activity overwhelmingly center on V2.

The current steward of the CryptoPunks IP, the Infinite NODE Foundation, also recognizes the V2 contract as the official CryptoPunks contract.

4. Which collection has chronological provenance?

This is where V1 becomes impossible to dismiss.

The blockchain does not care that the developers later regretted the contract.

It records a simpler fact:

this happened first.

5. Which one should collectors value more?

That is not a technical question.

It is a market question, a cultural question and ultimately a preference question.

And the market currently has a very clear answer.

The Market Has Voted—At Least for Now

As of August 20, 2026, CoinGecko showed the following snapshot:

	CryptoPunks (canonical/V2)	CryptoPunks V1 (wrapped)
Floor price	~32.41 ETH	~2.25 ETH
USD floor	~$75,207	~$5,223
Tracked assets	9,994	5,150 wrapped
Estimated market cap	~$751.6M	~$26.9M

Sources: CryptoPunks on CoinGecko and CryptoPunks V1 (wrapped) on CoinGecko.

On those figures, canonical CryptoPunks carry roughly 28 times the reported market capitalization and more than 14 times the floor price of wrapped V1 Punks.

That is not a close vote.

But there is an important caveat.

NFT "market cap" is generally an estimate produced by multiplying a collection's floor price by a tracked supply. CoinGecko currently tracks roughly 5,150 wrapped V1 assets rather than treating all original V1 token records as actively circulating wrapped NFTs. So the two market-cap figures are useful indicators of market scale, but they are not perfectly apples-to-apples measures of the historical collections.

The floor-price difference gives us a cleaner observation:

collectors currently assign far more economic value to canonical V2 CryptoPunks.

Does that settle the historical question?

Not necessarily.

Markets price the stories collectors care about today.

Those stories can change.

Vintage card collectors know this well. A once-overlooked variation can become important when the market develops a better understanding of its place in a production history.

V1 does not need to surpass V2 to become historically significant.

A Shadowless Charizard does not have to replace a 1st Edition Charizard to matter.

Code Is Immutable. Meaning Isn't.

Crypto is often described as if blockchains remove subjectivity from ownership.

They do remove some kinds of subjectivity.

Ethereum can tell us:

which contract was deployed first;
which address owned a token at a given point;
when a transaction occurred;
which code executed;
which Punk ID moved from one address to another.

Those are objective properties of the ledger.

But Ethereum cannot tell us:

which contract deserves to be called "official";
which version collectors should value more;
whether creator intent outranks chronology;
whether a failed implementation is historically important;
what a Punk means to the culture around it.

That layer still belongs to humans.

In fact, the ERC-721 specification itself makes a related observation: determining which smart contracts are well-known or canonical is outside the scope of the token standard.

That is a surprisingly deep limitation.

A blockchain can preserve provenance without being able to manufacture legitimacy.

Blockchains solve provenance better than they solve meaning.

V1 CryptoPunks may be one of the earliest and clearest demonstrations of that difference.

The ledger did not eliminate social consensus.

It simply gave social consensus a harder set of facts to argue over.

Maybe "Which One Is Real?" Is the Wrong Question

There is a tendency in crypto to force every historical disagreement into a binary.

Real or fake.

Canonical or illegitimate.

Original or copy.

But collectibles often become easier to understand when we use more precise categories.

A reasonable taxonomy might be:

V1 CryptoPunks: the first deployed CryptoPunks contract.

V2 CryptoPunks: the corrected and canonical CryptoPunks collection.

Those statements can both be true.

We do not need to pretend V1 came second in order to recognize V2's cultural legitimacy.

And we do not need to pretend V2 is merely a "copy" in order to acknowledge that V1 came first.

The relationship is more interesting than either maximalist interpretation.

V1 is part software artifact, part error edition, part digital archaeology.

V2 is the version through which CryptoPunks became CryptoPunks.

The first contains chronological primacy.

The second contains canonical primacy.

What V1 Punks Tell Us About NFT Value

The V1 story also exposes a broader problem with how NFT value is often discussed.

Collectors frequently reduce an NFT to two variables:

rarity + price.

But historical collectibles rarely work that way.

Value can emerge from:

scarcity;
aesthetics;
provenance;
edition;
chronology;
creator intent;
technical history;
cultural recognition;
community preference;
mistakes;
memes;
and the stories collectors agree are worth preserving.

V1 CryptoPunks are interesting precisely because those signals disagree.

They are chronologically earlier but economically cheaper.

They have direct Larva Labs provenance but were rejected by Larva Labs as the canonical collection.

They contain the same underlying Punk identities but belong to a different contract history.

They were largely ignored for years and later revived because collectors began treating old smart contracts as historical artifacts.

This is also why NFTRanker treats community preference as a signal distinct from floor price or trait rarity.

A market tells us what people are willing to pay.

Rarity tells us how statistically scarce a trait is.

A head-to-head preference ranking tells us something else: which NFTs people actually choose when asked to compare them directly.

None of those signals has to be the single definition of value. We dig deeper into that tension in NFT Rarity vs. Community Ranking and in our guide on how to find the best NFTs in a collection.

The V1/V2 argument is also one instance of a much larger question. Chronology, rarity and price all fail to explain why some early NFTs are still discussed and others vanished. We set out a framework for that in What Makes an NFT Historically Important?

And you can put it into practice with the Punks themselves: canonical CryptoPunks are live on NFTRanker today. Browse the community-ranked CryptoPunks, or vote on Punk matchups and help decide which Punks the community actually prefers.

For more on that distinction, see What is NFTRanker? and the NFTRanker guides.

The Blockchain Remembers Both

Canonical CryptoPunks are clearly the CryptoPunks that became a global cultural object.

Their market is larger.

Their institutional recognition is stronger.

Their creator-backed continuity is stronger.

Their place in the NFT canon is stronger.

But V1 Punks are something stranger.

They are the CryptoPunks that existed before everyone agreed what CryptoPunks were.

That makes them difficult to fit into the normal language of originals and copies.

A corrected Pokémon print run does not travel backward through time and destroy the earlier printing.

Likewise, five years of social consensus around V2 cannot make the V1 deployment have happened later.

So perhaps the cleanest answer is this:

V1 CryptoPunks are the chronological originals. V2 CryptoPunks are the canonical originals.

Whether the first category should ever become more valuable than the second is a question markets will answer over time.

But the historical ordering is already settled.

Ethereum recorded that part in 2017.

The more interesting questions remain open:

If provenance matters in digital collecting, how much should being first matter?

When creator intent conflicts with immutable chronology, which one should collectors privilege?

And fifty years from now, will collectors care more about which CryptoPunks were canonical—or which contract came first?

The blockchain has already answered the easiest question.

V1 came first.

What that should mean is still being decided by everyone else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are V1 CryptoPunks?

V1 CryptoPunks are the token records from the first CryptoPunks smart contract deployed by Larva Labs on Ethereum on June 9, 2017. That contract contained a marketplace bug and was replaced by a corrected contract later that month.

Did V1 CryptoPunks come before regular CryptoPunks?

Yes, chronologically. The V1 contract was deployed on June 9, 2017. The replacement contract now recognized as canonical CryptoPunks was deployed on June 22, with the corrected public release generally dated June 23.

Why were V1 CryptoPunks replaced?

The original contract contained a marketplace flaw that could allow sale proceeds to be returned to the buyer rather than properly paid to the seller. Larva Labs deployed a corrected contract and migrated the project to it.

Are V1 CryptoPunks made by Larva Labs?

The underlying V1 smart contract was deployed by Larva Labs as the original CryptoPunks contract. The modern V1 wrapper and community infrastructure were created later by community developers and should not be confused with the original 2017 deployment.

Are V1 CryptoPunks ERC-721 NFTs?

The original CryptoPunks contracts predate ERC-721 and use a custom design that is partially ERC-20-compatible. Modern wrapped V1 Punks use an ERC-721 wrapper so they can interact more easily with today's NFT marketplaces and infrastructure.

What is the difference between V1 and V2 CryptoPunks?

V1 refers to the first, buggy CryptoPunks contract. V2 refers to the corrected contract that Larva Labs deployed afterward and that became the canonical CryptoPunks collection recognized by the broader market and current CryptoPunks stewardship.

Can you rank CryptoPunks on NFTRanker?

Yes. The canonical CryptoPunks collection is rankable on NFTRanker, where collectors vote on head-to-head matchups to build a community-preference ranking of the Punks — a signal distinct from trait rarity or floor price.

Are V1 CryptoPunks the original CryptoPunks?

Chronologically, yes: V1 comes from the first CryptoPunks contract deployed by Larva Labs. Culturally and officially, however, the replacement V2 contract became the canonical CryptoPunks collection. Whether V1 should therefore be called the "real original" depends on whether original means first deployment, creator intent, or cultural legitimacy.