10,000-piece CryptoPunks collection of Ethereum-based NFTs has surpassed $1 billion in sales, NFT aggregation site CryptoSlam.io reported.

CryptoPunks has become the second NFT project to hit the billion-dollar mark after NFT game Axie Infinity surpassed that level on August 8. Axie has reached a total trading volume of $1.6 billion so far.

The cheapest CryptoPunk currently sells for $445,000. And the prices are going up fast. Yesterday the lowest price for a single CryptoPunk was $345,000.

Certain Punks are rarer than others, and each come with different prices; the algorithm that generated the collection four years ago assigned different attributes to each Punk. For instance, some smoke cigarettes, some are zombies and others are aliens etc.

The Punks were created back in 2017 by Larva Labs, a software company run by Brooklyn-based developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson. Punks were originally intended to be used as part of a videogame, but they decided to release them as NFTs instead.

Hall and Watkinson took 1,000 Punks for themselves and let the community claim the rest for free. Punks have soared in value since then, partly because they’re one of the oldest collections of their kind.

Trading surged to new heights late last month, pushing CryptoPunks’s daily volume up from $1.8 million to $41.5 million within a week.

Things got even hotter this week. On Monday, CryptoPunks hit a daily sales record of $101 million when Visa bought one of them, and the project’s total trading volume increased by 716% in the past week, according to CryptoSlam.

The coming days are likely to keep breaking the sales records.

Source: CryptoPunks Become The 2nd NFT Project To Reach Total Sales of $1 Billion – Fintechs.fi