CryptoPunks achieved $305 million in sales in one week and is now signed with UTA, a top Hollywood agency

Larva Labs, the team behind the popular NFT project CryptoPunks, has signed a deal with Hollywood’s United Talent Agency (UTA).

According to The Hollywood Reporter on August 31, UTA will represent Larva Labs in intellectual property (IP) transactions in the fields of television, film, video games, licensing and publishing. Larva Labs' other two NFT projects, Meebits and Autoglyphs, will also be represented by UTA.

CryptoPunks was launched in 2017 and is one of the first NFT projects created on Ethereum. The IP-related transaction with UTA marks a major milestone for Larva Labs as it is one of the first examples of content created in the blockchain space entering the mainstream entertainment industry.

Lesley Silverman, head of digital assets at UTA, told The Hollywood Reporter:

“I would say this is one of the first opportunities for IP that originated entirely in the crypto world to come into the broader entertainment space, and they’ve earned that opportunity.”

“They really hit the zeitgeist in a striking way,” he added.

The CryptoPunks project maintained a relatively niche following for much of its short history before bursting onto the scene this year on a wave of growing interest in the NFT space, which saw sales of $2.5 billion in the first six months of the year.

According to the CryptoPunks website, CryptoPunks has generated a total of $1.18 billion in sales since 2017, with $304.8 million in sales in the past seven days alone. The cheapest CryptoPunk currently on sale is 115 ETH, worth about $391,000 at the time of writing.

Public figures such as rapper Jay Z, electronic dance musician Steve Aoki, and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk reportedly own CryptoPunks. As Cointelegraph reported on August 23, payment technology giant Visa purchased CryptoPunk 7610, a female head with a mohawk, clown green eyes, and lipstick, for 49.50 ETH (worth $150,000 at the time of purchase).

CryptoPunks has completed approximately $140 million worth of trades in the past 24 hours, and its lifetime trading volume has now exceeded $1 billion.

— Larva Labs (@larvalabs) August 28, 2021

There are 10,000 CryptoPunks NFTs in total, all of which are pixel art avatars of individuals generated by computers from a set of unique features. These NFTs were initially free, and in April this year, TechCrunch reported that a collector named "mr703" grabbed 703 Punks when they were first launched. At current prices, the hundreds of NFTs he kept are now worth tens of millions of dollars.

Now that Punk is VISA’s mascot, we are experiencing the end of an era: fringe art experiments are becoming a corporate marketing tool. Be happy, because this will drive the valuation of CryptoPunks through the roof.

— mr703 (@mr703_punks) August 27, 2021

Larva Labs’ other NFT projects have also followed the computer-generated route of CryptoPunks. Launched in May, Meebits NFT consists of 20,000 unique three-dimensional voxel characters created for use in the metaverse and NFT games.

Launched in 2019, Autoglyphs is a generative art project limited to 512 NFTs, where users generate a “Glyph” by donating 0.20 ETH ($687) in creation fees to Larva Labs’ chosen charity, 350.org, an organization that aims to combat climate change.