【Lina Romay】

The Lina RomayNFT fever is still raging.

Nine CryptoPunks, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) residing on the Ethereum network, have been sold at an auction at Christie's for $16,962,500.

Larva Labs, the company who created CryptoPunks, is one of the pioneers in the NFT space, and CryptoPunks are among the most coveted NFTs. For a detailed overview of what NFTs are, check our guide here; the short version is that they're digital artworks that reside on a blockchain. They share properties with cryptocurrency tokens (coins), but they're unique, and cannot be altered once they've been minted.

CryptoPunks, in particular, are pixelated digital portraits of little “punks,” each of them having a specific combinations of traits (think glasses, haircut, beard) that makes every one unique.

While $17 million sounds like a pretty hefty price to pay for nine pixelized faces, it's not even the biggest NFT sale — in March, artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, sold his NFT artwork for more than $69 million, also at a Christie's auction.

Larva Labs originally created 10,000 CryptoPunks in 2017. The company gave the majority of them away, but kept some for themselves, and is now making good money selling them.

These particular CryptoPunks have attained such a high price mostly because they're rare. Only 10,000 CryptoPunks have ever been created; each is unique, but they share certain traits which vary in rarity. In particular, the blue-faced "Alien" CryptoPunk is one of only nine Aliens, making it among the rarest CryptoPunk in existence. Information on all the CryptoPunks in existence can be found on Larva Labs' website.

As for Christie's, it appears that the NFT auctions will keep going; bids for an NFT by Emily Ratajkowski start in two days.

Related Video: A beginner's guide to NFTs, the crypto potentially worth millions

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