CryptoPunks Briefly Overtook Bored Apes by NFT Floor Price

CryptoPunks briefly overtook Bored Ape Yacht Club by floor price on August 21, 2022, interrupting BAYC’s extended hold on the most closely watched ranking among high-value Ethereum profile-picture collections.

A contemporaneous observation reported at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time placed the lowest listed CryptoPunk at 66.45 ETH and the lowest listed Bored Ape at 64.99 ETH. The 1.46 ETH difference put the CryptoPunks floor approximately 2.25% above BAYC’s, according to a Coinburn calculation from those quoted listings.

The reversal did not last. By a second observation reported at 4:00 p.m. Eastern, BAYC’s floor had risen to 68.48 ETH while CryptoPunks remained at 66.45 ETH. The two snapshots therefore establish a brief change in ranking, not a completed daily close or a permanent transfer of market leadership.

A rivalry inside one corporate portfolio

The comparison carried symbolic weight because CryptoPunks and BAYC represented two different eras of the NFT market. CryptoPunks originated in 2017, while BAYC launched in 2021 and became a prominent collection during that year’s expansion in NFT trading and celebrity participation.

By August 21, 2022, however, both collections’ intellectual property sat under Yuga Labs. The company announced on March 11, 2022 that it had acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property from Larva Labs. That common ownership did not merge the collections’ tokens, holders or secondary-market order books. Their respective floor prices still reflected separate sets of listings and buyers.

Decrypt’s August 21 account, citing NFT Price Floor, described the crossover as a momentary event followed by a rapid BAYC recovery. It also reported that both collections had lost value over the preceding 30 days, with BAYC declining faster in dollar terms. That context supports interpreting the flip as relative resilience by CryptoPunks amid a falling market, rather than evidence that CryptoPunks had entered an unrestricted rally.

Contemporaneous publications disagreed about the precise historical lookback. Decrypt characterized the move as the first such flip since March 2022, while CoinDesk’s August 22 report described it as the first since December 2021. Because the surviving reports do not resolve that discrepancy through a shared raw historical series, this reconstruction makes no “first since” claim.

What a floor price measures

An NFT floor price is generally the lowest active asking price identified for a collection on the venues included by a particular data provider. It is not an average sale price, an appraisal of every token or proof that a buyer completed a transaction at that level.

That distinction is material for collections containing individually distinguishable assets. Rare traits can cause particular NFTs to trade far above the floor, while a single new listing, cancellation or purchase can move the displayed minimum abruptly. Listings may also differ across marketplaces, and aggregators can vary in how quickly they identify stale, invalid or newly posted orders.

The quoted dollar equivalents add another measurement layer because the NFTs were priced in ether. Bitcoin.com placed the 1:45 p.m. observations at approximately $107,866 for CryptoPunks and $105,623 for BAYC. Those conversions depended on the ETH-dollar rate used at that moment and should not be treated as fixed values for the entire August 21 UTC day.

The bounded conclusion

The defensible finding is narrow: two contemporaneous records observed CryptoPunks ahead of BAYC during August 21, while a later same-day observation showed BAYC back in front. The episode demonstrated how quickly a prominent NFT ranking could change when it depended on the cheapest available listing in relatively thin, fragmented markets.

It did not establish realized collection-wide valuations, durable buyer preference or future performance. Without the underlying timestamped order books from every relevant marketplace, the exact duration and venue coverage of the crossover remain uncertain.