In June 2017, two New York developers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, published ten thousand generated faces on Ethereum, 24 pixels by 24. Free: all it took was a wallet and a few cents in fees. It took nine days for all of them to find takers.
Today, anyone can copy the image with a right click. And some of these faces trade for millions.
for punk #5822, one of the collection's nine "aliens", in February 2022; it had been claimed for free five years earlier
In the meantime, Christie's had sold nine punks for close to $17 M, among old masters and post-war art. The price, here, does not pay for the image: it pays for the entry in the ledger.
Caution with the records: in October 2024, a punk was posted at $56 M. On-chain data suggests a purchase from oneself, financed by a flash loan repaid within the same transaction. The market manufactures its legends, just as colonial accounts embellished Yap.
And the punks are not, strictly speaking, the first images inscribed on a chain. But they inspired the standard that defined everything that followed. The legend is loose in its details, decisive in its effect.
The image is not rare. Every pixel is public, the copy is perfect, free, instantaneous. What is rare is the entry: ten thousand lines, frozen in code in 2017, not one more since.
As on Yap, the material is worth nothing. Rarity is not in the object: it is in the ledger that counts it.
Hundreds of imitation collections, clones on every chain: the stock of images explodes, the value of a copy stays at zero. The O'Keefe inflation, reversed: here, the copy does not discount the original, it designates it.
Every transfer is written into a timestamped block, public, open to anyone, forever: the ceremony of Yap, made automatic. And the trajectory is becoming institutional: Larva Labs handed the collection to Yuga Labs in 2022; in 2025, a non-profit foundation bought the rights for around twenty million dollars, to preserve the ten thousand faces and exhibit them in Palo Alto.
The speculative object is trying to become heritage. The real question of transmission remains: will the story pass to generations who did not live through 2017?
June 2017: a flaw in the first contract lets a buyer walk away with the image and take the money back. Larva Labs reissues the ten thousand faces in a second contract, and declares the old one void.
Every punk carries its number, its attributes, the history of its sales. The community maintains the canon as the island maintained the names of its stones. When the tokens of the first contract came back to the market, in 2022, the creators themselves sold theirs while declaring them illegitimate.
No rival version can coexist with the canon. The power is not in the file, it is in the story.
Never has age been better proven: every claim from 2017 is public, dated to the second, verifiable by anyone, impossible to backdate. And yet the tokens of the first contract, older by fourteen days, are worth far less than those of the second.
Proven precedence is a condition of value: alone, it is not its source.
The image is worth nothing: anyone can display it, copy it, print it. What sells is the entry: rarity written in code, a public chain, a defended story, a dated origin. Since the fever of 2021, prices have given back a great deal; the ledger has not moved.
One might be tempted to smile. But an island in Micronesia has been running the same system for centuries: a public ledger, witnesses, a unanimous story, and stones that do not move. The punks did not invent this model: they plugged it into electricity.