Back in April, I wrote Are NFTs Back, an article riffing on the surprise rally in top Ethereum collections happening at that time. I closed the post by suggesting volume, rather than just floor price moves, would ultimately make the difference.

Fast forward to today, and CryptoPunks are seeing the beginnings of a new wave of volume. Sales have exploded in recent weeks, while two of the rarest Punks just sold for at least ~$3.9M combined yesterday.

Plus, new layers of infra are now part of the action, with tools that didn't exist in past cycles lending against, brokering, buying, and redistributing Punks. However, this rally does have some curious quirks, so let’s break down what’s happening.

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Volume surge

Last week from Sept. 19th through Sept. 26th, Punks were the top NFT collection by sales, clearing ~$8.2M in unwrapped volume per CryptoSlam. That's roughly 11.7x more than the prior week.

The spark here? A sweep around Sept. 23rd, when buyers reportedly scooped up ~63 Punks for ~$6M and lifted the floor from ~29 ETH to ~34 ETH in about two days.

To put that spike into perspective, over the past four weeks the official Punks marketplace, which only tracks sales of unwrapped Punks, has logged ~4,490 ETH (~$12M) in sales. In other words, roughly half of that action came in the few days around the Sept. 23rd sweep.

As for the floor price, it’s been calmer. At ~33 ETH (~$89k) right now, it's up ~31% since Jan. 1st but still ~39% below the ~54 ETH it hit in late July 2025. In other words, the NFTs are moving faster than the price, at least currently.

Major grail sales

Yesterday, Oct. 1st, two of the rarest Punks sold for USDC within roughly 12 hours of each other, both through GONDI, the popular NFT lending platform whose "Sell & Repay" feature lets borrowers sell NFTs they’ve collateralized in loans and pay off their debt in one go.

The first, Punk #8348, the only Punk with seven attributes, sold for 3M USDC plus an undisclosed amount, the biggest sale in GONDI's history. Its seller, seedphrase, had held it since 2020 and called the offer one he "couldn't refuse."

The second, Punk #3609, one of the 88 coveted Zombie Punks, sold for 875k USDC, or ~326 ETH at the time, in a deal brokered by Eli Scheinman, the founder of Canon Punks.

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Notably, both of these Punks moved as wrapped CryptoPunks 721 tokens, and both buyers paid in USDC instead of ETH.

Additionally, neither sale threatened the collection's record, i.e. Alien #5822's 8,000 ETH sale in 2022, and #3609 actually sold below the 440 ETH it fetched in May 2025, a reminder that grails don't only go up.

The new plumbing

Punks launched in 2017, before the ERC-721 NFT standard existed, so for years they mostly traded on their own built-in marketplace priced in ETH. Today, a whole stack of tools and services sits around that original contract:

With these projects in mind, consider their combined effect. Every Punk sitting in a loan, or in PunkStrategy, or in FWA makes for one less Punk listed near the floor. To what extent these new dynamics are thinning the floor supply and amplifying movement in the market is an open question, but it’s a thread to watch.

Not your usual rally

In past cycles, hot Punks markets have often coincided with ETH strength. When the floor topped ~54 ETH (over $200k) in late July 2025, ETH was trading near $3,745, and it went on to set its ~$4,954 all-time high on Aug. 24th, 2025.

This time’s a bit different. ETH sits around $2,690 at the moment, ~46% below its peak, and while ETH hasn’t been totally anemic lately, Punks are heating up in spite of the lack of breakout ETH strength.

Either Punks are acting as an early read on onchain risk appetite, or they're starting to trade on their own terms.

Of course, the USDC sales of the grails mentioned earlier hint toward the latter. Paying in stablecoins suggests buyers who want Punk exposure without ETH's volatility, or who are arriving via TradFi rails.

Either way, the OG Ethereum NFTs are moving again, and they're doing it with new legos around them. Now, let’s see if this volume spike can be sustained and if it feeds into broader NFT bullishness!