CryptoPunks, one of the first NFT projects seen on the Ethereum blockchain, has just ended its auction at Christie’s last week, and nine of the punk portraits  from Larva Labs have sold for a whopping $16,962,500. The pixelated portraits come from the NFT platform’s co-creators Matt Hall and John Watkinson.

In 2017, the platform gave away the pixelated characters for free, developing an ever-growing NFT community around the ‘Punks. Due to the recent boom in NFTs the prices for the characters soared in prices, leading to the substantial payday for the creators of the project. Additionally, the creators of pixelized avatars released another new project called Meebits just days before the sale, which garnered almost $80 million in sales just a few hours after its drop.

Though the sale of the portraits hit a stunning number, with the final bid at Christie’s hititng $14.5 million, and $16.96 million after the fees, the crypto community expected an even higher premium. When priced in denominations of the rising Ethereum cryptocurrency, the entire bundle sold for slightly less than the sale price of the previous alien figure, which sold for $7.2 million, (4,200 Eth) in March 2021.