CryptoPunk Bounties: Ark.Gallery Rolls Out Blind Bids on 8-Bit NFT Collectibles

A new contract rolled out by Ark.Gallery hopes to inject some fluid in the CryptoPunk market by letting people place blind bids backed by ether, called bounties, for the increasingly in-demand digital collectibles.

Launched Friday, the bounties give CryptoPunk owners the option to instantly cash out by accepting any of the live bids, as opposed to listing their product and waiting on bids in a marketplace.

On the buyer side, instead of placing bids on multiple collectibles users can place a bounty on "Any punk" and wait for an owner to accept it.

Each of the 10,000 punks are unique characters and are sorted by traits such as male, female, alien, spots/no spots, etc.

Some of these traits - like punks with beanies or zombie punks - are quite rare and tend to be more expensive.

While this was a hiccup encountered in listing the punks on third-party marketplaces, it changed when the "Wrapped punks" smart contract was launched by Ark.Gallery, a decentralized autonomous organization for shared NFT ownership.

The smart contract lets owners "Wrap" their punk tokens into the ERC-721 standard.

Put simply, wrapping the punks makes them more easily swappable.

On Saturday, a wrapped punk with rare traits sold for 185 ETH on the Nifty marketplace.

The platform's history of "Bounties" shows that a total of 26 have been executed as of Tuesday afternoon, at an average price of 3.64 ETH. According to Ceresia, the early numbers were encouraging and he expects them to grow as the platform adds bounties for other collections including Autoglyphs.