Despite the cooling of the recent NFT frenzy, prized nonfungible tokens with historical significance are still fetching multi-million-dollar prices.

On Wednesday, famed New York-based auction house Christie's tweeted that an auction for nine tokens from pioneering NFT CryptoPunks had cleared for nearly $17 million combined.

Despite the tokens fetching millions, some Twitter users speculated that the winning applicant scored a bargain.

CryptoPunks were launched by LarvaLabs in 2017 and were limited to 10,000 tokens in total. The NFTs depict randomly generated pixelated portraits, with unique features inspired past the London punk movement, such every bit hairstyles, jewelry and sunglasses.

Ahead of the auction, Christie'south teamed up with nonprofit and urban art proponent SaveArtSpace to display CryptoPunks in public spaces in New York. The public exhibition, dubbed Pixelated, is showcasing 193 CryptoPunks from May 10 until June six and expands a similar public exhibition of CryptoPunks held in Miami during April.

Adult streaming platform CamSoda is also jumping on the CryptoPunk bandwagon, announcing it will host a alive no-reserve auction of CryptoPunk #7060 on Thursday. Sale attendees must eolith the m full of at least $i worth of crypto assets into their CamSoda business relationship to participate.

CamSoda vice president Daryn Parker stated: "Right now we are in the midst of a NFT gold rush. NFTs are crypto's hottest investment infinite so far in 2021, with millions in trades and rare collectibles like CryptoPunks selling for huge sums."

"Given how CryptoPunks have captured the mainstream crypto zeitgeist, we wanted to make one hands accessible to our users," he added.

In Feb, Christie's auctioned famed digital artist Beeple's "Everydays: The Start 5000 Days" NFT artwork for more than $69 million.

Source: Christie'south / Larva Labs