If You Invested $1,000 In Ethereum When CryptoPunks Were Released, Here's How Much You'd Have Now

Cryptocurrency Ethereum ETH/USD is seeing a sharp rise in valuation in recent days, which comes as other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin BTC/USD have hit all-time highs since the 2024 election.

While Ethereum has gained less than Bitcoin in 2024 and trades below its all-time highs set in 2015, investors who bought the cryptocurrency years ago are still profitable on their trades.  

What Happened: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed Ethereum in 2014 via a white paper. The cryptocurrency officially launched in 2015 and has been one of the most well-known and valuable cryptocurrencies since that time.

Many well-known cryptocurrencies had impressive runs in 2021. Ethereum was a big gainer in 2021 going from $737.71 to $3,682.63.

One of the factors that helped Ethereum in 2021 was increased interest and massive valuations for non-fungible tokens.

Larva Labs launched CryptoPunks on June 23, 2017. The collection of 10,000 24×24 pixel art images built on the Ethereum blockchain is now one of the biggest non-fungible token collections.

One of the early NFT launches, CryptoPunks are highly coveted among NFT collectors and often times serve as profile pictures for those in the cryptocurrency community on social media.

The project was not an early success but has quickly become the standard among NFT collections attracting investments from celebrities and investors alike.

While many NFT collections have witnessed drops in their price and lack of interest from investors, CryptoPunks are one of the few that have held up in value and demand. The collection is seeing recent interest with over $10.75 million in sales in the last week.

The floor price for a CryptoPunks NFT, or lowest price to buy one, is currently 37.24 ETH, or around $133,695 at the time of writing.

Although Ethereum's price has declined since 2021, investing during the historic NFT launch would still have yielded a profit.

Read Also: If You Invested $1,000 In XRP Token When SEC Lawsuit Caused Mass Panic, Here’s How Much You’d Have Today

Investing $1,000 in ETH: At the time of the CryptoPunks launch, Ethereum hit a high of $348.01.

A $1,000 investment in Ethereum on this historic day could have bought 2.8735 ETH. That investment from 2017 would be worth $10,361.81 today based on a price of $3,605.99 at the time of writing.

The investment would be up 936.2% in the last seven-plus years.

Ethereum hit one-month highs of $3,614.88 on Nov. 27. The cryptocurrency has traded between $2,020.76 and $4,092.28 over the last year, hitting highs in March around the time Ethereum ETFs were approved by the SEC. The all-time high for Ethereum is $4,891.70, hit in November 2021.

Read Next:

• If You Bought $1 Worth Of Bitcoin At Launch, Here’s How Much You’d Have Today

This article was previously published by Benzinga and has been updated.

Photo: Shutterstock