After a 4-year hiatus, the "Punk Sweep" has returned, with a single address spending $8 million in one go to sweep 46 CryptoPunks, completely igniting the NFT community's enthusiasm.

Not only CryptoPunks, but in recent days, the overall trading volume in the NFT market has picked up again, even surpassing the high point in February of this year. According to data from the Coingecko platform, the total market value of the NFT sector has increased by 29% in the past 24 hours, surpassing a market value of $6.7 billion. The trading volume has soared by 372%, reaching $45 million.

Crypto seemed to have abandoned the NFT sector for a long time, but the "tainted" MoonBird has recently shown signs of activity again, seemingly preparing to take the IP route of "Pudgy Penguins." With the overall warming of the NFT market and the repeated mentions of Opensea, which has not issued coins for a long time after its announcement, can we ask the question, "Is NFT Summer back again?"

4-Year Gap: Whale Sweeps CryptoPunks

Four years ago, in July 2021, "0x65d" spent approximately $7 million in one go to sweep 104 CryptoPunks, marking the legendary "Punk Sweep." In March 2022, these 104 CryptoPunks were valued as a whole at $20-30 million in an auction at Sotheby's, but twenty minutes after the auction started, "0x65d" canceled the auction.

Related Reading: "Why Was the Large-scale Auction of 104 CryptoPunks at Sotheby's Canceled?"

Four years later, in July 2025, "0x1bb" spent approximately $8 million in one go to sweep 46 CryptoPunks. Seeing the "Punk Sweep 2.0" as ETH gradually approaches its historical all-time high, there is truly a sense of the cyclical nature of time.

The address 0x1bb351C5410b2f6BaE36a74aA6B38a9800AE72D6 used to fund the purchase of an NFT was transferred from Coinbase Prime one day ago. In addition to 46 CryptoPunks, this address also purchased 11 Chromie Squiggle art blocks. According to on-chain data, some of the funds used to buy the NFT were also transferred from the address 0xF1CDC3De7819f93fB93D0c52001d4Fa495Ab471D, which had its funds transferred from Coinbase Prime one day ago as well and also purchased 19 Chromie Squiggle.

Altogether, 0x1bb acquired a total of 46 CryptoPunks and 30 Chromie Squiggle, spending approximately $8.6 million.

Currently, the identity of 0x1bb remains a mystery, and no one knows which whale or institution is behind this address. After the copyright to CryptoPunks was acquired by the Infinite Node Foundation for around $20 million in May of this year, the Infinite Node Foundation's official account has not posted any new tweets. Therefore, this is a case of "mysterious surge"—no one knows who 0x1bb is or why they suddenly made such significant purchases.

However, 0x1bb's large purchases clearly ignited the NFT market sentiment:

Ethereum NFTs surging across the board (except for Milady)

Solana NFTs surging across the board

Bitcoin NFT Seeing Across-the-Board Rise

Will Moonbirds Follow the Penguin's Old Path?

The rise of Moonbirds has been particularly noteworthy among all these projects. Over the past week, the floor price of Moonbirds has nearly tripled. And if we extend the timeline to the past 3 months, the floor price of Moonbirds has increased by almost 11 times.

On May 31 of this year, Moonbirds was acquired by Orange Cap Games from Yuga Labs, and as soon as the news broke, the floor price surged nearly threefold. After a period of adjustment, Moonbirds began to surge.

Currently, Moonbirds is conveying an image of "Pudgy Penguins CTO 2.0." In 2022, after Luca Netz took over Pudgy Penguins, the team quickly got to work, transforming the entire IP into a top-tier IP in the NFT space up to this day.

Orange Cap Games, which acquired Moonbirds, is also well known for creating the card game "Vibes TCG" using the Pudgy Penguins IP. At the end of 2024, Orange Cap Games completed a $2 million angel round of financing, which was instrumental in the development of "Vibes TCG." On June 10 of this year, they announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round of financing, led by 1kx and Yuga Labs.

In 2023, Pudgy Penguins raised $9 million in seed funding, also led by 1kx.

Orange Cap Games CEO Spencer Gordon-Sand is a well-known figure in the industry, having founded the NFT-focused fund Spencer Ventures in 2022. After Orange Cap Games acquired Moonbirds, the new team, like Pudgy Penguins back in the day, rapidly delivered some visible changes to the community:

“Spencer: In the 51 days after acquiring the full range of Moonbirds, we had 5 days as the daily trading volume leader of ETH NFTs, confirmed an airdrop from the social app Towns, confirmed free Pokémon cards, had our avatar featured on the OpenSea official Twitter account, established a Telegram announcement channel with 25,000 members, put $1.4M into a lottery to buy our Telegram stickers, secured a $350k investment led by 1kx, hired new team members, and are about to announce.”

It can be said that Moonbirds has been liberated from the trend of strategic contraction by Yuga Labs and has become an IP that a new company is vigorously developing, reminiscent of the early days of Pudgy Penguins while the price is rising. These changes have greatly altered Moonbirds' fundamentals.

Which other projects experienced abnormal movements today?

Although benefiting from ETH's recent uptrend, the funds that flowed into NFTs today were still led by Ethereum. However, both the Solana and Bitcoin ecosystems saw many projects follow this trend.

Solana Ecosystem

Today, the Solana team directly posted the images of four NFT projects with the caption “We're so back.” In fact, these four Solana NFT projects have each developed in different directions in their respective fields.

Among them, Solana Monkey Business (SMB) in the top left, as one of the earliest NFT projects deeply rooted in the Solana ecosystem, still occupies the top spot in terms of gains, with a 36% increase in the last 24 hours, a floor price of 25 SOL, and a trading volume exceeding $650k.

This NFT project operated by MonkeDAO is known for its community-driven nature, including initiatives such as running Solana validator nodes. The core founding team, Nom and SolportTom, are also members of the team that now successfully combats Pumpfun on the launchpad LetsBonk/BONK.

In addition, SolportTom also mentioned another project led by him known as "DeRUG" (AKA CTO) — Taiyo Robotics, which has also seen significant growth. Within 24 hours, the floor price surged by 40% to reach 60 SOL, with a trading volume exceeding $260,000. Over the past month, it has increased tenfold. According to Tom, this is the first CTO project to emerge in the prevalent "CTO concept" within the Solana ecosystem.

Tom also recounted his experience as a "forced CTO" at the time when he had just entered the industry and was working for a relatively unknown development team serving clients. Back then, they had a small BD team that would send messages on their Discord for each new project mint, offering services such as deploying the Candy Machine.

Later, Taiyo approached the team wanting to build a marketplace where users could purchase custom assets and replace parts on their Bot. They brought Tom's team into Discord, assigned roles to the team, but then they essentially "vanished into thin air."

The community members assumed they were also part of the team, but even Tom was not sure. "Not wanting his reputation to be tarnished, he decided to take over the project himself, using it as an endorsement of community trust and trying to garner some goodwill."

Unlike SMB, which deeply roots in the Solana community, Claynosaurz's path resembles more of an "American-style" Azuki. This project is led by a team of experienced animators, focusing on high-quality content creation. In the past 24 hours, the trading volume has reached $120,000. Claynosaurz recently won the Collision Awards Gold Award for animation excellence. Meanwhile, team members acted as invited guests at one of the most prominent animation expos held in San Diego — COMIC CON, making Claynosaurz one of the most prominent animated NFT projects in Solana.

On the other hand, the former Solana flagship, Mad Lads, saw a 20% surge in floor price within 24 hours, bringing the floor price back to 40 SOL. The long-standing NFT project Galactic Geckos also experienced astonishing growth, with the floor price nearly doubling within 24 hours, now priced at 6.5 SOL.

Ordinals Ecosystem

While the Ordinals ecosystem has been quiet for a long time, it has also stirred up some waves, apart from NodeMonkes, which saw a 30% increase in its floor price in a single day (although it is still far from its ATH). The current flagship wizard of the Ordinals ecosystem is the Taproot Wizard. Apart from a few wizards who bought some Bitcoin at the beginning just to "FOMO" in, the Taproot Wizard is now only 6 orders away from reaching its ATH again. With Bitcoin's increasingly high price, the floor price has already reached $25,000. Not to mention that purchasing an NFT still costs "digital gold" Bitcoin, it's hard not to think that the Taproot Wizard's next plan may far exceed a mere "community."

With more and more NFT projects emerging and old OGs being "resurrected," does this NFT craze represent the acceptance of the NFT sector by the capital markets, becoming an outlet for bull market funds overflow, or will it ultimately be another "flash in the pan" after numerous attempted resurrections?

We can't be sure, just as we don't know how long "it is coming" will take for OpenSea.

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