Auction house Christie’s sold a collection of nine portraits from the CryptoPunks series for 16.9 million dollars (13.9 million euros) on Tuesday. CryptoPunks was one of Larva Labs ‘ first NFT projects in 2017 and consists of Pixel-like portraits made by a computer.

Four years ago, an algorithm created 10,000 CryptoPunks characters. The CryptoPunks consisted of humans, zombies, aliens and monkeys. Each face had different characteristics. They had different hair styles, skin colors and headgear. Some features are rarer than others, which increases the value of portraits with these features.

Larva Labs gave away nine thousand portraits in 2017 and kept a thousand for himself. The studio sold nine in a collection on Tuesday as a non-fungible token (NFT). An NFT is a unique piece of code on the internet, to which a digital work is linked. The ownership of a work is recorded in it and everyone can see online how they are traded.

In the collection of Larva Labs there are at least two rare portraits. For example, it contains one of the nine aliens from the entire series.

CryptoPunks have been very popular since the emergence of NFTs in February. Two aliens were sold in March for over $ 7.5 million each. Seven other works yielded over $ 1 million.

For Christie’s auction house, it is the largest revenue for an NFT since the auction of the first 5000 Days by artist Beeple in March. His collection of five thousand works yielded 69 million dollars.