Larva Labs CryptoPunks Marketplace Review

What could be improved

Limited NFT options

This site only has two NFT collections available, and they’re both lines of digital characters. If you want to shop for other types of NFTs, such as digital art or videos, this isn’t the best NFT marketplace for you.

Also worth mentioning is that Larva Lab’s NFTs tend to be expensive. CryptoPunks normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in Ethereum, which puts them out of most people’s price range.

To be fair, Larva Labs is a software development company, and its site is home to the team’s professional projects. It’s not built to be a massive NFT marketplace with something for everybody. But if you came across it while searching for a CryptoPunks NFT, it’s good to know what you will and won’t find on the company’s website.

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V1 Punks controversy

Larva Labs’ reputation took a hit after an incident related to V1 Punks, the original CryptoPunks project released by the lab. This version isn’t as popular as the official CryptoPunks collection that Larva Labs made after, but it has seen some success as the alternative version of such a popular project.

In January 2022, one of the Larva Labs founders sold 40 of these V1 Punks for 260 ETH (worth well over $500,000 at that time). Just weeks later, Larva Labs released a statement saying V1 Punks aren’t real CryptoPunks. Then, it announced it planned to take legal action against the V1 Punks collection.

To sum it up, a Larva Labs founder made a significant sum selling V1 Punks, and the company then went after that very same NFT collection. This seriously damaged its credibility in the NFT space.

Different design than most NFT marketplaces

Both the Larva Labs website and the CryptoPunks marketplace have much different layouts than a typical NFT marketplace. For example, the CryptoPunks marketplace includes large collages of different characters and lets you sort through them based on their types and attributes.

Because of how different it is, there’s a bit of a learning curve to using the platform and finding the NFT you want. Compared to other marketplaces, it’s not as beginner friendly.

No NFT minting

Larva Labs is designed for buying and selling its own NFTs. It’s not a place where you can mint NFTs of your own and list them for sale.