Lost Punks
Crypto has a storied history of fortunes being lost by misplacing a private key. Usually, the sums start out as a negligible amount and only later are the tokens worth anything.
Collectors and speculators are interested in knowing what the supply is of a token so they can get a sense of supply and demand dynamics. Fortunately the blockchain is public so we can get a good handle on if a wallet is likely lost.
With the rise of NFT’s in the past few years a question that comes up often is - How many CryptoPunks are lost? The answers that I’ve seen lack data so I took a look myself. 192, or 2%, of CryptoPunks are “lost”. They’re held in wallets that haven’t made a transaction in over 4 years.
Interestingly, 155 of the 192 punks are in two wallets:
In these two wallets there are 2 apes and 5 zombies. The hoodie zombie and beanie ape are arguably two of the best punks in the entire collection.
Someone has stopped by the punks discord and claimed they lost the 0x717 seedphrase in a house fire.
There’s also a long tail of addresses with one or a few punks in them
If we change the parameters to 2 or 3 years of inactivity, the numbers barely move.
4 years - 192 lost
3 years - 223 lost
2 years - 241 lost
You can find the script on Github.
