Behind the $10 million purchase of WeChat avatars, Justin Sun wants to tear down the walls of CryptoPunks

Recently, Justin Sun, who is active in the blockchain industry and social platforms, has once again won a huge amount of attention. He spent $10.5 million to buy a Tpunks avatar and set it as his WeChat and Twitter avatar.

Justin Sun himself lamented in his circle of friends: This is the first avatar in his life, and it is also the most expensive WeChat avatar so far. He also predicted that "no one understands why a picture is so expensive."

Sun Yuchen is not the first person to spend money to buy an avatar. Just a week ago, NBA star Curry spent 180,000 US dollars to buy a monkey avatar and then replaced it with his Twitter avatar.

Even the American credit card company VISA couldn't help but shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a digital avatar.

Not only Sun Yuchen and Curry, more and more people are starting to buy digital avatars and change them through social platforms. Digital avatars are gradually becoming a new identity symbol.

Strictly speaking, this Tpunk#3442 avatar is not just a picture, but also an NFT, or Non-Fungible Token. NFT is a popular concept that has expanded from the blockchain industry to many industries this year. The first to be impacted was art, followed by technology, venture capital, sports, entertainment, gaming and e-sports.

NFT brings digital works and physical assets onto the chain. Due to the uniqueness of this type of asset, NFT naturally has scarcity value. Sun Yuchen's Tpunk #3442 is the scarcest one in the Tpunks project and is more valuable than ordinary avatars.

Even so, it is still hard to understand why Sun Yuchen spent $10.5 million to buy an NFT. So, is there a bigger plan behind this move?

According to previous media reports, Tpunks is a project benchmarked against CryptoPunks, which also has a limited number of 10,000 avatars, mostly punk-style men and women. CryptoPunk is currently the most popular NFT avatar project on the market. In August, the daily transaction volume frequently exceeded US$100 million.

According to public data, in the second quarter of 2021, avatar NFT projects generated nearly $350 million in secondary sales, a 40% increase from the first quarter, and so far in 2021, avatar projects have generated more than $1 billion in sales. Among them, CryptoPunk has become the most representative NFT avatar project, with total sales reaching $1.17 billion, and sales in the past week exceeded $400 million. The avatar numbered 3100 was sold for $7.58 million.

The CryptoPunk project adopted a claiming method in the early stage, so the earliest investors can obtain huge returns with the current market heat. However, it also caused the current high price situation, which is impossible for ordinary people to obtain, and it is easy to establish a new chain of contempt on social platforms.

After the success of CryptoPunk, the project owner Larva Labs quickly released the second avatar project Meebits. After the release of Meebits, because the share distribution was biased towards the team and the previous CryptoPunks holders, it quickly caused criticism in the community.

CryptoPunk has built a moat through its influence in the market, allowing early beneficiaries to gain benefits through the joining of later participants, forming a relatively closed ecosystem, which completely violates the punk spirit and the original intention of blockchain's decentralization.

Sun Yuchen's intention of buying Tpunks for tens of millions of US dollars is very obvious. The world has suffered from CryptoPunk for a long time. He wants to use his influence and the popularity created by the event to promote the success of the Tpunks project, thereby breaking down the industry barriers created by CryptoPunk.

Once Justin Sun’s frontal attack on CryptoPunk is effective, we will see a multi-party competition in the NFT avatar field, which will play a strong role in lowering the threshold for holding NFT avatars and increasing the widespread holding of NFT avatars.

Just like the story of how Justin Sun shook Ethereum's status as a public chain with TRON and made the TRC-20 standard popular, Tpunks, driven by the popularity of the event of buying avatars for tens of millions, has become a powerful participant in NFT avatars. CryptoPunk's dominant position is in jeopardy, and the beneficiaries are still the numerous NFT avatar enthusiasts.