Tiffany & Co Releases Those CryptoPunk Pendants And They Are Expensive, Here’s All The Intel

“Shall we custom make @TiffanyAndCo CryptoPunk pendants available for CryptoPunk owners to order for 1 week?” Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany & Co Executive Vice President of Product and Communications asked his 20.9k Twitter followers in April. The question was accompanied by a Twitter poll. The answer, of course, was a resounding YES. 80.3% in favor, for the record.

Now the pendants have finally become reality. On July 31, Tiffany announced its NFT TFTiff launch of 250 NFTs, the purchase of which allows existing CryptoPunk owners to have their own CryptoPunk realized as a bespoke Tiffany & Co pendant. The price? ETH30 which currently comes in just shy of $51,000.

It’s testament to LVMH owned Tiffany & Co’s new and thoroughly modern approach to marketing that Arnault can single-handedly execute a guerrilla marketing campaign via his personal social media handle.

LET’S HAVE SOME CONTEXT

A couple of days before his tweet in April, Arnault had posted a picture of his own #3167 CryptoPunk NFT reimagined in physical form as a rose gold and enamel jewel. Its bicolored glasses were made from Sapphire and Mozambique baguette Ruby while its own earring was fashioned from a yellow diamond. He signed off the tweet “LFG.”

He subsequently posted an image of said CryptoPunk nestled in one of Tiffany’s duck egg blue boxes and followed up with further images of its intricate production process showing precious stones being applied and enamel being meticulously dropped into each pixel space via a syringe.

Stories speculating about a potential collaborative collection soon began to circulate online while Arnault continued to stoke the fire with aforementioned Twitter poll. He pointed out he couldn’t make 10,000 though. 10,000 being the number of CryptoPunks in existence.

HERE’S HOW IT’S GOING TO WORK

According to the Frequently Asked Questions page of Tiffany’s dedicated NFT microsite, the sale will commence August 5 at 10:00 A.M. EST. via said website.

Each CryptoPunk holder is limited to a maximum of three NFTiff tokens. Punk ownership will be verified via its existence in the crypto wallet of the holder which needs to be the same one into which the NFTiff CryptoPunk NFT is minted.

The 87 different attributes and 159 colors of the 10,000 Punk NFTs will be converted to the most similar gemstone of enamel color. The pendant itself will be composed of 18-Karat rose or yellow gold (based on the color palette of the NFT) and each Punk will have at least 30 stones. Size will be approximately 30mm x 20-30mm. Delivery of the finished versions is anticipated early 2023.

According to CoinTelegraph, should all the limited edition pendants sell out, Tiffany & Co stands to make 7,500 in ETH (currently pushing $12.7 million).

HERE’S WHY TIFFANY IS ALLOWED TO DO IT

This is not a collaboration but a commercialization of specific Punks, legally possible from March following the sale of the CryptoPunk NFT franchise by creator, Larva Labs to Yuga Labs, owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Under the previous ownership, such commercialization represented a somewhat gray area. However, according to Business Wire, Yuga Labs stipulated the transfer of IP, commercial, and exclusive licensing rights to individual NFT holders. Meaning that a particular CryptoPunk owner (individual NFT holder) holds aforementioned rights to their particular Punk.

On April Fool’s Day Tiffany posted images of a gold ‘TiffCoin’ on its social media channels, claiming it was launching a new cryptocurrency. It later revealed that the story was a prank but went on to actually mint 499 physical versions of the TiffCoin in 18k gold, available to purchase on the Tiffany & Co website for a 24 hour window. Each cost $9,999.

Arnault bought his CryptoPunk,#3167 for ETH160, approximately $416,000, on Jan. 29. As of February, he’s used said CryptoPunk NFT as the profile picture (PFP) for his Instagram and Twitter accounts. Notably, though, he only had Tiffany create the physical version following the sale to Yuga Labs.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the likely intended meaning of the acronym LFG in a tweet.