Web3 Watch: ‘Buy Bitcoin’ sign, first post-halving satoshi go up for sale

If something in crypto can be sold, there’s a good chance it will be.

This week, a yellow legal pad with “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it sold for 16 bitcoin, worth over $1 million. 

The legal pad was held up behind then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 Congressional hearing in an episode that’s become iconic in the Bitcoin community. The auction for the piece of memorabilia was held at PubKey, a New York City bar popular among Bitcoiners.

Christian Langalis, the then-intern on Capitol Hill who flashed the Buy Bitcoin sign, took home most of the auction’s proceeds. 

Also this week, the crypto exchange CoinEx auctioned off the first satoshi of a block mined after Bitcoin’s recent halving event . Satoshis, or sats, are Bitcoin’s smallest unit and have been popularized recently by Ordinals being inscribed on them. CoinEx got access to the satoshi by way of a partnership with mining pool ViaBTC.

The sat netted double what the “Buy Bitcoin” sign did, selling in the end for $2.1 million.

Yet another alien punk sale

Bitcoin memorabilia weren’t the only items selling this week. For the third time since the beginning of March, a CryptoPunk sold for more than $10 million. 

On Thursday, Punk #635 sold for $12.41 million, making it the fourth-most expensive punk sale ever. The second- and third-largest sales came on March 20 and March 4, respectively. 

Read more: Someone bought a CryptoPunk for $16M

As with the other recent sales, Punk #635 is an alien punk, or one of nine CryptoPunks out of the 10,000 that have blue-ish skin. 

“To me, owning a Punk has never been about the floor price…It’s about my belief that NFTs will be the future of ownership,” the punk’s apparent new owner wrote on X.

One interesting stat:

• Crypto-focused VC firm Stratos reported that its investment in the memecoin DogWifHat yielded a 300x return for the fund in Q1.

Also of note:

• Blockworks bought a goat .
• Web3 restaurant loyalty app Blackbird sold free coffee passes in New York City.
• The popularity of Bitcoin Runes caused miners to earn more from fees than from block reward for the first time ever .

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