As the trading of rare pepes on Ethereum picked up, two “creative technologists” decided to create their own NFT project with a slight twist. John Watkinson and Matt Hall realized they could create unique characters generated on the Ethereum blockchain. Characters would be limited to 10,000 and no two characters would be the same. They called their project Cryptopunks, as a reference to the Cypherpunks who experimented with precursors to Bitcoin in the 1990s