Most "FAQ" pages assume you already know what's going on. This one assumes you just found us five minutes ago. Answers are in plain English — no Solidity, no jargon. For the engineer's view, head to Mechanism → or Whitepaper →.
Most NFTs are frozen the second they mint — you get a JPEG and that's it forever. EvolvingPunks aren't. After you mint, your punk starts changing on its own. Different hat, different glasses, different beard, every few minutes, automatically. No bot doing it. No team script. No human input.
Everything happens 100% on-chain, in the open. The pixel art is stored inside the Ethereum contract itself (no IPFS, no image server). The randomness that picks each new trait is derived live from the chain's own block data. The freeze logic, the burn payout, the rarity math — all of it runs in the smart contract where anyone can read it, audit it, replay it, or verify it from a block explorer. No backend. No private database. No server we could turn off. Whatever you see, anyone else can independently re-derive from public chain state.
You can let your punk keep changing forever. Or, when you see a look you love, you can freeze parts of it to lock them in. That choice — freeze or let it run — is the whole game.
0.01 ETH on Ethereum right now. You need three things:
Not affiliated with Larva Labs or Yuga Labs. The original CryptoPunks were released under CC0 in 2022 — meaning the art is in the public domain, no permission needed to build on top of it. We use the same 11 base types and 87 traits from the OG sprite library, with the same rarity distribution baked into the on-chain logic. Your Alien is statistically as rare here (9 in 10,000) as it would be in the original set.
But everything after that is new. OG CryptoPunks are frozen images — mint once, never change. EvolvingPunks are living artifacts: same visual vocabulary, but each one mutates over time and only commits when you say so. Think of it as the original collection's pixel grammar, used to tell a different story.
The whole collection is also CC0. Make derivatives, remix, print on T-shirts. The art isn't ours to gatekeep, and it never was.
One punk, pulled from a 10,000-id pool. The contract rolls a random "gene" for you at the mint block, and that gene decides:
No. You can close the tab and walk away. Your punk evolves whether you're watching or
not. Come back tomorrow and it'll look different. Come back next week and it'll look
different again. The only action ever available to you is freeze — and that's
optional, on your timing.
Immediately. One of your 8 slots is already awake at mint, and it picks a new random trait every 6 hours (every 6 hours on mainnet). The other 7 slots wake up at their own random times.
Full reveal — all 8 slots awake and rolling — takes roughly a week per punk. The slow burn is the point: you're meant to live with your punk, not stare at it all day waiting for the next roll.
Refresh your collection page after each interval and you'll see the awake slots showing different traits. Maybe a beanie one cycle, then no hat, then a fedora, then a mohawk. Sometimes the slot is "empty" (that's intentional — some slots are blank most of the time on real CryptoPunks, like Neck which is 96% empty).
The contract isn't actually writing anything new — it's just computing the current trait on demand whenever someone looks. Nothing happens until you intervene.
When you see a combination of traits you love, hit the freeze button on your punk's card. That snapshot becomes permanent on-chain — those slots stop changing forever.
The catch: freeze locks every currently-evolving slot at once, not just one. So you can't cherry-pick "just keep this hat, let everything else keep rolling." If three slots are awake when you freeze, all three get committed to whatever they're showing right now. Slots that haven't unlocked yet are untouched — you can freeze them later, in a separate call.
You're stuck with it. There is no "unfreeze." The protocol is one-way on purpose — if you could undo freezes, you'd just freeze-and-undo until you got lucky. Commitment is the whole game. Sit on the trigger until you mean it.
Yes — 0.001 ETH per call, plus normal gas. And we want to be upfront about why this fee exists: it's purely anti-spam, not a money grab.
Without it, anyone could just hammer freeze() in a loop to scramble
the on-chain randomness for free — which would let attackers grind for favorable
rerolls on slots they haven't even committed to yet. The fee makes that loop
uneconomical. That's also why it's charged even on a no-op call (one that doesn't
actually freeze anything new) — a "free poke" would do exactly the damage we're
trying to prevent.
Yes. The Market page lets you list at any ETH price. A buyer pays your exact asking price; you keep 95%, and 5% goes to the protocol (this rate is hard-coded — nobody can change it, including us).
Your punk keeps evolving while it's listed. Whoever buys it gets the state at the moment their buy transaction confirms. If you watch your listing's unfrozen slots roll something incredible, you can cancel, freeze, and re-list higher.
$EVOLVE is the token bonded to the NFT. You don't have to touch it. But if you want to:
You can also just hold the punk forever and never engage with $EVOLVE. Token side is optional.
Yes, permanently. Total supply drops by 1. You're literally trading a 1-of-10,000 NFT for a fungible token. Most people won't ever burn — burning makes sense if you're arbitraging the Dutch auction or just want the tokens.
There are two ends of the spectrum, and the protocol is indifferent between them:
You can also mix: freeze 2 slots early, let the other 6 keep rolling forever.
Completely valid. Don't freeze, don't list, don't burn. Your punk will keep evolving quietly in the background until Ethereum stops. You own a tiny piece of always-moving art, plus a permanent base type — and if that base happens to be rare (Alien 0.09% or Ape 0.24%), you keep the rarity regardless of what the slots do.
By OG CryptoPunks distribution:
So if you mint 30, statistically you might catch a Zombie. To pull an Alien you'd need to be lucky or mint a lot.
100% on Ethereum. The pixel art is stored inside the contract itself — no IPFS, no
external image server, no CDN. When someone calls tokenURI(), the contract
builds the SVG image live from on-chain bytes.
If our website disappears tomorrow, your punk still exists. It still evolves. Any block explorer or any third-party Ethereum app can read it. The website is a wrapper, not the thing.
No. MetaMask, Rabby, any injected wallet works. If you don't have one yet, the "Connect" button on our pages offers an email-or-Google login (Privy) that creates a wallet for you in seconds. Same chain, same standards — you can export the keys later and move it to MetaMask if you want.
Read the full visual walkthrough — topology, randomness, rewards, and the buyback flywheel.