This is a collection from 2021. The mint is still open.
CryptoRappers launched on 22 September 2021. Ten thousand pixel rappers on Ethereum, 0.05 ETH each. 635 were minted, and then the collection sat quiet for four years.
The sale never closed. It is still running today, at the 2021 price, with 9,365 rappers unminted.
What happened in 2021
The collection went on sale on 22 September 2021. No allowlist, no waves, no phases. You paid 0.05 ETH and got the next rapper in the line.
By the time anyone came back to look, 635 had gone out. The most recent one, number 634, was minted on 20 July 2022. Since that day Ethereum switched itself to proof of stake and went through a full market cycle, and the sale has been sitting open the whole time.
0.05 ETH is an absurd price in 2026, and nobody can fix it
In September 2021 it was an ordinary number. Almost every ten thousand piece collection launched around there, and 0.05 was simply what a pixel avatar with no history cost.
That was nearly five years ago. Everything else from that year either repriced, relaunched on a new contract, or disappeared. This one did none of those things, because the price here is not a setting anybody can reach. It is written into the contract as a constant:
A constant is fixed at the moment the contract is deployed and lives in the bytecode itself, not in a variable that can be updated afterwards. There is no setPrice function in this contract, no admin panel behind it, and no owner-only path to one. The person who wrote that line cannot change it either.
So the number is stuck exactly where 2021 left it. It will not be marked up to whatever these are worth now, and it will not be marked down, so there is no cheaper moment to wait for.
Here is how far it has drifted. ETH closed at $3,078 on 22 September 2021, which made a rapper cost about $154 on launch day. Today the same mint comes to —, which is less in dollars than the people who bought at launch paid.
The supply is a constant as well. MAX_TOKENS = 10000. There will never be more than ten thousand rappers, and nobody can add one.
The only thing that can change is whether it stays open
The owner has no way to touch the price. What they do have is a switch:
That switch is the single moving part in the whole arrangement. While it reads true, the mint works at 0.05 ETH. I called it while writing this. It reads true.
Minting is the only way to get one
The last time a rapper moved between two wallets was 22 November 2022. The 635 that were minted sit in 258 wallets, and none of them have moved since.
So minting is not the cheaper route into this collection. Right now it is the route.
9,365 are left, and 120 of them are rare
The collection contains 103 Aliens and 24 Eternals. Those are the two rare face types.
Seven of them have been minted so far: five Aliens and two Eternals. The other 120 are still in the unminted pool, which works out to roughly one in every seventy-eight mints.
Three traits are still completely untouched
Hacker is a hairstyle. There are seven in the entire collection, which makes it the rarest trait there is, and every one of them is still unminted. Joker is a mouth, 21 of those in the collection, none of them minted either. Red Snapback has 180, also untouched.
The rarity ranks a marketplace shows cover the 635 that came out, because a marketplace ranks tokens that exist and the contract answers tokenURI for nothing else. That is six percent of the collection. The other 94 percent has no rank next to it anywhere.
What the collection is
Ten thousand rappers drawn on a 24 by 24 pixel grid, the same size the CryptoPunks were drawn on. The idea in 2021 was straightforward: the punks had run the space for four years, and they needed opponents.
Punk and rap had been set against each other long before any of this. Both came out of New York in the mid-seventies, one downtown and one in the Bronx, and spent the next thirty years being written up as each other's opposite. Drawing rappers on the punks' own grid was that old argument moved onto a blockchain, which is why the grid is the same 24 by 24 and not something new. The opposition only reads if the format is identical.
The other half of it was that by 2021 a punk was no longer a punk. It was the most expensive profile picture on the internet, the thing people bought to show they had been early, which is the exact posture punk was invented to stand against. Rap never claimed otherwise. It has been open about the chain and the car since the beginning, so a rapper was the more honest thing to hang on a wallet.
That was an argument for September 2021, when there was one collection everybody else in the space was standing next to.
The faces split into 3,414 white male, 2,378 black male, 2,377 white female and 1,704 black female, plus the Aliens and Eternals. On top of that sit 47 hairstyles, 23 mouths, 16 eye types and 8 accessories.
752 of them wear a surgical mask and 791 wear AirPods, which dates the drawings exactly. Nobody would put those details on a pixel rapper today, and that is what makes them read as genuinely 2021.
The trait names were written by hand and never sanded down by anybody: Glasses Hater, Smart Ass, From 3021, Taxi Tennis, Brakedance Hat, and a moustache called Sherlock.
9,365 left, 120 of them rare, at 0.05 ETH. The same price as on 22 September 2021, and the contract has no way to charge anything else.