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It all starts with one pixelated paperclip. Each round, people bid to take whatever the vault is holding, and the vault tries to walk that pile up toward a real CryptoPunk.
In 2005 Kyle MacDonald did this with a red paperclip and, fourteen trades later, had a house. In 2021 PaperclipDAO ran it on-chain and actually landed CryptoPunk #3744, but then for some reason traded it away. This is different. We are here for the Punk and the Punk only.
Punk Paperclips are also unique in their own way. If your bid is accepted, you get not only the whole vault inventory, but also a Paperclip receipt, which is a collectible on its own. And that is not the end either.
One prize pack per open round: everything currently in the vault. Anyone can bid. Only the vault can accept.
Everything happens on Ethereum Mainnet, where CryptoPunks live.
Timeline is on Start. Current desk is Rounds. Minted clips are on Paperclips. Your bids: My offers.
This isn’t a general marketplace. You’re bidding for the full vault’s pile only. You can’t take a subset, and you can’t fill the order yourself.
Trades settle on Seaport 1.6 protocol. Audited, immutable and battle tested by OpenSea, same address on every chain that uses it. You sign an order off-chain. When it fills, both sides move or neither does. Seaport never holds your NFTs. BAYC Grails OTC uses the same family of settlement.
Seaport contract: 0x0000000000000068F116a894984e2DB1123eB395
Important note. Seaport uses a plain transfer to send ERC-721s to the winner. It does not check what type of a receiver it is. A normal wallet — including a Safe — can get and send those NFTs on. However, if the winning address is a contract with no way to move NFTs out, it will still receive the winnings, but they will get stuck. It is your responsibility to bid from an address you fully control.
A small extra contract (a Seaport “zone”) puts offers on the board, makes sure only the vault can take them, and checks that any ERC-20 in the bid is a real whitelisted token — so nobody slips in a fake WETH. It never holds assets or touches the asset flow. If something were wrong with the registry, your NFTs would still be safe in your wallet. Seaport is what actually moves them, and only on a valid fill.
PaperclipRegistry contract: —
Registry architecture was inspired by ocarina.trade. The contract carries over the GPL-3.0 license.
Signing an offer doesn’t lock anything. You can list the same NFTs somewhere else. If they leave your wallet before accept, the offer can’t fill. If you want the signature dead, cancel it on Seaport from the offer page. That costs gas and you can’t undo it.
No trade fee from us. You pay gas to approve, register, cancel, or fill. NFT approvals go to Seaport for the token ids you’re offering. ERC-20 approvals are the amount this offer needs, nothing extra.
Use “Create offer” button on the Current round page or Start page.
The full vault inventory. You can’t drop items or pick one NFT out of the pile. This is for simplicity — if you have a really special offer and need something custom, let me know and we’ll think of something.
NFTs you hold, and/or whitelisted ERC-20s like WETH. No native ETH — wrap it. Wrapped Punks only at this stage (we’ll add support for unwrapped if necessary).
Select 1, 3, 7, or 30 days, or a year. Default is 30 days.
The checklist checks you still hold the assets, asks for Seaport approvals if needed, verifies the transfer, then you sign the Seaport order and register it on PaperclipRegistry. After that it shows on the round board and in My offers.
Cancel lives on the offer detail page, not the list. It hits Seaport, not the registry — the registry only listed the offer. That costs gas and cannot be undone. After it confirms, the signature is dead and the offer cannot fill.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | Live. I might accept it. |
| Filled | This one won. The swap happened. |
| Cancelled | You killed the Seaport order — this one, or all of yours at once with a “cancel all” elsewhere. Costs gas. Can’t be undone. |
| Expired | Past the deadline you picked. |
| Void | Someone else won the round. Your Seaport order may still be sitting there, but the vault no longer holds what it asks for, so it can’t fill. Cancel if you want the signature gone. |
| Unfillable | Vault inventory changed, so this Get side no longer matches. Cancel if you want the signature gone. |
| Unknown | Couldn’t read status. We don’t treat that as Open. |
The vault holds the current inventory, accepts winning offers, and mints receipt Paperclips.
Address: —
In this stage of the project, the vault is not locked, yet. It is too early to say what shape will all this take in future, so we’d like keep our options open. Other control mechanisms will be considered later on, especially if the community thinks they are necessary. For now, please trust the dev.
Having said that, your assets remain safe — they stay in your wallet till the offer is filled, while the full offer lifecycle is governed by OpenSea’s Seaport, as explained here. The worst thing that can happen is that your bid is not accepted.
Anyone can transfer anything to the Vault, if they wish. Assets sent that way are treated as gifts. They do not become part of the vault inventory, are not shown on the board, and you cannot bid on them. If you want to take part, make an offer instead.
The vault owner decides which offer to accept under their own discretion. For the offer to make sense, it should somehow be better than the vault inventory, so we can progress towards the Punk. Why you should participate in such a trade is a legitimate question — read more in Why should you participate?
Only the vault can accept an offer. Collectors only make offers and cancel their own — they can’t unilaterally fill against the vault.
On accept, Seaport moves your pledged assets (Give) to the vault and the vault’s inventory (Get) to you in one tx. Other open bids are marked Void.
The round is then settled and a new one begins.
In addition to the vault inventory, each round winner gets a collectible receipt NFT. The collection owner mints it as a separate tx. Until that happens the round may show a pending receipt.
The first Punk Paperclip #0 is preminted to seed round 1, then it leaves with the winner (who actually gets additional Punk Paperclip #1 for winning the round).
Receipts live in their own ERC-721 collection. See all the minted ones on the Paperclips page.
Collection address: —
Chain: Ethereum Mainnet
Royalties: 5%
Artwork: 24×24px manually designed paperclips saved directly onchain, as they should be.
When the vault receives any Punk, round production stops. The first stage of this experiment is then complete.
If opportunity arises, special extra rounds can take place to exchange the Punk to:
Reasons are all yours, but here are some ideas: