Field manual

How PunkFinder works

PunkFinder answers one question about any CryptoPunk: who holds it — V1 and V2 — and is anyone home. Everything is read live from public chain data and self-published identity. No monthly snapshots, no guesses.

Reading a report

Enter a punk number and you get two panels, V1 and V2. They share the same number but are independent tokens, often held by different people, so PunkFinder always reports both and never merges them. Each panel has:

Holder: The wallet that actually controls the token — pierced past any wrapper, vault, or stash to the beneficial owner. Held since is when that wallet acquired it.
Identity: Who the wallet is, if they've said so: an ENS name, a curated label, or an OpenSea profile — with an X handle when it's set in their ENS record. If nothing is published, it simply reads "no known on-chain identity."
Custody: The chain of custody as explicit steps — e.g. the raw punk locked in a wrapper contract, held by the address above. A contract such as a lending protocol or a multisig is named, not left as a dead end.
Signs of life: Whether the owner is active — from their most recent signed transaction of any kind, across the whole wallet, not just punk moves. A punk sitting still in a busy wallet is being held, not lost. Incoming transfers don't count; only the owner signing does.
Evidence: Every claim is a link to its source — the holder on evm.now, the ENS record, the OpenSea profile, the activity log — so you can verify any of it yourself.

Status at a glance

The status marker is colored by reachability and activity, not good versus bad:

ReachableAn identity is attached (ENS, curated label, or OpenSea) — there's a way to reach the owner.

Active — anonymousRecently signed a transaction, but no published identity.

Held — Yuga Labs · vaultedA known long-term vault. These wallets are built to sit still, so the quiet is deliberate custody, not a lost punk.

Held — contractHeld by a named contract — a lending protocol or a Safe multisig — reachable through that entity, not gauged by transactions.

Held — no outbound activityThe wallet has never signed an outbound transaction — a receive-only or cold wallet, not the same as one gone quiet for years.

InactiveNo signed activity for a while.

Long inactiveYears without a signed transaction, and no recent acquisition — possibly lost.

When a punk is held somewhere it might actually be bought — for example as collateral in a Gondi loan — the panel adds a Lead callout pointing to the next step.

Original claim

Above the panels, the report notes when the punk was first claimed on the V1 contract back in 2017, and by whom — the deepest provenance point on chain.

What PunkFinder never shows

Only self-published or on-chain-derivable identity: ENS names and their text records, OpenSea usernames, curated labels for known entities, and chain events. Never emails or physical contact information — those aren't even fetched — and never a guess about who an anonymous wallet "really" is. If someone hasn't published it themselves, PunkFinder doesn't show it.

Where the data comes from

Ownership: The live punks indexer — current holders, custody, events, and original claims. Always live, never a stale snapshot.
Activity: The wallet's most recent signed transaction, from a whole-chain source (evm.now / Blockscout).
Identity: ENS (name, avatar, and text records) and OpenSea profiles, resolved server-side so keys stay private.
Traits: Type and accessories from the on-chain CryptoPunks data, via the Networked Art punks SDK.

Still coming

Market listings and a for-sale status, fuller status verdicts, wallet-address lookup, and labels for more custody and lending protocols.