Frequently Asked Questions
What is does it mean if a punk is burned?
In blockchain terminology a token is burned if it’s transferred to an inaccessible wallet, making it impossible for anyone to ever interact with it again. Tokens are indelible, so as long as the blockchain exists the tokens will as well, but they will never be transferred again. So a punk is considered burned when it’s sent to one of these inaccessible wallets.
How do we know these punks are burned?
A punk is considered burned if it’s been transferred to a known Burn Wallet such as 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000, or to a random address which was never set up as a wallet has happened with mistaken copy and paste errors. Unlike functional wallets that someone lost the keys to, a burn wallet was never functional and no one has ever had the keys to it.
Can someone guess the keys and get access to one of these burn wallets?
In theory, a person could try random private keys until one happens to produce that exact address. In practice, the odds are so tiny that it’s functionally impossible. You’d be trying to win a lottery with roughly a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance. Even if a computer could test a trillion guesses every second (which is wildly optimistic for real wallet checks), it would still take far longer than the age of the universe to hit that exact address. You are 1000x more likely to flip a coin anf get heads 150 times in a row than you are to guess the seed phrase to a burn wallet. So no.
What about those lost wallets?
There are a number of punks in wallets which are considered lost. These are wallets someone set up and used briefly and then lost access to for one reason or another. They may have forgotten to write down their seed phrase, or threw out the computer with the keys on it, or any number of other reasons. Lost punks are not considered burned, because there is always the chance someone someday finds a backup of the seed phrase that they’d forgotten they had somewhere. We’ve seen dormant wallets spring back to life after 5+ years of inactivity, and there are stories of people who have laptops with corrupted hard drives that they hope to one day recover. Of course the longer those go without activity the less likely that becomes, and they may ultimately be lost forever, but this technical distinction separates lost wallets from burn wallets. On this site we’re only documenting the confirmably burned punks.