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 Ethereum address, 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 an inaccessible Ethereum address.
How do we know these punks are burned? A punk is considered burned if it's been transferred to an "official" Burn Wallet such as 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 or to an Ethereum address which was either never set up as a wallet or is a contract without withdraw or transfer fuctions resulting in the punk being permaently locked in that contract. Technically a "burn wallet" is one that was never functional and no one has ever had the keys to it, differentiating it from a lost wallet.
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 and 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 widely 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. How long a punk needs to be inactive to be considered lost is subjective, you can check out Lost Punks to explore punks that are potentially lost.