Web3 Watch: ‘Buy Bitcoin’ sign, first post-halving satoshi go up for sale

Plus, a CryptoPunk sells for $12 million and Blockworks buys a goat

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If something in crypto can be sold, there’s a good chance it will be.

This week, a yellow legal pad with “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it sold for 16 bitcoin, worth over $1 million. 

The legal pad was held up behind then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 Congressional hearing in an episode that’s become iconic in the Bitcoin community. The auction for the piece of memorabilia was held at PubKey, a New York City bar popular among Bitcoiners.

Christian Langalis, the then-intern on Capitol Hill who flashed the Buy Bitcoin sign, took home most of the auction’s proceeds. 

Also this week, the crypto exchange CoinEx auctioned off the first satoshi of a block mined after Bitcoin’s recent halving event. Satoshis, or sats, are Bitcoin’s smallest unit and have been popularized recently by Ordinals being inscribed on them. CoinEx got access to the satoshi by way of a partnership with mining pool ViaBTC.

The sat netted double what the “Buy Bitcoin” sign did, selling in the end for $2.1 million.

Yet another alien punk sale

Bitcoin memorabilia weren’t the only items selling this week. For the third time since the beginning of March, a CryptoPunk sold for more than $10 million. 

On Thursday, Punk #635 sold for $12.41 million, making it the fourth-most expensive punk sale ever. The second- and third-largest sales came on March 20 and March 4, respectively. 

Read more: Someone bought a CryptoPunk for $16M

As with the other recent sales, Punk #635 is an alien punk, or one of nine CryptoPunks out of the 10,000 that have blue-ish skin. 

“To me, owning a Punk has never been about the floor price…It’s about my belief that NFTs will be the future of ownership,” the punk’s apparent new owner wrote on X.

One interesting stat:

  • Crypto-focused VC firm Stratos reported that its investment in the memecoin DogWifHat yielded a 300x return for the fund in Q1.

Also of note:


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Onchain gacha platforms sold $284.3 million of digital card packs in July 2026, and Collector Crypt accounted for more than half of that activity. However, it buys back 92.9% of what it sells, which leaves it with a third of the category's revenue on more than half of its volume, and a quarter of its activity arrives through partner apps whose users it does not own. Courtyard runs the opposite model, a consumer app selling smaller packs to thousands of retail buyers who resell the cards to each other, and it took 59.7% of category revenue while growing through a month the category spent contracting. This report compares the five largest platforms on gross activity, buyback intensity, revenue after buybacks, consumer composition, marketplace liquidity, and distribution ownership, and finds Courtyard the strongest performer as of July 2026, with the qualification that none of the five discloses inventory costs or resale proceeds, so no platform in the category can yet be shown to be profitable.

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