Thought NFTs were dead? A piece of pixelated art just sold for $16 million.

• Someone bought a CryptoPunk NFT for 4,500 ETH, or about $16 million.
• It's the second-most expensive CryptoPunk NFT sale ever by dollar amount. 
• The buyer outbid another offer for 4,250 ETH, or about $14.5 million.

Remember NFTs? Someone just bought one for roughly $16 million. 

A bidder paid 4,500 ether for CryptoPunk #3100, one of the series' nine "Alien Punks" non-fungible tokens. On Monday, the price of ether hovered at about $3,556 per token, which makes the March 4 sale the second-most expensive CryptoPunk sale.

The series of 10,000 algorithmically generated characters was a fixture of the NFT boom of the pandemic era. An NFT is a digital item that's tied to the blockchain and holds a unique signature that can't be duplicated. 

The buyer of CryptoPunk #3100 bested another bid at 4,250 ether, or about $14.5 million, which was placed on March 1, according to the listing on OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. A number of other CryptoPunk NFTs have recently sold for around 60 ether, or more than $200,000, and total trading volume for the collection hit $8.25 million last week, according to an analysis from The Block.

The latest big sale is a throwback to the heyday of the peak of the digital collectibles market. At one point, the NFT market saw about $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume, and collections like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes regularly sold for millions of dollars to celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Stephen Curry. 

A study from September said 95% of the NFT market may be worthless.

Yet, crypto risk appetite is on the rise again. This month's $16 million NFT sale comes alongside a fresh rally toward all-time highs of $69,000 for bitcoin. The token is close to reclaiming a price level last seen when rates were near zero, as the demand from bitcoin ETFs and the upcoming halving event eclipse worries about higher-for-longer interest rates. 

Ether has climbed 51% year-to-date, tracking bitcoin's 50.6% gain.