A new collection of 20,000 NFTs has caused a significant stir in the non-fungible token world, making a grand entrance comparable to a heavily loaded freight train. Within just over a week of its debut, the mysterious Nakamigos collection has surpassed the Bored Ape Yacht Club in all-time trades, achieving a mammoth 52,000 sales.

As of press time, the collection has generated a trading volume of 8,183 ETH, or about $14.5 million. The buzz surrounding Nakamigos has left many wondering about the project’s appeal to the NFT community. The collection consists of 20,000 24×24 pixel characters with a vague resemblance to CryptoPunks.

There has been a lot of speculation surrounding the project’s origin, which has created intrigue among collectors. The name Nakamigos pays homage to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin, with the “amigos” part meaning “friends” in Spanish. Thus, the name becomes “friends of Nakamoto” or “Nakamigos.”

The creator of Nakamigos, like Bitcoin’s founder, remains anonymous. A blog post from the project describes them as an “OG crypto artist,” leading to speculation on Crypto Twitter about who this might be, with many suspecting Sartoshi, the NFT influencer and artist behind the Mfers collection.

Sartoshi left the Mfers project last June when he bequeathed control of all 10,021 stick figures to the Mfers community while simultaneously issuing an “end of Sartoshi” pass. However, he reappeared six months later from his self-imposed exile to announce the coming of Nakamigos, notifying holders of the eos pass of their eligibility to mint pieces of the collection for free. Each holder was allowed to mint a single NFT on March 22 before the collection opened up to the public the next day.

Nakamigos has also been linked to Larva Labs, the company behind CryptoPunks, but the project has refuted these claims. Some speculators point to the aesthetic similarities between the collection and CryptoPunks, plus the fact that its licensing agreement resembles that of the famous collection. While little is known about the project at this time, all this speculation has created the perfect storm for Nakamigos to surpass BAYC in lifetime trades.