Key points to remember
- Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT series, have acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs.
- Yuga Labs said it would grant the owners of CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property rights to their NFTs.
- Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks NFTs are some of the most valuable non-fungible tokens in the world.
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After much speculation within the NFT community, Yuga Labs has confirmed that it has acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from Larva Labs.
Yuga Labs buys CryptoPunks
Yuga Labs, creators of the sought-after Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Collection, has acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs for an undisclosed sum.
Big news to share today: Yuga has acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from @LarvaLabs, and the first thing we do is give full trading rights to NFT holders. Just like we did for BAYC and MAYC owners. pic.twitter.com/lAIKKvoEDj
— Yuga Laboratories (@yugalabs) March 11, 2022
Rumors about the development had been circulating in the NFT community throughout Friday, before the two design studios announced the update late tonight. In one tweet storm, Yuga Labs said it would grant the owners of CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property rights to their NFTs, the same way the owners of Bored Ape have commercial rights to their cartoon monkeys. “It was amazing to watch the BAYC ecosystem use their rights to collaborate and build awesome shit that we could never have imagined,” one post read. “We can’t wait to see the Cryptopunks and Meebits communities do the same.” Yuga Labs added that it has long drawn inspiration from Larva Labs to elevate “NFTs and the wider crypto world”, before noting that the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem will remain its primary focus.
Larva Labs wrote that CryptoPunks and Meebits helped lay the groundwork for other profile picture NFT projects and now “needs a steward with a different skill set to keep growing.” In a Mirror ad, a joint quote from Larva Labs co-founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson read:
“Yuga Labs are the innovators of the modern profile picture project, and the best in the world at leveraging these projects. They are the ideal stewards of CryptoPunks and Meebits. In their hands, we are confident they will continue to be vital and thriving projects in the decentralized Web are emerging.
Larva Labs launched the popular CryptoPunks NFT Collection in June 2017, a precursor to the project avatar trend that took the NFT world by storm in 2021. Every CryptoPunk NFT was given away for free and they were quickly claimed. They now command a pretty penny in the secondary market: At the height of the NFT boom last year, punks were trading for over $500,000. Today, the cheapest are around $190,000, though the rarest are much more expensive (one of nine ultra-rare Alien Punks sold for $23.7 million last month). In May 2021, months after NFTs entered the mainstream, Larva Labs dropped a new collection of avatar-based characters called Meebits.
Yuga Labs was inspired by Larva Labs for its red hot collection, Bored Ape Yacht Club. Released in April 2021, the tokenized primate series has become arguably the most sought after NFT collection in the world, surpassing even CryptoPunks. Countless celebrities, including Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon and Justin Bieber, have “aped” into the exclusive club, and the collection has since spawned an entire ecosystem including spin-off collections, a partnership with Adidas and a next game to win. Unlike CryptoPunks, Yuga Labs opted to give monkey owners full commercial rights to their NFTs, which partly contributed to the collection’s success. Now, with the new deal inked, holders of CryptoPunks and Meebits will also be able to use their NFTs as they wish. What’s next for both collections is still unclear, although Larva Labs has hinted that there are more plans on the horizon. Concluding the announcement, Yuga Labs wrote:
“Our vision has always been to build a community-owned brand that extends far beyond NFTs, and now we can bring CryptoPunks and Meebits with us.”
Disclosure: At the time of writing this article, the author of this article owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.
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