Yuga Labs, Bored Ape Yacht Club creator buys CryptoPunks and Meebits
Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), has acquired NFT collections CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs.
CryptoPunks is one of the oldest and most valuable brands in the NFT world, and Meebits quickly joined the list of the most valuable NFT collections after its launch last May.
Yuga Labs hopes to foster a “community of builders” by creating derivative works around the two projects.
To do that, it plans to grant intellectual property and marketing rights to the owners of CryptoPunks and Meebits, allowing them to create works and products based on their NFTs in the same way that the owners of Bored Ape have done.
“Everyone knows CryptoPunks, everyone loves CryptoPunks,” he said. “It’s just iconic, ahead of its time. It’s visionary, and it will be here forever. We immediately got excited without knowing at all what we’d like the next step to be.”
Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the co-founders of Larva Labs, said they thought Yuga Labs would be a better steward of projects in the future. The duo launched CryptoPunks in 2017 as a “sort of digital art project.”
In addition, Yuga Labs has the intellectual property rights to “423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits.” However, the creator of CryptoPunks and Meebits, Larva Labs, maintain ownership of a couple of “Punks and Meebs” with its extensive NFT collection called Autoglyphs.
According to Yuga Labs’ announcement, it will grant commercial rights to owners of CryptoPunks and Meebits in the same way as it does to owners of BAYC and MAYC. This means that NFT collectors can monetize their digital assets as they wish.
“While we will work to bring more utility to the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections, we intend to do so as thoughtful stewards. We are in no rush here. We will listen to the community before deciding what comes next.”
To date, more than $1 billion has been traded in Bored Apes, according to OpenSea, which ranks the collection as the second largest NFT collection of all time by trading volume.
It is second only to CryptoPunks, with $2.2 billion. Meebits has traded about $227 million in volume, according to OpenSea.
Digital collectibles attracted a lot of attention in 2021, resulting in $17.4 billion in sales. According to a recent report, NFT sales were up 21,000% last year compared to 2020, with 2.5 million crypto wallets involved in trading or holding a token.
Of that tally, one of the largest sales in NFT’s history goes to the chain’s CEO, Deepak Thalipal, who bought a rare alien avatar from the CryptoPunk collection for $23.7 million last month. This is the fourth most expensive NFT sale in history.
Meebits also sold its most expensive NFT for 1,000 Ethereum (ETH) worth $2.1 million last year in July.
“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,” reads the Yuga Labs announcement.
Yuga Labs is known as the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT. His original BAYC collection included 10,000 Apes and was released in April 2021. MAYC, on the other hand, is a collection that includes 20,000 mutant apes.
As part of the MAYC project, the Yuga Labs team arbitrarily released 10,000 mutant sera to all Bored Ape holders in August 2021. When Bored Apes were exposed to these sera, they became a unique Mutant Ape NFT.
Larva Labs founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson said they trusted Yuga Labs with the future of CryptoPunks and Meebits by saying:
“Yuga Labs are the innovators of the modern profile image project and the best in the world at operating these projects. They are the ideal stewards of CrytoPunks and Meebits. In their hands, we are confident that they will continue to be vital and thriving projects in the emerging decentralized network.”
What next?
Along with the acquisition announcement, Yuga Labs also stated that they will grant the holders of CryptoPunks and Meebits all commercial rights. The team shared their feelings via Twitter and said that it was great to see the creative use of commercial rights from BAYC holders, and that they couldn’t wait to see CryptoPunk and Meebit holders as well.
After issuing commercial rights, the team said they would wait and listen to the community to determine their next action. That said, they also reminded that these new additions are not intended to create competition by stating:
“We want to grow the pie, not fight over slices.”
The Yuga Labs team further added that they are deeply committed to the community formed around BAYC and that they intended to keep it as the center of their universe.
But while today’s purchase makes Yuga Labs even more of a giant in the NFT space, its founders look beyond NFT when thinking about what’s next.
The company already launched other products, a limited-time mobile game and hosted a celebrity-filled party in Brooklyn.
“We see ourselves tentacled in all these things: streetwear, events, games, NFTs, etc.,” says Wylie Aronow, another co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club, who uses the pseudonym Gordon Goner.
The team will also have to find ways to monetize its new acquisitions, which did not generate money for Larva Labs.
Although Yuga Labs takes a stake every time a Bored Ape is resold, Larva Labs does not do so with CryptoPunks and Meebits.
Yuga Labs has no plans to change that, so they will have to come up with something else. Yuga Labs declined to comment on future plans for CryptoPunks and Meebits.
They don’t want to repeat Bored Ape’s “membership club” model with CryptoPunks and Meebits, Aronow said.
The acquisition is a big deal for another reason: it may be the first sign of professionalization and consolidation in the NFT space.
Outside of NBA Top Shot, most of the big brands in the NFT space have been quirky projects with names like Cool Cats and Pudgy Penguins that appear to be operated from Discord servers.
Yuga Labs is starting to act like a real business and, any company claiming a position in a growing market.
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