A new page is turned in the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs): Yuga Labs, the team behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) project, has acquired the intellectual property rights of the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections. Yuga Labs will be in charge of the future of these 2 projects and has already announced that the owners of the NFTs in these collections will now have full rights to their works.
Yuga Labs to acquire CryptoPunks and Meebits
Historic moment in the still young history of non-fungible tokens (NFTs): Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, has just acquired the intellectual property rights of the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections, both owned by Larva Labs.
With this acquisition, Yuga Labs will allow the owners of CryptoPunks and Meebits to have full ownership rights to their NFTs, similar to BAYC. According to the Yuga Labs press release, this will allow CryptoPunks to be integrated into certain future Web 3.0 projects.
Indeed, until now, Larva Labs still limited the use of its NFTs after their purchase, a practice often criticised by their community.
Let’s make it clear from the outset that this is not an acquisition of Larva Labs, but exclusively of these 2 collections of NFTs. Larva Labs will now continue to work independently on its other projects such as Autoglyphs and its game Road Trip.
An acquisition that seems to have gone smoothly, as Yuga Labs wrote in a tweet:
“We have long admired CryptoPunks and the work of their founders Matt and John. They have pushed NFTs and the crypto world more broadly forward, and we are honored to carry the projects they built into the future we are building at Yuga Labs. “
BAYC continues to dominate
Launched in 2017, the CryptoPunks collection is often considered the pioneer of NFTs in part due to its immediate success and the skyrocketing prices of its creations. However, the launch of the now famous BAYCs last year quickly pushed it into the background, with a floor price that literally exploded and even surpassed it, as shown in this chart:
Floor Price of BAYC and CryptoPunks collections since January 2021
CryptoPunks have long benefited from this pioneering aura in the world of NFTs, but their team has unfortunately not been able to maintain their success, unlike BAYC, which has relied on this proximity strategy.
Indeed, the purchase of a BAYC allows, among other things, to have access to exclusive airdrops, like last August when some lucky people were able to obtain a “mutant serum” to transform their monkey and see it evolve into a new unique NFT. A successful project, as the floor price of the mutant BAYCs has now reached 48,000 dollars.
The Larva Labs team itself has admitted that it no longer feels able to fully exploit the potential of its CryptoPunks, as it elaborated in its press release:
“Our specialty has always been to create projects when new technology emerges. So as this category of Profile Picture Projects grew into a real industry, we found ourselves no longer suited to running these projects. “
Yuga Labs was however keen to point out that its priority remains the development of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and that the future of CryptoPunks will be defined according to the feedback from their community, while making it clear that it was not planned for CryptoPunks to operate as a club like the BAYC.
