Boring Ape Yacht Club maker Yuga Labs announced on Friday that it has acquired rights to the Crypto Punks and Meebits NFT collections from creator Larva Labs.
Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the two most valuable NFT collections by market capitalization, worth at least about $ 3.6 billion at current prices. Yuga Labs is rumored to have been negotiating funding over the past few months, but no official announcement has been made.
No terms and conditions have been announced.
CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT are owned by members of the community, but the intellectual property rights of the character have long (and controversially) been owned by the creators of the project. With this announcement, Yuga Labs has announced that it will grant individual owners the full commercial rights of NFTs. We don’t specifically transfer the full copyright, but it’s a step ahead of what Larva Labs has done so far, and it’s something the owners have long wanted.
“We have long admired the work of CryptoPunks and the founder of the project, Matt & John. They have advanced the world of NFTs and the wider cryptocurrency, and we have the brands they have built. We are honored to bring it to the future we are building with Yuga. ” Tweet Read from your Yuga Labs Twitter account.
The CryptoPunks project started in 2017 and users have charged 10,000 NFTs for free. It is generally considered one of the earliest NFT projects and one of the most influential projects. In late 2020, the price of pixelated portraits began to skyrocket, with the rarest ones selling for millions of dollars and the cheapest ones now selling for nearly $ 200,000. In May 2021, the founders of Larva Labs released a follow-up project called Meebits, which made a primary sale of tens of millions of dollars within hours of launch.
The founders of Larva Labs have almost completely withdrawn from the project at this point. In a blog post, Yuga Labs details that he got 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits from the company, leaving only a few of each in addition to the generative. Art project Autoglyphs that was not part of the contract.
Yuga Labs has taken a more aggressive path and unveiled a partnership to actively build a community for the Bored Apes project.
“But this isn’t an acquisition of Larva Labs … we won’t talk about it until we’re ready, but in general we’re working on something weird. I’m excited to return to doing my best. New. “, Blog post According to the founder of Larva Labs.
