Yuga Labs, the maker of Bored Apes Yacht Club, has announced the acquisition of the rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections from their creator Larva Labs.
The acquisition is an important discussion because BoredApes and CryptoPunks are the most valued NFT collections by market cap. Together, these NFT collections are valued at at least $3.6 billion. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Prior to the acquisition, Bored Apes’ YugaLabs was rumoured to be raising funds.
Although the intellectual property rights of the characters belonged to the projects’ creators, the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFTs are owned by members of the community. Following its acquisition, Yuga Labs will be giving full commercial rights of the NFTs to the individual owners. This, however, does not mean YugaLabs will be giving up full ownership, but it’s a step closer to what the owners of the NFT have always wanted.
YugaLabs is quite excited about its acquisition, a tweet it shared reads, “We’ve long admired CryptoPunks, and the work of the project’s founders, Matt & John. They’ve pushed NFTs and the broader crypto world forward, and we’re honoured to carry the brands they’ve built into the future we’re building at Yuga.
The CryptoPunks project launched back in 2017 and 10,000 NFTs were claimed by users for free. Today, it is not only one of the oldest NFT projects, it is also one of the most popular. The prices of this NFT soared in late 2020 and now the cheapest of them all goes for almost $200,000. Last year, creator Larva Labs launched a follow-up project called Meebit which went viral and sold for millions of dollars within hours of launch.
While YugaLabs is acquiring Larva Lab’s most precious project, a Larva Lab blog post made it clear that “This is, however, not an acquisition of Larva Labs… As for what’s next for us, we never talk about that until it’s ready, but in general, we’re excited to get back to what we do best, which is working on weird new stuff.
