Bored Apes Yacht Club’s parent firm Yuga Labs announced on 11 March that they have acquired the rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections from creator Larva Labs, according to the source. However, the terms of the deal were not specified.
That being said, Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the two most valuable NFT collections by market cap and hold a combined valuation of more than $3 billion at current prices.
CryptoPunks and Meebits NFTs are owned by community members, but the intellectual property rights of the characters had long been held by the projects’ creators drawing criticisms. With this announcement, Yuga Labs signaled that things are about to change. They won’t be transferring the full copyright to the individual holders but have taken a step further than Larva Labs and something owners had long desired.
A tweet from the Yuga Labs Twitter account read, “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 honored to carry the brands they’ve built into the future we’re building at Yuga.”
The CryptoPunks project was conceived in 2017 by Larva Labs with 10,000 NFTs and is generally seen as one of the earliest and most influential NFT projects to date. In May of 2021, the creators released a follow-up project called Meebits, netting tens of millions of dollars in primary sales within hours of launch.
Yuga Labs on its “aggressive” acquisition
Yuga Labs has been actively building the community surrounding the BAYC project. A blog post from the Larva Labs founders quoted, “This is, however, not an acquisition of Larva Lab. 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.”
Earlier in February, Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz criticized Buzzfeed for revealing the identities of the Bored Ape founders. TronWeekly had previously reported on the news that created quite a furor in the community with some accusing Buzzfeed’s article as “doxxing” rather than appropriate journalistic practice.
