Yuga Labs, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced today that it has acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. CryptoPunks is one of the oldest and most valuable brands in the world of NFTs, and Meebits quickly joined the roster of NFT collections. more valuable after its launch last May.
Yuga Labs hopes to foster a “builder community” by creating derivative works around the two projects. To do that, it plans to grant intellectual property and commercialization 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,” says Greg Solano, co-founder of the Bored Ape Yacht Club who goes by the pseudonym Gargamel. the edge. “It’s just iconic, ahead of his time. He is a visionary, and he will be here forever. We immediately got excited not knowing at all what we would 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 project manager in the future. The duo launched CryptoPunks in 2017 as a “kind of digital art project,” says Hall. the edge. “We felt like we were less and less suited to this as a couple of experimental software development people.”
Yuga Labs is also acquiring more than 400 CryptoPunks and 1,700 Meebits from Larva Labs as part of the deal. The company declined to share the sale price. Larva Labs will continue to operate independently and work on new projects.
To date, more than $1 billion worth of Bored Apes have been traded, 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, at $2.2 billion. Meebits has traded around $227 million in volume, according to OpenSea.
The acquisition comes as the NFT market has started to cool off. After a rapid increase in sales volume and value for much of last year, the market started to slide over the holidays and has yet to recover. Sales tracker NonFungible pegs yesterday’s NFT sales at around 12,000 transactions with a total value of $30 million. Transaction totals were 10 times higher than in August and September of last year; even a month ago, sales figures and value were double what they are today.
But while today’s purchase makes Yuga Labs an even bigger giant in the NFT space, its founders look beyond NFTs when thinking about what’s next. The company has already released merch, launched a limited-time mobile game and held a celebrity-studded party in Brooklyn.
“We see ourselves with tentacles in all of those things: streetwear, events, games, NFTs, and so on,” says Wylie Aronow, another co-founder of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, who goes by the pseudonym Gordon Goner. “It’s just a matter of discovering and extending that utility to these new IPs.”
The team will also need to find ways to monetize their new acquisitions, which weren’t making money for Larva Labs. While Yuga Labs takes a cut every time a Bored Ape is resold, Larva Labs doesn’t do that with CryptoPunks and Meebits. Yuga Labs does not intend to change that, so they will have to think of 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.
Yuga Labs has also been growing rapidly. Yuga Labs had 11 employees as of January. Today, the co-founders say that number is closer to 50. The company has has allegedly been in talks with Andreessen Horowitz on a multi-million dollar investment valued at close to $5 billion. Yuga Labs declined to comment on a potential investment.
The acquisition is a big deal for another reason: it is perhaps the first sign that the NFT space is becoming professionalized and consolidated. Outside the best shot in the nbaAs of now, most of the big brands in the NFT space have been eccentric projects with names like Cool Cats and Pudgy Penguins that seem to run from Discord servers. Yuga Labs is beginning to act like a real company, and like any company that positions itself in a growing market, it seeks to consolidate.