Larva Labs announced the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits to Yuga Labs, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). On Saturday, March 12, Yuga Labs confirmed the acquisition through its Twitter handle. BAYC now owns the brands along with the copyrights status of the art collection and IP rights for both CryptoPunks and Meebits.
Yuga Labs is known for its original and unique collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFT released in April 2021. Later then, they also bombarded all the owners of Bored Ape with the mutant serum to create Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFTs. Now both the collection holds thousands of millions of dollars in evaluation.
Meanwhile, Yuga Labs is excited to have CryptoPunks and Meebits onboard. They see it as a vast ocean of opportunities for themselves and how they can build new tools around it. The co-founder Greg Solano states to The Verge,
“Everybody knows CryptoPunks, everybody loves CryptoPunks. It’s just iconic, ahead of its time. It’s visionary, and it’s gonna be here forever. We were just immediately excited about it without knowing at all what we would want the next step to be.”
Greg Solano
Also, read - All you need to know about the Bored Ape Yacht NFT collection
The varied approaches between Yuga and Larva Labs
Whereas, CryptoPunks was the leading competitor against BAYC in the NFT profile picture zone. The algorithmically generated 8-bit style pixel art of punks was one of the most trending NFTs on the biggest NFT sale platform OpenSea. Despite being unique and built on the ERC-20 platform of the Ethereum blockchain the creators seemed to be quite indifferent because of the lousy market for them in the year 2021.
While Yuga Labs came up with a different approach for their NFTs and providing a premium membership to its owners was a game-changer in the market. It did attract many celebrities and sports stars towards them and consequently, the prices soared in the market. Initially, the project was given a floor price of 0.08 ETH which gave the owners a golden opportunity to bag some Bored Apes NFT, further allowing them to monetize their apes.
However, Yuga Labs have clarified to give full rights of commercialization to both the NFT collection holders. It means the owners of CryptoPunks and Meebits can use their avatars for marketing, services, product advertisement, and other initiatives. Moreover, Larva Labs admits that it’s beyond their capacity to serve the industry with the growing demand for modern-day NFT profile pictures.
Perhaps now when the future of CryptoPunks and Meebits are secured, the Larva Labs would like to experiment more and launch new projects. Larva seemed to be quite happy with Yuga being the best innovator in the NFT Profile Picture market. They are persistent in their vision to operate in the world fairly and grow communities around them.
