The NFT community never stands still, gradually scaling and transforming. Recently, another wave-making news has avalanched the Web3 space, as Bored Apes maker Yuga Labs is acquiring the rights to its main competitor CryptoPunks and brand-new Meebits NFT collections by Larva Labs!
Just imagine, the two pioneering titans of the NFT terrains with the world's most valuable collections that are worth now around $3.6 billion in market capitalization are merging for something even greater. The terms of the deal concern the brands, art copyright, and some other IP rights for both collections that are kept unveiled at the moment. Moreover, Yuga Labs also gets 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits.
“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 Yuga Labs official Twitter account reads.
The rights to CryptoPunks and Meebits are distributed among the community members, but the intellectual property rights have been primarily owned by the projects’ creators. With the acquisition, according to Yuga Labs, all the commercial rights will be given to NFT holders. They will hardly give out the full copyright, but it's definitely head and shoulders above the opportunities the community members had with the old leadership.
From now, under the Yuga Labs' ownership, both CtyptoPunks and Meebits will benefit from forwarding to Web3. Now, all the willing will be able to make use of the NFT collections in their Web3 projects in the metaverse.
On top of that, Yuga Labs are well aware that CryptoPunks and Meebits are totally different from Bored Apes. It means the project leaders will be more attentive to the holders’ opinions and agree on each step with the community.
“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,” Larva Labs founders announced on the company's blog.
Just to mention, the CryptoPunks project was launched in 2017 with 10,000 NFTs claimed by users for free. Since then it has grown into the symbol of the NFT movement with a floor price of about $200,000 for now. As for the Meebits, the follow-up collection launched in May of 2021 and raised dozens of millions of dollars in primary sales within a couple of hours after the drop.
