Bored Ape Yacht Club Creator, Yuga Labs, Buys CryptoPunks and Meebits

Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property and over 2,000 NFTs from Larva Labs.

Bored Ape Yacht Club Creator, Yuga Labs, Acquires CryptoPunks and Meebits
Cryptopunks, Yugalabs, Meebits

The Deal

Yuga Labs, the recently-doxxed creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT intellectual property (IP) from Larva Labs.

Yuga Labs now owns all of the CryptoPunks and Meebits IP, as well as 423 CryptoPunk NFTs and 1,711 Meebit NFTs. While the purchase price is not public, the average sale price of CryptoPunks and Meebits suggests the deal includes over $100M in NFT assets. It is unknown if the 423 CryptoPunks NFTs sold to Yuga Labs include the 104 Punks in last month's canceled Sotheby's auction.

In its announcement of the sale, Yuga Labs said, "we will soon be granting CryptoPunks and Meebits holders the same commercial rights that BAYC and MAYC owners enjoy," and that Yuga Labs plans to bring "additional utility" to the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections.

The Assets

CryptoPunks
CryptoPunks. Source: Larva Labs

CryptoPunks is a collection of 10k unique pixelated character NFTs registered on Ethereum. Considered by many investors to be a "blue chip" NFT project, CryptoPunks has inspired dozens of copycat projects and ushered forth what Larva Labs calls the "modern CryptoArt movement."

Meebits
Meebits. Source: Larva Labs

Meebits is a collection of 20k unique, 3D voxel character NFTs registered on Ethereum. Meebit NFT holders get access to their Meebit's 3D raw files so they can create their own Meebit animations using 3D modeling software.

According to Nansen's wash trade filter, Meebits has extremely low "real" trading volume. From February 3-10, 2022, Nansen found that over 99% of Meebits transactions were wash trades.

Txn Type Volume (ETH) Volume (%)
Wash trades 583,832 99.999%
Real trades 711 .001%
Total 584,543 100%

Why Did Yuga Labs Want to Own CryptoPunks and Meebits?

Analysts believe that Yuga Labs can generate more profit from the CryptoPunks and Meebits IP than Larva Labs was capable of. Since Bored Ape Yacht Club has grown in popularity, Yuga Labs has generated additional income through licensing the brand. In December 2021, Yuga Labs and Sandbox (SAND) creator Animoca Brands announced an NFT game partnership using Bored Ape Yacht Club branding.

NFTs were hot at the time, and Animoca co-founder Yat Siu said, “NFTs have emerged as a store of culture. There are very few icons that are able to represent the surging world of NFTs as powerfully as Bored Ape Yacht Club." Despite the recent dip in NFT interest, it's reasonable to expect similar enthusiasm in the gaming and fashion spaces for CryptoPunks licensed products.

There is still no official word on how CryptoPunks and Meebits will be integrated into Yuga Labs' other projects, or if Yuga's new acquisitions will eventually release their own tokens, like the teased Bored Ape Yacht Club token coming this year.