Yuga Labs, the company behind one of the most prestigious NFT collections, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced today that it has purchased the intellectual property rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from Larva Labs. After this bombshell dropped on the NFT world, secondary market sales of the collection totaled $18.8 million in the last 24 hours, marking a 1,219% increase over the previous 24 hours, according to data from CryptoSlam.
NFTs are non-fungible, unique tokens that exist on blockchains, such as Ethereum or Solana. They provide ownership of digital objects, such as images, music files or video game objects. The NFT market has exploded over the past year, with more than $23 billion exchanged by 2021, according to data from DappRadar.
Yuga Labs commits to securing real IP for NFTs, another step toward mass adoption
Yuga Labs has announced that it will grant intellectual property rights for individual CryptoPunks images to their respective owners, just as it has done for its own Bored Ape collections. This detail had been a point of contention for some CryptoPunks owners in the past, as Larva Labs had previously given unclear indications of the owners’ ability to monetize their NFT images.
Larva Labs also sold its Meebits NFT project intellectual property to Yuga Labs as part of the deal. Meebits sales over the past 24 hours also jumped to $18.5 million, according to CryptoSlam data, representing a 529 percent increase over the previous period. The floor price of Meebits rose 32 percent during the period, to nearly ETH 5.6 ($14,500).
The first step for Yuga Labs is to fully license CryptoPunks and Meebits commercially, according to a statement from Yuga Labs: “With this acquisition, Yuga Labs will own the CryptoPunks and Meebit trademarks and logos, and as they did with their own BAYC collection, Yuga Labs will transfer IP, commercial and exclusive licensing rights to individual NFT holders.”
The founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club want to revive the NFT phenomenon
Yuga Labs, who launched the BAYC collection in April last year, had previously granted all Bored Ape NFT owners a full license to use the images they own for any commercial purpose they choose. Entrepreneurs, brands and celebrities have been quick to jump on the BAYC phenomenon and have launched various Bored Ape branded campaigns, one can think of the famous sports brand Adidas who have asserted their status as a pioneer of the Metaverse and has already collaborated with BAYC for an NFT collection.
Larva Labs, creators of the CryptoPunks collection, was reluctant to grant the same type of commercial license to its NFT holders, which had become a source of controversy among CryptoPunks investors. As a result, several prominent holders dropped out of the project, including the pseudonymous “Punk4156,” who told Decrypt in December that the intellectual property dispute was behind his $10 million CryptoPunks NFT sale.
Yuga Labs, however, wanted to reassure the owners of Bored Ape in its tweets, “To be clear: the BAYC ecosystem will remain the center of our universe. We believe that what’s good for the punks is good for the apes and the rest of space. Likewise, what’s good for the monkeys is good for the punks. We want to make the pie bigger, not fight over slices.”
As for what exactly is in store for CryptoPunks now that the IP will be controlled by Yuga Labs, the company’s pseudonymous co-founders are certain of one thing they say, “We’re in no hurry to do anything other than give people their IP, see what they’re building and listen. Yuga Labs has addressed the main issue surrounding these mythical collections created by Larva Labs, and now define a new framework that secures NFT owners and ensures their full ownership of their digital asset.
