Bored Ape Yacht Club creator buys CryptoPunks and Meebits

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs, announced today that it had acquired two programs from Larva Labs. One of the oldest and most valuable brands in the NFT world is CryptoPunks, and after launching last May, Meebits joined the list of most valuable NFT collections.

Yuga Labs wants to create derivative works around the two projects. It plans to grant intellectual property and commercialization rights to the owners of the crypts, allowing them to create works and products based off their crypts.

Greg Solano, a Bored Ape Yacht Club co-founder who goes by the name Gargamel, tells The Verge that everybody knows about the game. It is visionary and will be here forever. We were very excited about it, but we didn't know what we wanted the next step to be.

John Watkinson and Matt Hall said that Yuga Labs would be better stewards of the projects going forward. We felt like we were less and less suited to this as a couple of software developer experimentalist kind.

Yuga Labs is buying more than 400 crypts and 1,700 eobits from Larva Labs. The sale price was not shared by the company. Larva Labs will work on new projects.

According to OpenSea, the Bored Apes collection is the second-largest NFT collection of all time by trading volume. It is beaten by only one company, at $2.2 billion. According to OpenSea, Meebits have traded around $227 million in volume.

The market has started to cool off. The market began to dip around the holidays after a rapid rise in sales volume and value throughout much of last year. The sales tracker NonFungible pegs yesterday's NFT sales at around 12,000 transactions with a total value of $30 million. Through August and September of last year, transaction totals were 10x higher than they are today, and even a month ago, sales numbers and value were twice as high.

The purchase of Yuga Labs will make it even more of a force in the NFT space, but its founders are looking beyond that. The company released a limited-time mobile game, held a celebrity-packed party, and launched merch drops.

Gordon Goner, one of the co-founding members of Bored Ape Yacht Club, says that they see themselves in all those things.

The team needs to figure out how to monetize its new acquisitions, which weren't making money for Larva Labs. Though Yuga Labs takes a cut every time a Bored Ape is sold, Larva Labs doesn't. Yuga Labs doesn't intend to change that, so they have to figure something else out. Yuga Labs wouldn't comment on future plans. Aronow said they don't want to repeat Bored Ape'smembership club model.

Yuga Labs is growing fast. There were 11 employees at Yuga Labs in January. The co-founders say that number is closer to 50. According to reports, the company is in talks about a multi-million dollar investment at a valuation approaching $5 billion. Yuga Labs wouldn't comment on the investment.

The acquisition is a big deal because it is the first sign of NFT space professionalizing and consolidation. Outside of the NBA's Top Shot, most of the big brands in the NFT space have been eccentric projects with names like Cool Cats and Pudgy Penguins. Yuga Labs is starting to act like a real company and is looking to consolidate.