After acquisition by Yuga Labs, CryptoPunks has a "commercial license"
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks are currently the two most valuable series in the NFT market by market cap and floor price. But just on March 11, Yuga Labs, the creator of BAYC, announced that it has acquired two NFT series, CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs, covering branding, art rights and other intellectual property.
CryptoPunks is the second and most successful NFT project by Larva Labs. Larva Labs then launched a third NFT project Meebits last year, aimed at future metaverse and online gaming world, also achieved good results.
Larva Labs co-founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson said in a release: "Yuga Labs is the innovator of social avatar projects and the best company in the world to run them. It would be ideal steward for CrytoPunks and Meebits. In their hands, we believe that these two projects will continue to be vital and thriving projects in Web3.”
Although the deal does not mean that the two co-founders of Larva Labs will join Yuga Labs, after the acquisition of the two NFT series, Yuga seems to have the first plan, which is to give CryptoPunks and Meebits Holder with commercial rights.
CryptoPunks' "commercial license" sparks controversy
New York-based software company Larva Labs created its famous CryptoPunks NFT series in June 2017, a collection of algorithmically generated 10,000 24×24, 8-bit styled tagged and pixelated artistic images. Each CryptoPunks NFT is randomly generated from several different properties, so no two CryptoPunks will be exactly the same, guaranteeing their uniqueness.
Among the 10,000 NFTs are 9 aliens, 24 apes, 88 zombies, 3,840 female and 6,039 male characters, each with unique characteristics including glasses, cheeks, braids, chimneys, hair color, beanie, etc. Arguably, the more unique the feature, the rarer the NFT.
However, such set of free-generated images' popularity is far beyond imagination in just four years. The price has gone from zero to millions of dollars, even the global payment giant Visa spent nearly 50 ETH to buy CryptoPunk #7610 under last year's NFT craze.
To sum up the reasons for the popularity of CryptoPunks, in addition to being revered as the oldest project in the NFT market and the earliest project to gain widespread attention as well as its scarcity, celebrity promotion is also one of the reasons. Including Gary Vaynerchuk, Stephen Curry, Serena Williams are its senior fans.
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