The purchase price remains undisclosed, but it is likely to be in the astronomical (crypto) range: Yuga Labs, the company behind the NFT collection "Bored Ape Yacht Club" (BAYC), which is particularly popular among celebrities, has the products of the pioneer on the blockchain -Art Market and bought the rights to the "CryptoPunks" and "Meebits" from LarvaLabs.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Larva Labs, the company of software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson, remains as a separate entity, but Yuga Labs now controls the three most valuable collections of non-fungible tokens - and has big plans to commercialize them off the blockchain.

"We see ourselves with tentacles in all these areas: casual wear, events, video games, NFT and so on," Wylie Aranow, aka Gordon Goner, one of the founders of the BAYC project, told American tech portal The Verge.

His partner Greg Solano aka Gargamel called the "CryptoPunks" visionary, iconic and forward-looking.

In fact, what Hall and Watkinson launched as “some kind of art project” on the Ethereum blockchain has sparked an unprecedented boom.

In mid-2017 they issued – for free – 10,000 NFT, one-off virtual certificates of ownership on the blockchain linked to the appropriate number of algorithmically generated collectible characters: pixelated portraits of figures inspired by the London punk scene.

The "CryptoPunks" kindled such a passion for collecting and such a fever of speculation that the most expensive of them was sold a month ago for 8000 Ether, the equivalent of around 23 million dollars.

The revenue that "CryptoPunks" have generated since their launch is in the billions.

The traditional art business ennobled the Pixelkopf-NFT with museum exhibitions and auctions, for example at Sotheby'

Welcome to the club

Following this model, Yuga Labs has raised the business with the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" - and expanded it with a few offers.

Again, a collection of 10,000 collectibles, this time computer-generated three-quarter profiles of cartoon-like monkey heads with various accessories and idiosyncrasies, certified by NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

Unlike the puristic "CryptoPunks", which only mark virtual possession, BAYC-NFT are also membership cards for a club.

Not only do their owners have the right to market their NFT commercially, they are also part of a community that includes Paris Hilton, Snoop Dog or Jimmy Fallon, where you can be invited to parties and hope for special offers.

The fact that this model led to the "Bored Apes" soon outperforming the "CryptoPunks" in popularity and becoming even more successful commercially has to do with the development of the NFT business towards a medium of digital self-expression, also in social media networks is celebrated.

NFTs have become part of popular culture as objects of speculation.

Hall and Watkinson, the fathers of "CryptoPunks," said in an interview, "We felt that as guys doing experimental software design, we felt like we didn't really fit in." Separating the rights to the "CryptoPunks" and The three-dimensional virtual collectible figures "Meebits", which they also developed and launched in 2021, seem like the logical next step.

Yuga Labs, which underpinned the purchase of the rights with the acquisition of 400 "CryptoPunk" NFTs and 1700 "Meebits" tokens, will look to exhaust all possibilities of playful commercialization with two established strong brands and one newcomer.

The fact that NFT are also used in serious times has been shown since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Millions in cryptocurrencies were donated to the attacked country.

Among the donations was also a "CryptoPunk".

Its estimated market value: over $200,000.