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Yuga Labs has just bought out the collection of CryptoPunks avatars from its competitor Larva Labs. An operation that could give birth to a behemoth in the still nascent NFT market.
© Getty — Alexi Rosenfeld
After conquering the stars, the creators of the Bored Ape have just struck a blow on the NFT market. The latter, with their company Yuga Labs, have just bought the collection of CryptoPunks avatars from their competitor Larva Labs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it is a major move in consolidating the nascent NFT market (non-fungible tokens), these certificates of authenticity which make it possible to appropriate a digital object.
Larva Labs launched its CryptoPunks collection in 2017, small pixelated characters from retro games that popularized avatars in NFTs. Initially, these NFTs could be requested and obtained for free by anyone with an Ethereum wallet, but all of the images in the collection quickly found takers, triggering a surge in prices to obtain them.
At the peak of the industry’s explosion last year, CryptoPunks could trade for over $500,000. If the cheapest ones today cost around $190,000, some more coveted ones are sold for tens of millions of dollars. In February, one of the nine extraterrestrials in the collection was acquired for $23.7 million. After the CryptoPunks, Larva Labs unveiled a new collection of characters last year, avatars called Meebits.
Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, the two main collections of NFT
While Larva Labs was a pioneer in the NFT market, Yuga Labs and its Bored Ape, digital images of humanized apes, have since become particularly popular. Launched in April 2021, the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, which includes 10,000 unique designs, has indeed won over the biggest stars. Some images are in the hands of Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Curry, Shaquille O’Neal, Neymar, Omar Sy, Snoop Dogg or even Paris Hilton.
At the beginning of the year, BuzzFeed claimed to have succeeded in discovering the identities of two of the four founders of the most popular NFT collection of the moment, who pocketed nearly $2 million in the first sale alone and continue to earn 2.5% commission on each resale of NFT. In January, the average sale price of an NFT Bored Ape was around $250,000.
Yuga Labs soon valued at 5 billion dollars?
From his collection of signs tokenized, Yuga Labs has developed an entire ecosystem, thanks to derivative collections or a partnership with Adidas. An ecosystem that will therefore be further enriched with the 10,000 NFT CryptoPunks characters. The owners of the latter, like those of the Bored Ape, will now hold the rights to commercial exploitation of their NFTs.
With Larva Labs in its fold, Yuga Labs is giving itself the means to become a juggernaut in the sector, which should not fail to attract investors. Andreessen Horowitz would thus be in line to take part in an operation which would bring the valuation of the company to 5 billion dollars. In 2021, NFT’s sales volume hit $24.9 billion, up from just $94.9 million a year earlier, according to figures disclosed by DappRadar to Reuters.