Bored Apes Buy CryptoPunks in $5B Deal

Disney has sold CryptoPunks, the world’s first cryptocollectable digital asset, to BoredApes. The virtual currency is part of Disney’s new game that rewards players with extra time in their favorite park after they spend time playing. Staying at Walt Disney World for a day gets users $1 worth of crypto-points and four hours’ worth of gameplay.

The “crypto punks nft” is a new cryptocurrency that has been created by Bored Apes. The company announced the deal on their website.

The NFT collections from the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks have always been popular, and now the two iconic NFT collections have united, generating even more excitement.

A Game-Changer for BAYC

The rights to sell Larva Labs’ equally famous CryptoPunks and Meebits collections have been bought by Yuga Labs, the parent company of the celebrity-heavy BAYC clique. This establishes an NFT monster with a market valuation of $5 billion in digital art, and it might be the start of an NFT consolidation binge. 

The CryptoPunks set, which was published as a limited series in 2017, is credited with sparking the creation of the ERC-721 standard for non-fungible tokens and digital collectibles on the Ethereum network.

Celebrity endorsements and investments boosted the appeal of the Bored Apes Yacht Club NFT series, with Justin Bieber spending approximately US$1.8 million on two Bored Ape NFTs in a week. 

Former NBA great Shaquille O’Neal, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, Mark Cuban, Gwyneth Paltrow, Eminem, and Paris Hilton, to name a few, have all ‘aped into’ the BAYC universe and helped increase the NFT market profile. After hiding behind the Gargamel and Gordon Goner internet aliases, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, the two developers of the BAYC set, just had their secret identities uncovered.

The Gravity Center of NFT

They are the creators of Yuga Labs, which now holds the most valuable NFT assets and plans to become the center of gravity for all things digital art, according to the official statement:

“We’re working with our legal teams to complete the revised terms and conditions for both collections, which we’ll share with the community as soon as possible.” By turning up these rights, we’re further integrating CryptoPunks and Meebits with the web3 ethos, and we anticipate a broad spectrum of third-party developers and community producers using CryptoPunks and Meebits into their web3 projects… For us, NFTs have always been about culture. We’ve always wanted to build a community-owned brand that goes beyond NFTs, and we’re thrilled to be able to do it with CryptoPunks and Meebits on board.”

According to Larva Labs founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson, Yuga Labs will be “the perfect caretakers of the CrytoPunks and Meebits.” “We are convinced that in their hands, they will continue to be crucial, flourishing initiatives in the nascent decentralized web,” they say, adding that they would not personally move to the new corporation and will instead focus on different projects.

Finally, some ideas

Yuga Labs’ initial statement of the Larva Labs sets purchase was to affirm that they would transfer the IP (intellectual property) rights to individual NFTs to its buyers, to relieve CryptoPunk NFT owners’ surprise at the merger.

Yuga Labs does this with its BAYC collection, but despite the fact that it’s long been a pet gripe of theirs, Larva was reticent to provide it to CryptoPunks’ owners. The purchase price is unclear, but the new giant non-fungible token entity might become a major target for the looming NFT and digital art market regulatory clouds.