Bored Ape Yacht Club creator acquires CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collection

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs has announced on Friday that they have acquired the rights of NFT collection CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. This means that we Yuga Labs now owns 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits. For the uninitiated, BAYC is a popular collection of 10,000 unique bored NFT apes created Yuga Labs. It has generated more than $1 billion in total sales amid celebrities flocking into the NFT bandwagon.
Bored Apes and CryptoPunks NFT collections are the most sold NFTs. Both the collections hold a combined worth at a minimum of some $3.6 billion at current prices.  “We’ve long admired CryptoPunks, and the work of the project’s founders, Matt & John. They’ve pushed NFTs and the broader crypto world forward, and we’re honored to carry the brands they’ve built into the future we’re building at Yuga,” a tweet from the Yuga Labs Twitter account reads.
According to Yuga Labs, this deal comes after conversations took place between Guy Oseary and the Larva Labs founders. “One call led to another and here we are at this horic moment,” Yuga Labs said in a blog post.

“Yuga Labs are the innovators of the modern profile picture project, and the best in the world at operating these projects. They are the ideal stewards of the CryptoPunks and Meebits. In their hands, we are confident that they will continue to be vital, thriving projects in the emerging decentralized web,” Matt Hall and John Watkinson, co-founders of Larva Labs, CryptoPunks and Meebits said in a joint statement.
Meanwhile, this acquisition does not mean that co-founders of CryptoPunks and Meebits are joining Yuga. They’re going to continue running Larva Labs and will keep doing what they are doing. “While we will work to bring additional utility to both the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections, we intend to do so as thoughtful stewards. We’re not in a rush here. We’ll be lening to the community before we decide what comes next,” Yuga Labs added in the blog post.

In other news, the BAYC NFT collection announced that it has donated $1 million in cryptocurrency Ethereum to Ukraine’s official crypto wallet address. This aid comes in support of Ukraine after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
BAYC NFT is owned famous celebrities, such as basketball icon Steph Curry, music art Post Malone, and even American TV host Jimmy Fallon. More recently, rap art Eminem is the latest to jump into the NFT craze with his first BAYC purchase that cost 123.45 Ether worth $452,000 (Rs 3.36 crore approx.).