Sold Meebits and CryptoPunks to the Boring Ape Company

On March 12, Yuga Labs, the parent company of Boring Ape BAYC, announced the acquisition of the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT series IP developed by Larva Labs. Yuga Labs plans to offer full commercial rights to both NFT series to holders.

Meanwhile, Yuga Labs stated that the BAYC ecosystem will remain its "center of the universe." The acquired NFT series will not be crammed into the "club" model developed for BAYC. Yuga Labs will work to bring additional utility to the CryptoPunks and Meebits series and will fully listen to the community before deciding on the next move.

The NFT industry that has been silent for a long time has finally added some imagination. BAYC has always been the representative of CC0, and Larva Labs' IP is not only expensive, but it is criticized that the holder has no commercial copyright. This acquisition is equivalent to the BAYC team buying the commercial copyright and giving it to the players of CryptoPunks and Meebits.

As a result, the two major IPs no longer belong to Larva Labs, and Yuga Labs has become the absolute leader in the NFT field. Many people may not know much about Meebits, but in fact, Meebits, which was launched in May last year, also broke many records of NFTs at that time. There are still many stories about the "Ape Universe" in the future, and the story of the two young people who created Larva Labs is also worth reading. This is an article written by Rhythm in May last year, and I hope it will be helpful to readers.



Before turning cocoon into butterfly


Larva Labs means "larvae laboratory" in Chinese. The most well-known thing it has done so far is the launch of CryptoPunks. Before the larvae "turned cocoons into butterflies", Larva Labs was only a company specializing in the development of mobile applications such as iPhone and Android. The software company, the company is not too big, only two people John Watkinson and Matt Hall.

John and Matt are old acquaintances. They entered the University of Toronto in 1994 to study computer science. After graduation, Matt worked as a software engineer at Agency.com, Modus, and Columbia University Medical Center; while John chose to pursue further education, 7 years after graduating in computer science at the University of Toronto, and then in electrical engineering and genetics at Columbia University 's Dr.

In 2005, the two decided to start their own business and co-founded Larva Labs. At that time, the Internet had just developed for a few years, and their positioning for Larva Labs was only a "small mobile independent software developer", mainly developing apps. As the iPhone took the smartphone to a whole new level in 2007, mobile apps also became the new thing.

At that time, Larva Labs also created some popular small games, such as "Trism", which sold as high as $250,000 in the first two months of Apple's App Store.