Yuga Labs, the well-known company that founded the world’s most famous NFT collection, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which last summer sold 21 pieces of its collection at auction for $24.4 million, has recently purchased two of the most valuable NFT pieces in existence. These are CryptoPunks and Meebits.
NFTs acquired by Yuga Labs
“[Yuga Labs is] 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 statement.
The two collections of Bored Apes and CryptoPunks have now become icons for the growing NFT community, with a trading volume of over $1 billion and $2.2 billion respectively.
In 2021, the NFT world experienced a real boom, reaching around $17 billion in sales. According to a recent report, NFT sales would have increased by 21,000% by 2020.
Cryptocurrency wallets reportedly transacted in the non-fungible token market amounted to around 2.5 million.
Yuga Labs also announced that it would leave the commercial rights of the two NFTs to Larva Labs. CryptoPunks was one of the first ever projects and one piece in the collection fetches a valuation of almost 70 ETH, or about $185,000.
While Meebits, the second piece purchased, recorded a trading volume of about $227 million, on OpenSea, with the floor price trading at 4.7 ETH, or about $12,000.
Artist Dillon Francis gets paid in NFTs
Electronic music artist Dillon Francis has accepted a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT as part of a record partnership deal with upcoming DJ duo ESCAPΞPLAN, whose musical identities are represented by their Bored Apes.
The traded NFT represents the monkey with the “DMT” fur, which was sold for 109 ETH (approximately $283,000 at current prices) to Randy Greenstein of Big Night Entertainment, only to be transferred to Dillon Francis a month ago.
The artist commenting on the news said:
“I had to have a monkey to be in ESCAPΞPLAN’s music videos”.
Francis‘ interest in Web3 and the world of cryptography is certainly not limited to his newly received NFT. The artist said he has been involved in the world of NFTs for about a year with over 100 pieces already in his possession. He also said in a recent interview that he first learned about the crypto world in 2017:
“In 2017, when a friend of mine told me to buy Ethereum and Bitcoin, I already thought I was too late. It’s never too late”.
