NFTs

Yuga Labs Just Sold the Moonbirds NFT IP, Just a Year After Buying It

Yuga Labs is serious about refocusing on the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the Otherside metaverse game, and related projects. On Friday, the crypto startup said that it had sold off yet another previously acquired NFT project IP, dumping the Moonbirds property that it purchased just over a year ago. The buyer is Orange Cap Games, a young gaming startup that builds digital and physical trading card games. The firm’s first game, the Pudgy Penguins-themed Vibes TCG, launched on Ethereum layer-2 network Abstract.

“Spencer [Gordon-Sand, CEO] and the team at Orange Cap Games are among the smartest, most detail-oriented builders in consumer crypto,” Yuga Labs co-founder and CEO Greg “Garga” Solano wrote on X. “Moonbirds deserve a team whose whole world is the birds, and there’s no one better than Orange Cap Games to help them reach their potential.”

Orange Cap Games has yet to share concrete plans for the Moonbirds IP and associated Mythics and Oddities collections. However, in an X post, the studio said that any future on-chain assets tied to Moonbirds will either be minted on a layer-1 chain or on the Yuga-linked ApeChain, an Ethereum layer-2 network. Additionally, Moonbirds characters will still come to Yuga’s long-in-the-works Otherside game.

Already this year, Yuga Labs has parted ways with the CryptoPunks and Meebits IP that it acquired from Larva Labs in 2022. The Meebits IP was sold in February to a new startup, The Meebit Company, while the nonprofit Infinite Node Foundation picked up the influential CryptoPunks IP earlier this month. The original Moonbirds NFT collection was launched on Ethereum in April 2022, with immense demand generating $280 million worth of primary and secondary sales in the initial weekend.

Original creator Proof, led by Digg co-founder and venture capitalist Kevin Rose, raised some $60 million in funding after the mint to create a crypto ecosystem of content, assets, and events. However, as the NFT market collapsed into late 2022 and throughout 2023, the firm faced increasing pushback from collectors. Yuga Labs ultimately acquired Proof and the Moonbirds IP in February 2024, with Rose becoming an advisor to the Bored Ape maker as part of the deal.

Terron Gold