These two young men sold Meebits and CryptoPunks to Boring Apes

Written by: 0x13, Rhythm BlockBeats

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

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

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

As a result, the two major IPs no longer belong to Larva Labs, and Yuga Labs becomes NFT The absolute leader in the field. Many people may not know much about Meebits, but in fact, Meebits launched in May last year also broke many NFT records at that time. There are still many stories about "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 BlockBeats in May last year. I hope it will be helpful to readers .

Before turning into a butterfly

Larva Labs means "larva laboratory" in Chinese. The most well-known thing it has done so far is to launch CryptoPunks. Before the larva "turns into a butterfly", Larva Labs just A software company specializing in the development of mobile applications such as iPhone and Android, 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 graduating, Matt worked as a software engineer at Agency.com, Modus, and Columbia University Medical Center; John chose to continue his studies, completing 7 years of postgraduate computer science at the University of Toronto, and then electrical engineering and genetics at Columbia University of Dr.

In 2005, the two decided to start a business and founded Larva Labs together. At that time, the Internet had just developed for a few years, and they positioned Larva Labs as a "small mobile independent software developer", mainly developing apps. As the iPhone took smartphones to new heights in 2007, so did mobile apps.

At that time, Larva Labs also created some popular mini-games, such as "Trism" before the Apple App Store That's $250,000 in sales in just two months.

Like many developers, the two founders of Larva Labs were on the way to find their own position, but also because of various problems of the centralized platform Various complaints arose. They must have never imagined that after more than ten years, they can earn nearly 80 million US dollars in a single day with a decentralized project.

Birth of the CryptoPunks

The time comes to 2017, for John and Matt, this may be the most important year of their lives.

At the beginning of 2017, John made a "Pixel Character Generator", and they have been able to create a lot of cool pixels with it Character avatar. But at first they didn't think about what they were going to do with this generator, did they create some characters for a new game? A bit too boring, but what else to do? Their ideas were proposed one by one and rejected one by one until they learned about blockchain and Ethereum.

John and Matt finally decided to bring these pixel avatars to the blockchain, allowing their uniqueness to be verified and making them It can be owned, and these pixel avatars inspired by the 20th-century cypherpunk movement have become true collectibles. And time has proved that their decision is extremely correct.

"This is an experiment." Matt said. Realize, whether people can accept virtual collectibles.

The ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards that are widely used in the NFT field have not yet been created, and Ethereum The community is just getting started, and there is very little information about Solidity development and responses on the Stack Overflow forums, so all they can do is make changes on top of the ERC-20 standard.

So they could only cross the river by feeling the stones,Sure enough, they made a huge mistake.

At the very beginning, John and Matt kept 1000 CryptoPunks for themselves, and gave away all the others for free. All CryptoPunks were claimed within a week or so. When the primary market is closed, transactions in the secondary market become active.

John and Matt embed the trading market in the smart contract, they want users to trade their CryptoPunk conveniently, in their In the idea, a user wants to bid 1ETH to buy a CryptoPunk, another user places an order to sell the CryptoPunk for 1ETH, and the smart contract will act as an agent to carry out the transaction, and everything seems to be going smoothly.

Until one day, a user tweeted: "I sold my CryptoPunk for 1ETH, but I But I didn’t receive the money.”

One stone caused a thousand waves, John and Matt started to check the smart contract, and found that the problem was in the smart contract Instead of distributing the buyer's money to the seller, it is distributed back to the buyer. That is to say, after spending 1ETH, the buyer can not only get CryptoPunk, but also get back the 1ETH he spent.

Before that, people were very optimistic about CryptoPunk, and they were all proud of owning a CryptoPunk, but such loopholes have no It is different from a catastrophe.

If the contract finds a problem, just fix it. However, to ensure that everyone still gets their own CryptoPunk, countless transactions need to be rerun, and John and Matt need to pay thousands of dollars in gas fees, which is not a small sum. Even more difficult is whether they can still be trusted by the community after this incident, and will members of the CryptoPunk community continue to recognize the value of CryptoPunk?

John and Matt took this to the community with trepidation, admitted the mistake they made, and told people about CryptoPunks Need to migrate to new smart contracts. Surprisingly, no one objected, everyone was in favor of doing this, and they all chose to continue to support them. "No one complained that 'I only accept old smart contracts'." John and Matt couldn't be happier, it really made them feel The cohesion of community power.

So the problem was quickly resolved, and John and Matt added a new "bidding" feature where people could bid on a When a CryptoPunk bids, the money paid by the buyer will be stored in the smart contract. When the seller accepts the bid, the transaction will proceed immediately. Each CryptoPunk has an exclusive small market.

After that, there is a familiar story, CryptoPunks was exhibited offline in Zurich and the exhibited works were quickly sold out. The highest transaction volume in the primary market is 4,200 ETH (approximately 7.5 million US dollars at the time), and it will land in Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses in the second quarter of 2021.

“I think we are artists now.”

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Larva Labs' second project is not as famous as CryptoPunks, but it also reflects the creative genius of John and Matt.

This project is called Autoglyphs, a blockchain character generation art NFT project. Compared with CryptoPunk, each NFT has a concrete pattern, Autoglyphs is much more abstract, and the seemingly simple and messy characters hide mystery.

This series of artwork was inspired by the work of generative artists Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton in the 1960s, when computer storage The capacity is limited, so they can only use these simple characters to piece together a piece of art.

Michael A Noll, Computer Composition with Lines, 1964

And What John and Matt want to challenge is not computer storage capacity, but block storage capacity.

When creating CryptoPunk, they chose to store the image files in Larva Labs off-chain servers instead of on-chain, Although it faces the risk of being unable to prevent tampering, it also easily avoids the problem of block storage capacity.

But this time, John and Matt want to try to store Autoglyphs on the blockchain, traditional jpg or png image files are too Big, so they only had the option to create with characters.

"We must write a streamlined but efficient code, and the output of the work must be a small amount of data or text. These constraints have made us It’s hard to move an inch.” John and Matt tried repeatedly to create countless generators, rewritten their codes into smart contracts, and finally found the most suitable one, but even so, the transaction fees were still scary high. At that time, the Ethereum block The Gas Limit is 8 million, and it will cost them 3 million to generate an Autoglyphs NFT. Even so, they chose to continue doing it.

Strictly speaking, what is stored on the blockchain is not an image, but just a piece of code, when you want to see image, the code runs to generate an image.

John and Matt said that the Autoglyphs series of NFTs is a tribute to the generative artists of the 60s and 70s. And when they began to explore the digital field, they found that the art of that era did not receive much attention and appreciation, which is a very regrettable thing.

In an interview shortly after the launch of Autoglyphs, when the host asked them what their status is now, or "small mobile end ISV," John said, "I think we're artists now."

Hello, Yuan Universe

From CryptoPunk, which symbolizes the cypherpunk movement and detonated the encrypted world, to Autoglyphs, John and Matt, who pay tribute to the generative art of the 1960s They have been using their way to describe the world and spirit they love and respect, and their third project Meebits represents their enthusiasm for the metaverse.

Meebits has been getting a lot of attention before its official launch. True Ventures partner and well-known investor Kevin Rose tweeted to announce the project: "I just saw an early preview of the next NFT project that CryptoPunks production team Larva Labs will launch, my God, get your ETH ready! Let’s go.”

These remarks undoubtedly made everyone look forward to this project, and the facts have proved that everyone's expectations are worthwhile.

On May 4, 2021, the somewhat quiet NFT field boiled up again, Larva Labs has launched their third NFT project - Meebits.

The sale of Meebits adopts the Dutch auction mode, with a starting price of 2.5ETH. After a period of time without trading volume, the price will gradually decrease . However, backed by the brand of Larva Labs, Meebits was sold out in a short period of time, with an average price of 2.4ETH.

In just three days, the total transaction volume of Meebits in the secondary market has reached 12,000 ETH, or about 42 million U.S. dollars, which is much higher than the seven-day transaction volume of CryptoPunks, the most popular NFT collectible item. On the first day of the Meebits secondary market transaction, OpenSea's daily transaction volume reached 23.1375 million US dollars, a record high.

Meebits is more like an "upgraded version of CryptoPunks", From pixel avatars to voxel dolls, coupled with the different elements and rarity commonly used in series of NFT collectibles, it has attracted countless users to participate in snapping up. But if it is only this change, it is not enough to say that this is an excellent and innovative work. More importantly, these static "decorations" in the past can be moved this time.

And these little dolls that can move freely can be adapted to any metaverse. Metaverse can be said to be the hottest concept in recent times. It is considered to be the next form of the Internet, and it is also a virtual world for people to socialize, entertain, work and live in the future. And in this virtual world, it would be super cool to have a Meebits character "skin".

Larva Labs is an NFT Pioneers have opened the door to the NFT world for people through CryptoPunks. At the same time, Larva Labs has been doing what they really want to do, depicting the world they love through each work, from cypherpunk to generative art. In the Metaverse, while it's unknown where Larva Labs' next series will be aimed at, there's no doubt they'll continue to make rare collectibles for Gen Z and all digital natives.

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