Yuga Labs sells off Moonbirds IP as push to clean house continues

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Yuga Labs is cleaning house.

The crypto startup, known for creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and promising a massive metaverse game called Otherside, has continued to purge itself of all the other NFT IP it’s acquired in recent years.

Yuga has now sold off Kevin Rose’s Moonbirds IP, which it bought via an acquisition of Proof Labs in 2024, to a company called Orange Cap Games. Quick sidenote: Rose is now rebooting his old news site Digg with a crypto wallet integration.

“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,” Yuga Labs cofounder Greg Solano wrote. “As for Yuga, we’re laser-focused on Apes, Otherside, and something special we’ve been cooking up.”

Moonbirds’ new owner Orange Cap Games previously made a Pudgy Penguins-themed trading card game called Vibes. Moonbirds could get some kind of game of their own, but will also still be playable in the Otherside. Moonbirds NFTs minted for 2.5 ETH back in 2022, worth $7,600 at the time. The current floor price is 0.9 ETH ($2,290), up 40% in the last four days.

Now that the Moonbirds are out, will anything else Yuga-related be cut? In response to a post that suggested the Apecoin DAO should also be shut down, Solano said that “eliminating cruft” and being “thoughtful but also kinda fucking ruthless” going forward is the goal.

“At the end of the day, I just want apes and our core to fucking win,” the Yuga cofounder said.

Yuga cofounder Wylie Aronow agreed with the idea that DAO may no longer be needed, writing: “I think the DAO experiment for Apecoin may have run its course and with the regulatory nature changing rapidly in the States.”

So what’s next for Yuga now? In a January tweet, Solano said the team planned to get a “persistent” version of Otherside out by roughly June this year (which could mean a launch sometime this month). 

Otherside has been many years in the making. In case you forgot, the planned Otherside metaverse game held a massive “Otherdeed” virtual land mint back in 2022 that resulted in $561 million in NFT land sales within a day. It triggered massive gas fee wars where some paid thousands of dollars in Ethereum network fees alone. That fee and minting chaos could have absolutely been avoided, according to one Ethereum infrastructure expert.

Yuga Labs has since been dealing with a lawsuit in the years since that mint (separate from its legal battle with Ryder Ripps). Yuga, along with numerous other defendants including various celebrities and firms like MoonPay, was sued in late 2022 for creating what the complaint alleges is a “vast scheme” to sell what the Plaintiff claims are securities. Nearly three years later, that lawsuit appears to be ongoing, per PACER records inspected by Blockworks.

Yuga, which raised $450 million in seed funding in March 2022 at a $4 billion valuation, bought the CryptoPunks IP that month alongside the Meebits IP. At that point, Yuga had plans to expand its crypto empire. But recently, it’s been selling off that IP in a move that suggests it may have bitten off more than it could chew — or at least is dramatically pulling back.

Last month, Yuga sold CryptoPunks to a new nonprofit that plans to exhibit the NFTs at an art gallery in California. Yuga also sold Meebits to MeebCo in February, and sold off its HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara IPs to Faraway in April last year.

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