📺 Yuga Labs Buys Out CryptoPunks; Bullish or Bearish for Punks? | Zeneca, Andy8052, Scott Lewis

hey bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation episode where we talk about something hot that is going on in crypto today's episode what could be hotter than this the apes bought the punks david okay yuka labs biggest nft acquisition in history one one for the one for the history books in in all of crypto i think made a massive purchase of crypto punk ip from larva labs and also um purchase some punks and other assets along with that i believe we're gonna be talking about that today

david what's the topic and who do we have in our conversation on today's state of the nation yeah this has really caught the nft ecosystem by storm people always uh speculated that at one point in time some nft brands will start buying the ip of other nft brands but i don't think anyone expected that the second largest the biggest brand that has come out in the nft mania the board apes would buy the most original most og ip out of the crypto punks from larva labs so it's like

ethereum buying bitcoin wow sorry maybe that's advice uh so there's been a lot of um just questions about what does this mean what does it mean for people to own nfts but have that be separate and distinct from the ip of those nfts what is larva labs going to do with the crypto punk ip do the crypto punks like this uh is this bullish for crypto punks and if the cr are the crypto punk owners allowed to not like it yet it'd still be bullish uh so we're gonna unpack all of

these things on today's state of the nation to talk about these things we have zenika 33 who you guys probably are familiar with he's a frequent contributor to the overpriced jpegs podcast with dr carly riley overall nft connor sewer uh owns more apes than he does punks but owns both so there's that also coming in uh you guys know andy8052 he's uh the the founder co-founder of fractional which fractionalizes nfts uh he's got a punk he is perhaps on team punk uh and of course last but not least

we got scott lewis co-founder of defy pulse slingshot and hype hype as an nft uh lore platform if you like to talk about your nfts and give them stories also a crypto punk diamond hander perhaps also on team punk so these are our three great guests they're going to give us their perspectives that's what this means for crypto punks what this means for yugo labs and what this means for the nft ecosystem overall it's that last piece that i think is the most interesting case study overall what does this mean for nfts right this is a fantastic case setting we get to see this play out in real time also speaking

of real time david you ever lose you ever lose track of all of your wallets oh all the time all right man this is a way where you can always keep track of your wallets in real time this is called xerion uh you just plug your mighty mask wallet in plug your ledger in you get access across all of your wallets now um that was a beautiful thing on ethereum alone i've been a xerion user from like day one as soon as they spun up an interface but now the problem i have is i've got all of these wallets across layer twos

and other side chains as well well xerion has added the ability to aggregate those wallets too so i actually know what's in my wallet this is not my wallet this is an example wallet i kind of wish it was mine because you know pretty pretty okay nft uh profile but you can see here i could just flip from ethereum to optimism to avalanche with the click of a button i also have the ability to like bridge this is huge too this is the year of bridging isn't it if you want to go from ethereum to polygon you could do that in one click in xerion as well so david

what should folks do with xerion yeah there's a link in the show notes to go load up your wallet and it will tell you everywhere that you've ever engaged with across all the chains and it'll let you do all of your things all your multi-chain things all in one spot including look at all of your nfts that you might hold in different wallets so not only does it let you look at all your wallets on all of the chains but it also lets you look at all of your assets across many many wallets across many many chains so it is the ultimate aggregator too it's like a battle station ryan it's like you know it feels

like you got like multiple screens you're at a command and control center that's what zero is makes you feel like a badass basically yeah this is cool in the nft section you can actually look at the the value of all your nfts by floor price they added that feature recently so go click on the link connect your wallet to xerion david i got to ask you the question i ask before we begin all of these state of the nations which is what is the state of the nation today ryan the state of the nation is branding and i actually think that this is the crux of the issue because board apes are a brand cryptopunks are a brand and that's really what ip is and so when we

are assessing discussing what this means for nfts what this means for the apes and the punks we're really discussing the value of these new metaverse brands these new digitally native brands that exist exclusively on the internet rather than rather than transcending or starting physically and then moving on to the internet these are starting on the internet and these are really the fundamental questions of brands and of themselves so ryan we are just uh the state of the nation is branding we are branding the future right now that's super good i know a term you've used in the past too is this this term called headless brands so we're exploring a new

type of brand right this is like a new age digital clout how to acquire it and i think the story of of um what happens with the apes and the punks will become super relevant into the future as the metaverse builds out as crypto builds out as we figure out what the hell we do with these digital property rights guys we're going to talk about what all this means in just a minute with our fantastic panelists but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to spend

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hardware wallet go to ledger.com grab a ledger and take control over your crypto hey guys we are back exploring this massive acquisition in the nft world uh apes by punks what does that mean we've got some excellent panelists i'm about to introduce you to before i do i want to go over a few quick things in case you haven't been following what's been going on uh so on march 11th board apes yacht club creators yugo labs they just announced their acquisition of crypto punks and also me bits which is a sub

crypto punks uh type of brand collections from larva labs so that happened on march 11th to give you guys some context crypto punks and board apes are like the number one and number two nft projects and it's not even close you know everyone else kind of trails off so punks their market cap is around 1.6 billion dollars for all these punk jpegs okay massive amount apes if you include the apes ecosystem at large is just under that 1.4 billion dollars okay so we're

talking three billion dollars worth of digital property rights this is massive this is close to 20 of the entire nft market these are our two brands that have really entered mainstream consciousness you see a lot of celebrities sporting nfts that are either board apes or uh or crypto punks in some cases so we want to talk about what this means because for uh yugo labs for board apes yacht club holders um hugo labs immediately

revealed their plans to grant all holders of crypto punks basically the same commercial rights that were available to the apes which the punks didn't have before we're going to get into that um hugo labs has also said we'll see if the community believes this that this acquisition is going to be really good for punks and also really good for apes so let's talk about what this means is this good for apes is it's good for punks is this good for nfts what does this mean for crypto we're going to go over all of the implications i want to introduce you to our guest the

first is xenica who's an nft connoisseur community leader you've you've heard him on overpriced jpegs podcast with carly riley zenika welcome how are you doing i'm doing well thanks for having me happy to be here uh i've heard zenika you are maybe team ape a little bit skewed but you also hold uh punks too so maybe it's not accurate to call you team ape yeah i bought my punk like two months ago so i'm a very recent addition to the punks but i have both yeah awesome all right and then we have andy8052 he is

the founder fractional fractional nft platform he's also been on bank list before more team punk i think andy how are you doing hey yeah i'm good thanks for having me back uh definitely as far as my bags go skew team pump also we also have uh scott lewis who's the co-founder of d5 pulse also slingshot he is a crypto punk diamond hander uh team punk i think scott do you have any apes i do not have any apes i really like the

project but do not own it all right well these are our panelists today we're going to dig into this topic um first guys let's talk about this this this first issue here which is like commercial rights to owners versus unwanted brand managers this is kind of a contrast a point that we're going to talk about a little bit but as we do i think it's important to to ask the question what were punks actually missing before like what did the punk community want were there some licenses that they didn't have some

abilities they didn't have that they really wanted uh zenika why don't we start with uh you for that question yeah i mean i think that's it's tricky to answer because the punks or the punk community it's it's a large community it's like thousands of people and different individuals have different wants and desires i think certainly there was some subsection that did want uh greater commercial rights because maybe they wanted to you know turn their punk into a brand and under the under lava labs they they couldn't lava labs you know had restrictions on what you could do with your punk uh but on the

other side i think there's probably a considerable amount of the uh community who are pretty kind of happy with how things were with like this hands-off approach just like there's crypto punks there are you know we're not trying to commercialize it lava labs is not trying to do anything crazy um yeah i mean again i think uh if things had continued as like lava labs were hands off and doing nothing people were probably fine but over the last year we saw live labs like make some questionable decisions and that maybe ticked off a few punks holders as well uh

yeah it's hard to say honestly andy what would you add to that yeah and i think that covered it really well to be honest i think a lot of what crypto punk's owners really wanted more than anything was just for larva labs to like at the point where they were clearly they weren't building massive things for it just to like kind of never talk about them again and i think the real issue people took was okay we don't have rights but you're also doing weird things and making like takedown requests against punk derivatives and that kind of stuff was really the crux of what some people took issue with

so scott what would you add to this what kind of rights did the punk holders actually want yeah i think there were like two or maybe two and a half like kind of like solutions that people were hoping to see i mean the first was that i think a significant portion of acuity i just wanted punks to go cco um and and sort of let uh like let it everyone use any punk imagery however they wanted um and then i think there was

kind of like one and a half options there were different types of ownership uh one was just sort of like which i was actually in favor was the yugo labs style full commercial rights um and then i think there was like a little civil community that would really preferred kind of the rights go to a dow that punk holders would then govern um and sort of like full community rights but more like collective ownership rather than individual ownership um and yeah i guess like it's sort of like you know maybe is that irony uh when hugo labs

bought it we ended up getting new collabs style like full commercial rides which yeah so there's something i definitely want to to drive home about the nature of punks that is i think is a really integral point of this story crypto punks being the very first profile picture nft project before so many people even wore their punks as their profile picture it was the first og project that came around and and before really nfts had the monetary value that they have now and so it has this branding it has this culture has

this style that's very unique and very crypto native um they're they're pixels they're called punks that's a reference in my in my mind as a reference to the cypherpunks uh and it's it's very decentralized which is very true to the nature of of cryptocurrency where there the larva labs never took a leadership position and never considered the crypto punks as their project but as something that they just birthed and gave to the world uh and so that was kind of the ethos that i think really attracted a lot of uh you know early og crypto

people and kind of why crypto punks are associated with like the kind of the ethereum ogs um yet that wasn't totally pure because as you guys have alluded to the larval labs were doing things that while while they did kind of have this hands-off approach they didn't also completely unrestrict uh the brand of crypto punks to be let loose uh and and so this i think this is really the crux of the issue where when yuga labs purchased the crypto punks ip some

people are on the side of um this is great now we have somebody actually uh allowing crypto punks to have the full commercial rights and then there are other people who are like well crypto punks were have never been about having a brand manager uh we don't want any leadership position on our decentralized vibe uh and so i'm wondering question to you guys which side of the of the of the of the aisle do you fall on do like do you do you think that this is a bigger offense to have a brand manager to taint the crypto

punk brand or are you more interested in seeing what a centralized team can actually finally do with the crypto punk brand uh zenika i'll throw this to you i think to what scott was saying before about how there's a camp wanting the crypto points to go cco i i would have i think like to have seen that just because as you mentioned sort of this was born out of like the ogs the early the cypherpunk movement and i think the community was really into like the decentralization aspect of it and even with lava labs uh

they were largely hands off until this year as far as i'm aware and then yuga comes in and is sort of taking the board ape your club model and just applying that directly to crypto punks and we haven't seen you know what other plans they might have i think that they alluded that they're planning to be relatively hands off and this is the first just big thing they're doing giving full commercial rights i mean i think there's definitely a time and a place for centralized entities to take ownership of a brand and steer it in a certain direction yuga has done that excellently with the

board apes but i think to me it's probably not the right approach for the cryptocurrency i think i would i'm a huge fan of cco and i think that they would thrive more under that model than uh just going you know hey it's similar to the apes we're gonna take it we're now considering it our brand i guess and we're gonna see what we do with that andy similar question to you which side of the aisle do you fall on are you bearish because uh we have an unwanted wanted brand manager or are you bullish because now punk owners are going to have commercial rights i've actually had

a pretty big change of heart here from when it first happened to now uh after just having more time to reflect on it and talk to people and think about it myself but i think kind of at the start i thought it was not great i didn't really love it i think that definitely somewhat hurts the narrative of punks um as it kind of i think there's like now kind of this [ __ ] in the armor to just the idea of being like the og project that did stuff because the ip has changed hands at least just like in my mental thinking about it and so to me i was like oh

that's not great i don't like it but then kind of as i've thought about it more i think the fact that punks were even ip was even for sale in the first place just makes me think that things probably wouldn't have been run better by larva labs long term and in my opinion hugo labs are like the premier nft company and studio and if like punks had to go anywhere else i would want it to be you go labs and so kind of just like from the mindset that

i think larv labs selling them to someone else and then that other group making them ccr or whatever is probably worse because it still creates the same like potential negative uh things around just larval labs not wanting the ip anymore and all that without having this really really great smart group of people who are well funded and are going to do cool things building and doing stuff with it so at this point i think like kind of of all the realistic scenarios that could have happened uh you labs buying punks is like pretty one of the best so andy are you

kind of like just like oh better than disney buying it something like this yeah it's like i don't like based on my understanding i don't think that there was a world where larval labs was just like hey you know what we don't want however many hundreds of millions of dollars we can get for this ip we'll just make it cc zero and so like kind of just accepting that that wasn't a possibility i think this is basically the second best possibility and overall way better than anything else that could happen i think that's a nuance that a lot of people have woken up to as a result of this where you know

people think like oh you buy your nft and cool you own the nft no very a lot fewer people are realize that there is ip associated with the entire set of those nfts and that ip is owned by someone even if you own the nft the ip is owned by someone else and personally i woke up to this fact as a result of this news and now are reconsidering and so andy kind of what you're saying is exactly what ryan said is that at some point in time that ip is an asset that will be owned by someone somewhere and so if larva labs goes under goes out of business it

gets auctioned off it could have been bought by somebody that we don't like um i'm reminded of the uh the martin skelly guy that bought the wu tang album uh and everyone hates him right like that could have like some we could have had some internet villain purchase the crypto punk ip so who who's the worst purchaser you could think of the guy that bought the constitution how about that guy uh and so and so andy what you're saying is like well uh yuga labs has been shown to be an excellent steward of an alternative nft ip in board apes and so

you know perhaps this is actually best case scenario is that kind of more or less what you're saying yeah i think like i still have some relative concern around centralization of all the massive ip under one company all that's not ideal but kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt in a lot of ways there aren't very many companies or organizations i think i would be more happy to see on punk's ip yeah totally there there's a take from dc investor that i want to read off and scott i want to get your opinions on it because i know you and dc investor

talk a lot at least on twitter he says as a result of the hugo labs buying the the crypto punk ip i don't expect everyone to understand but it feels like my favorite corner bar just got turned into an applebee's i know it's scott do you share these sentiments not really no uh like i think it's like i think sometimes it's like the social the social dynamics of nft collecting and like the different

people itself select into a collection um there's like a there's like a lot of like they attract kind of different types of people and they're all like their own little tribes in a sense with overlap it's a lot of overlap and so i think sometimes it's like easy to get caught up in like the stereotype of like a punk holder and a board a holder and like maybe forget about the fact that like you know there's like a lot of traits in board ape that came from punk

right and like it seems clear to me that hugo labs understood what punks were when they were making port apes and like i would still think there's of course risks that like they mess up the brand and that's true of anyone that like acquires a brand that's not the original founder or in larval apps case there's also the original founders mess up the brand um but i think sometimes like because we have so much emotional attachment to the jpegs we kind of forget that like

being a brand manager is a job you want done by a professional and like like um like like supreme and north face and timberland and vans are all owned by the same company and lots of other brands but like you know north face is still north face like in my eyes is like just someone that like knows the brand and like i think like i just want someone that's going to do

like a good professional job is that scott is that better than a dow owning it then like because okay so you go labs and we're maybe going to get to their slide deck at the bottom because that was kind of leaked and it's like it's like it's badass very hot it's pretty hot it's it's pretty amazing and you're like okay these guys can execute these guys are on it these guys are nailing it but like is that better than a dao owning punks let's say do you think that centralized brand management actually has some execution strengths and maybe a

decentralized like group of punk holders wouldn't i haven't been that impressed with dao's being brand managers in d5 at least um yeah i don't know i feel like it's something that like not messing up is something that's really hard for someone that's not like a professional at doing this and there's a lot of weird situations that have counter-intuitive

solutions and i think if you're looking at like all the all the d5 doubts and sort of like how they ran into like really some really bad public dramas that hurt their brand values and like really interesting the larva labs did and like i think both of them were like really trying to do a good job it's just like what seemed like a reasonable thing to do was not at all a reasonable thing to do it like versus a versus like a career professional they would take the same approach i think like the things that are really important for me is like liking the deal is that one like

people can actually invest money in their punks and like be able to like use them long term and not get like that image that they create and the lore around that image create kind of ripped off by whoever down the road um and i think that creates like a lot of like really cool stuff and and i think it's it's more like like but like pairing that with what is already a very like crypto punch community does its own stuff right like they're not waiting for someone else to like when dev's gonna add utility to my nft right and so it's

really like unlocking and like creating like a a better incentive structure within the crypto punx community than like you know having a party at a great location that we all get to attend yeah i got i got it and i do wonder if like this uh the centralized brand manager thing might be like better maybe that's the way brands do need to be managed i mean look like a brand like apple and it came from like you know steve jobs meticulous curation like the br the brain of kind of one individual in a very small group i

one thing i i i want to talk about really quick is this the cco that you guys have mentioned more than a few times so cco stands for creative commons license i believe i'm wondering xenica if you could just um school us a little bit on the cco license so like you don't have to get into all the details but um with a cco license for my punk does that does that mean if i were a punk holder i could um like make money on it could i

like license it to a movie house or an animation studio or a video game company uh does does it unlock me to do those sorts of things so how does cco unlock individual nft holders so i'm not a full expert on cco but my understanding is that yeah as we see on this uh this chart here cc's rocco means that the content is in the public domain there's basically there's no license there's no rights reserved anyone can basically do whatever they

want with the the ip so in the form of say uh bought apes lava labs are not uglabs owns the ip and they give a license to all apollos that license allows ape holders to have full commercial rights to do whatever they want to monetize their eight but it's still a license given by yuga you can at any point withdraw that license they can restrict that license they can uh disney can come along and buy yuga

and change their license so you're still sort of beholden to the parent company the centralized entity with cceo there's no there's no license it's just that this content is now in the public domain anyone is free to do whatever they want with it so generally the way copyright works is that uh creative work will go into the public domain become cco i think like 75 years after it's created or after the creator has died or maybe both or something like that so that's why if you go back you

look back at things like the works of shakespeare sherlock holmes you know things like that they're all in the public domain anyone can come along and create a piece of work using that ip and no one can sue them for it this newly created ip that can be licensed differently so if someone creates a like uh the sherlock movies you know that those new movies are not in public domain that's a new form of ip but it's the original you know the very fundamental part that

anyone can use and so when it comes to nfts uh we have some collections that are have full commercial rights so apes now punks and me bits um and then other collections where they're cco so cryptos mfas nouns and basically what that means is that again anyone can do whatever they want with it and so the owner of say i have crypto cryptos i uh if someone wants to monetize it they don't need my permission and i if they monetize i can't go after them and say you know i want some money back and neither can uh

you know the team or the founders of any of these projects it just it spawns creativity because no one is held back basically yeah so just to unpack that a little bit more we were talking about this before the show just to really unpack this and get into the details and they're actually kind of interesting because there's there's relation to crypt the ethos of crypto in of itself board apes and crypto punk owners this actually isn't yet true for crypto punk owners um uh yuga labs has not yet given this this new license they just have stated their intention to um no one really doubts them just to just to

clarify uh but board apes and crypto punk owners mutant apes and everyone out of yugo labs uh as in like i'm me and my crypto punk and scots crypto punk and andy's crypto punk those are our crypto punks and we hold the commercial rights to our crypto punks as in no one can go make a movie using my crypto punk as a main character without my express commission uh permission and that's different from creative commons open which are the mfers uh the crypto toads which are public domains as in anyone can use my mfr to do anything

that they want and they can adapt and change and do anything and it's very much the most like decentralized uh complexity at the edges version of creative commons and kind of the bold case for uh nfts that have creative commons opens is that the the uh there are zero restrictions on replication and reproducibility and that is a little bit like kind of like how we are trying to reduce the complexity of having as many nodes as possible with blockchains like how easy is it to re reproduce this and