The Infinite Node Foundation announced Tuesday that it has acquired the “full intellectual property rights” for CryptoPunks, one of the oldest and most famous NFT series, from Yuga Labs.
The Infinite Node Foundation is a new arts nonprofit dedicated to digital art conservation founded by venture capitalist Meyer “Micky” Malka and Becky Kleiner. It has an advisory board stocked with Web3 bigwigs, including Yuga Labs co-founder Wylie Aronow, Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon, and Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the founders of Larva Labs, the original creators of CryptoPunks.
CryptoPunks is a NFT collection hosted on the Etherueum blockchain that was created in 2017 by Hall and Watskinson. The collection, which consists of pixelated punks that the owner can use as a profile picture on social media accounts, was one of the first to reach a mass audience and is credited with jumpstarting the NFT craze in 2021.
In 2022, Yuga Labs, the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection—arguably the next major collection to hit the mainstream—purchased the rights to CryptoPunks for an undisclosed sum. Since, the NFT market has completely collapsed.
A report published last August by NFTevening said that the market for NFTs has been in such a dramatic downturn since 2023 that 95 percent of them are considered “dead,” with the average NFT owner experiencing a 44.5 percent loss on their investment.
While Infinite Node did not disclose a purchase price for CryptoPunks, crypto news website NFT Now has reported that multiple sources indicated that the nonprofit paid around $20 million.
“CryptoPunks sparked a cultural movement that blended code, community, and commerce,” Malka said in a press release. “By pairing museum-grade conservation with an evergreen endowment, we intend to future-proof this landmark work and make it easier than ever for scholars, curators, and collectors to engage with it.”
“The Punks were created to be truly decentralized, and have become a defining example of digital permanence and online network effects,” Hall and Wilkinson said. “The NODE foundation was created to explain and promote these ideas as a new art medium, and are the perfect long term home for the punks.”
A handful of museums already have CryptoPunks in their collection, including the ICA Miami, LACMA, and the Centre Pompidou.
