Yuga Labs Let go of CryptoPunks, NFT Blue Chip's next stop is the museum?

Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

In May 2025, CryptoPunks was "sent to the museum".

To be precise, it was Yuga Labs who transferred the intellectual property rights of the project that pioneered the NFT art era to a nonprofit called the Infinite Node Foundation (NODE). The latter announced that the acquisition not only includes the full intellectual property rights of CryptoPunks, but also comes with a $25 million cultural fund and will promote an ambitious museum collaboration program dedicated to integrating CryptoPunks into mainstream art institutions around the world.

It also announced in a high-profile manner: "This is not a transfer of ownership, but a liberation."

Within hours after the announcement, CryptoPunks floor prices quickly rebounded to about 48 ETH, and trading volume also saw a significant increase. The once silent trading interface became active again, as if reminding people of the glory this set of pixel icons once carried.

This blue-chip project, once regarded as the "Web3 Totem", has gone to a new chapter after years of market peaks and emotional troughs. The foundation also formed an advisory board to manage CryptoPunks, with Larva Labs founder and artists Matt Hall and John Watkinson returning to manage the committee, with Wylie Aronow (Yuga Labs) and Erick Calderon (Art Blocks) joining the committee. Additionally, NODE will hire Natalie Stone as a consultant to support the NODE team during the transition period.

But is this "return" a new beginning or the end of an era?

From Pioneer to Classic, CryptoPunks’ past and present lives

Born in 2017, CryptoPunks was created by Canadian developer group Larva Labs, inspired by punk culture and generative art. The 10,000-pixel avatars are cast for free, and there is no NFT market in that fashion, and only a small number of Ethereum users have received these images through smart contracts.

What really made CryptoPunks a crypto cultural totem is the explosion of the NFT market in 2021. That year, NFT became the mainstream discussion subject, from Christie's auction house to mainstream media, all of which focused on this new asset species. Because of its "original" identity, CryptoPunks is regarded as a "classical artifact" of digital art and its prices soar.

In August 2021, Visa announced that it would purchase CryptoPunk #7610 with 49.5 ETH, calling it "an important asset for enterprises to enter the NFT era". This behavior has triggered widespread imitation and promoted a short-term wave of institutions purchasing NFTs. In the same year, multiple Punk avatars were sold at Sotheby's and Christie's, such as Punk #7523 (commonly known as "Covid Alien") at Sotheby's for $11.7 million, creating an auction record for a single Punk. After experiencing the craziest stage of the NFT market, CryptoPunks' total transaction volume once exceeded US$3 billion, creating its mythical status as a "top blue chip".

However, the peak did not last long. With the launch of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) in spring 2021 and rapidly building a strong social community, business licensing system and celebrity communication power, CryptoPunks has gradually shown the limitations of fundamentalism but silence. Up-and-comers have won a larger user base through flexible IP licensing, peripheral products and party events, while CryptoPunks is gradually marginalized in terms of community activity and scalability because of Larva Labs' non-commercial stance.

This division eventually led to the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits IP in March 2022. The early stages of the acquisition news had a positive impact on CryptoPunks' price, but the actual progress after the acquisition was not as radical as the outside world expected. CryptoPunks has not been widely commercialized in Yuga's hands. On the one hand, it avoids vulgar IP generalization; on the other hand, it has failed to build an active ecosystem like BAYC. In the two years since Web3 entered the cold winter, CryptoPunks has gradually become a "respected but not touched".

Symbolized "definitionization", non-profit foundation takes over NFT

Totem

The acquisition of the sale, Infinite Node Foundation, is a non-profit foundation founded in 2025 by venture capitalist Micky Malka and curator Becky Kleiner. Its vision is to incorporate Internet native art into the mainstream cultural system and conduct research, exhibitions and archives.

According to NODE, the acquisition is not a traditional merger and the foundation promises to build a permanent exhibition space in Palo Alto and display the first full 10,000 CryptoPunks avatars, the first time in NFT history that a project has been curated in full set form. At the same time, the pavilion will synchronize a real-time Ethereum node, emphasizing the "on-chain locality" and "immutability" of on-chain art.

NODE's language is very clear, and they want to fight for a formal position in the academy and museum systems for Internet native art. It seems that CryptoPunks is completing an identity conversion, no longer a hype commodity, but an "cultural heritage" that can be exhibited, studied, and narrated.

But this transformation is not entirely romantic. Although the transaction amount is not disclosed, the $25 million cultural endowment established by NODE may imply Yuga Labs' "take-profit exit".

For the latter, selling CryptoPunks is more like a resource focus and financial optimization. Yuga launched a large-scale layoff in 2024 and clearly focused its business core on Otherside virtual world and ApeCoin ecosystem. The sale of Punks may be a rational leave.

Who is defining the "artistic" of NFT?

Interestingly, the main line behind this transaction is no longer valuation or floor price to a certain extent, but rather the status of art history.

NODE's intervention incorporates CryptoPunks into a more traditional cultural narrative: permanent collections, academic research, art curation…these words sound more like the responsibilities of MoMA or British Museum than the content of daily discussions in the crypto community.

In fact, NFTs have already shown a trend towards "museumization". In 2023, Autoglyphs were collected and exhibited by the Serpentine Gallery in London; Fidenza and Ringers began to be classified as representatives of the "general art movement" by curatorial organizations; Beeple's "Everydays" became the starting point for NFT's "museum settlement" after Christie's sold for $69 million.

From this perspective, the emergence of NODE is a gentle arrangement. It does not try to "empower" CryptoPunks, nor does it change its original appearance, but instead incorporates it into an institutional track of artistic protection. If the buyer this time is a commercial company, its operating logic is likely to be IP authorization, commercial joint branding, and traffic monetization. Although these practices can bring short-term benefits, they may eliminate the symbolic nature of CryptoPunks as a symbol of digital native culture.

However, new questions follow, what is the next narrative of NFT?

NODE said in the announcement: "This is not a transfer of ownership, but a liberation." When CryptoPunks become old money and "collection", we may also be witnessing the slow turn of NFTs from high-volatility financial experiments to low-frequency cultural styles. And CryptoPunks' transformation is like a mirror that reflects the anxiety of this industry.