NFTs
Moonbirds soar as Yuga Labs seeks to restore intellectual property rights of NFT holders
The collection’s minimum price has increased by 30% in the last 24 hours.
Once Popular NFT Collection Moonbirds is trying to revive its prolonged decline by adopting a new art direction, ending its Creative Commons (CC0) copyright licensing, and leaning on the Yuga Labs metaverse called Otherside.
“You will need a character. A character you own,” he wrote the Moonbirds X account.
“Starting today, Moonbirds will join Mythics as a collection with commercial rights. If you did stuff during the CC0 era – cool. But from now on, you’ll need to own a Moonbird to keep doing this.”
The news sent the Moonbirds soaring. The collection’s minimum price shot up from 0.57 ETH ($1,800) to 0.74 ETH ($2,350) amid a flurry of activity following the announcement, with 317 sales in the last 24 hours.
Colin Hesterly, one of the co-founders of Moonbirds and senior art director at Yuga Labs, will lead the project’s new art direction.
“It has been nearly a year since we emerged from the darkness,” Hesterly said in a video posted today, dubbed Moonbird Chronicles, but now “it’s time to rise to the light,” in what he calls a world that looks different.
The move to end Creative Commons licensing comes nearly two years after co-founder Kevin Rose’s surprise announcement on August 4, 2022, when he posted“We believe that this change honors and respects the values of the internet and web3 and begins a new and important phase of the project.”
Once a $4 billion ecosystem, Yuga Labs experienced a significant downtrend that culminated in a considerable restructuring last week. The company best known for its Bored Ape Yacht Collection (BAYC) NFTs is now focusing its efforts on Other sideits metaverse initiative.
Yuga Labs acquired Moonbirds along with other Proof Collective assets in February. At the time, co-founder Kevin Rose posted that “Yuga has built some of the best Web3 communities, and his plans for Otherside are ambitious in every way. Allowing Moonbirds to have a shared home on Otherside and be amplified as part of the Yuga ecosystem was a no-brainer.”
Moonbirds is also working to bring physical collectibles to the market, inspired by the success of other NFT projects like chubby penguinswhich has since been successful in Walmart stores across the US