NFTs
Yuga Labs Burns Nearly $1 Million in Ethereum Gaming NFTs — Here’s Why
Yuga Labs, the startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), announced on Thursday that it has completed the burn of 4,295 Ethereum NFTs related to the cryptocurrency game HV-MTL.
This happens the next day Yuga Labs has sold two of its gaming IPs for blockchain gaming studio Faraway—HV-MTL was one of those IPs. With Distant now in charge, the game studio Requested that Yuga Labs would burn the nearly $1 million worth of HV-MTL NFTs it owned.
“Burning” crypto assets refers to the act of sending them to an address where they cannot be retrieved, effectively destroying them. With a total supply of 30,000 HV-MTL NFTsThis burn represents 14% of the total supply — which many expected would increase the price of the collection by reducing the overall supply.
According to NFT Minimum PriceWhen news of the acquisition broke on Wednesday, the floor price — or the price of the cheapest NFT listed on a marketplace — of HV-MTL dropped 16% on a significant increase in trading volume. Then, in the hours that followed, as NFTs owned by Yuga Labs were burned, the floor price jumped 31% to a floor price of 0.064 ETH.
That’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the collection’s record price of 2,069 ETH (or $3,470) in March 2023. Even so, at Wednesday’s peak price of around $224 worth of ETH, the burn would have been valued at a minimum of $962,000 and potentially more, as some of the NFTs may have characteristics that could make them command prices higher than the floor.
HV-MTL Forge is a crafting game that requires players to create a habitat and maintain the health of their HV mechs. You must own an HV-MTL NFT to play the game, but the official website says that “non-holders will have the opportunity to try out a limited version of Forge.” This version does not appear to be publicly available at this time.
Now in Faraway’s hands, the game is expected to undergo some changes. “As we take over the reins of HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara,” Faraway said in a tweet“Our immediate goal is to bring as much utility as possible to the primary NFTs that make up these collections.”
For HV-MTL, the first step was to introduce a new points system which allows players to earn rewards by engaging in “new interoperable activations” on the Faraway network.
Edited by Andre Hayward