Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs has acquired Proof, the NFT boot behind the Moonbirds collection and the Proof Collective membership program, the company announced Friday.
According to Yuga Labs, the company has fully acquired Proof and all of its properties, including Moonbirds, Oddities, Mythics, and Grails. Yuga will add the Proof team to its staff and integrate the Moonbirds collection into the upcoming collection Other side metaverse game.
Proof co-founder and CEO Kevin Rose, a technology entrepreneur who also co-founded Digg, will assist with the transfer before becoming an advisor to Yuga Labs. Rose had previously denied that a takeover deal with Moonbirds was imminent. In a message shared on Twitter in December, Rose acknowledged that there was a “high-level conversation” with another unnamed founder about a deal that “never went anywhere.”
In an interview this week, Daniel Alegre, CEO of Yuga Labs, said Declutter that “there had been discussions in the industry about what would happen to Moonbirds,” and that the Bored Ape creator had reached out to see if he could help Proof in some way. Soon, he said, that outreach turned into a discussion about a possible acquisition.
“We had a meeting of the minds and we said, ‘You know what? Let’s do this, let’s make Proof part of the Yuga family,” Alegre said. “And then it all worked out. It actually went quite quickly.”
Rose was not available for interviews about the deal, a Yuga Labs representative said Declutter. Yuga Labs also declined to disclose the terms of the deal.
Alegre said Moonbirds “makes perfect sense” for Otherside, a game world that will feature avatars from a variety of NFT projects, including those in Yuga’s own stable like Bored Apes, CryptoPunksAnd Meebits. He wouldn’t elaborate on the planned integration, but said he believes Moonbirds’ art looks like it was “actually made for Otherside.”
Yuga Labs also plans to continue running the Proof Collective as is, and will align the Proof brand with its efforts of the art world around CryptoPunks And his TwelveFold Collection on Bitcoin’s Ordinals protocol. Whether the Proof branding will continue in the longer term has yet to be decided.
“We are still working on exactly what and how things will evolve,” Alegre replied when asked about the branding.
What is evidence?
The Proof Collective was launched by Rose in late 2021 as an Ethereum NFT-based membership plan for digital art collectors, offering exclusive member mints and other benefits such as real-world encounters and exclusive perks.
Secondary market prices for the 1,000 passes skyrocketed a few months later during the NFT bull market when Proof unveiled Moonbirds, a 10,000-item profile photo collection (PFP) that would award free mints to Proof Collective holders. The launch was a hit, which raised $280 million worth of trading volume in the first two days alone.
Proof rode high on the hype and $10 million raised from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six venture capital firm just days later. A few months later, Proof came up another $50 million in a Series A round led by VC giant Andreessen Horowitz, unveiling plans for a crypto token that has yet to materialize at the time of writing.
However, the time that followed was marked by several challenges for Proof. Moonbirds launched just before the bottom fell out of the NFT market, meaning many people bought assets that quickly lost significant market value and have yet to recover.
Evidence too faced opposition from Moonbirds holders in 2022 when it announced it would open source all artwork in the collection, limiting the ability of owners to license or commercialize their own images. Last year, Evidence canceled its first scheduled conference after limited demand, and later forced layoffs.
Rose has been open about the challenges of running an NFT business, add to Declutter in an interview in april 2023 that the Web3 The ethos of building in public and interacting directly with asset owners – some hurt by the loss of value – had taken its toll.
“Damn, the last few months have been rough, haven’t they?” Rose told me Declutter last April.
He said on the “Tim Ferriss Show” podcast in December that he had this experience caused him several health problemsand that he had sought treatment, including ketamine therapy.