FinTech news in CryptoPunks category

Alberto Simon, co-founder of art investing platform Masterworks, is leaving his current role at Gemini’s Nifty Gateway NFT platform to join Co:Create as a co-founder and chief product officer, Fung said. Co:Create will be chain-agnostic, meaning it will support the blockchains on which its customers have built their NFT projects, Fung said.

The Miami-based NFT firm behind Bored Apes Yacht Club has not previously raised funding, though the startup has long been courting attention from VCs eager to back a major player in the NFT craze. Yuga Labs, maker of the multimillion dollar monkey JPEGs that plenty of NFT skeptics love to hate, just raised a $450 million round from Andreessen Horowitz.

Multimillion dollar monkey pictures and monkey money are likely not the future you were expecting to capture the undivided attention of Silicon Valley VCs, but Yuga Labs hopes that the new game and token will inspire a mainstream crypto economy built around their their IP, which further expanded last week to include the highly valued CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections after Yuga acquired the assets from Larva Labs.

The Larva Labs founders have almost fully divested from the project at this point, with Yuga Labs detailing in a blog post that they had also acquired 423 CryptoPunks and 1,711 Meebits from the company, leaving the founders with just a few of each in addition to their generative art project Autoglyphs which was not part of the deal.

The fund is backed by a who’s who of crypto investors, with LPs including a sizable chunk of a16z’s investing team.

Users had the option of exchanging the comic NFT over a short period for a spot in the Pixel Vault founder’s DAO, a crypto collective which gave them ownership in a substantial collection of NFT artwork which included a number of CryptoPunks NFTs worth millions at current prices that were the main characters of the Pixel Vault comic.