Coinspeaker
CryptoPunks Owner Debuts New NFT Project Dubbed Meebits
The brain behind the iconic CryptoPunks Non-Fungible Token (NFT) project, Larva Labs are pushing forth a new game-changing innovation Dubbed Meebits. As detailed in a blog post published by Larva Labs on Monday, the team noted that Meebits is a graduation from the 2D 8-bit-pixelated characters CryptoPunks were made of and are notably a 3D based Avatars.
“Writing a generator of voxel characters was a lot more challenging and involved than writing a 2D generator. We’ve been tinkering with voxel generation for a few years and are really proud of where we ended up,” said Larva Labs Co-Founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson. “There are lots of little details we hope you notice, including Autoglyphs-style generative tattoo patterns on certain Meebits. And there are some cool rare types of Meebits, but we will wait for the community to discover them rather than list them all here!”
As the team’s third NFT project, Meebits will feature a series of unique characters peculiar to each Meebit, giving rise to their rarity, and their eventual rise in valuation. Meebits will be tradable on the Ethereum blockchain, with hopes aspirations that they can be integrated into any games or avatar-supported humanoid platforms. This will help to increase the real-life functionality of the Meebits characters themselves.
The success of the CryptoPunks project has tilted the growing support for Meebits thus far. As noted by TechCrunch, the founders aim to see Meebits help in lowering the barrier of entry seeing characters in the previous projects are now very expensive to own. The Meebits are currently been given away randomly through a Dutch Auction, a model which will eventually lower the price for minting the NFTs to 0 ETH. However, at present, about 2.49 ETH is required to mint any one of the total 20,000 Meebits in supply.
The Larva Labs team has raked in over $20 million in Ethereum from selling more than 2,000, per the TechCrunch report.
CryptoPunks Successor Meebits to Get Its Own Marketplace
Larva Labs is looking to build a marketplace where owners of Meebits can easily trade their assets with one another, mimicking the market being designed to support CryptoPunks. To date, CryptoPunks have netted over $550 million in revenue from a total supply of $10,000.
While Meebits can be acquired either through the claiming option designed for holders of CryptoPunks or through direct sales. Whichever option is embraced, the projected marketplace will make owning a Meebit worth the investment.
“We think being able to trade Meebits for Meebits is going to be really fun. For us, this evokes the kind of collecting we did as kids, where money was rarely involved in transactions,” Hall and Watkinson wrote. “We are just getting started fleshing out this new market, so in the coming weeks, expect lots of new features to make trading more convenient, plus the analysis tools that we’ve all grown accustomed to on the Cryptopunks site.”
The growth of NFT-inspired digital Avatar is on the rise, just this week, Coinspeaker reported that Genies pulled in $65 million in funding from big players in the industry. Just like Larva Labs, Genies is partnering with Dapper Labs to also launch a marketplace for its celebrity-themed avatar creations.