Moonbirds Soar as Yuga Labs Looks to Restore NFT Holders’ IP Rights

Once-popular NFT collection Moonbirds is attempting to revive its protracted decline by adopting a new art direction, ending its Creative Commons (CC0) copyright licensing, and leaning into Yuga Labs’ metaverse dubbed Otherside.

“You’re going to need a character. A character that you own,” wrote the Moonbirds X account.

“Starting today, Moonbirds will join Mythics as a collection with commercial rights. If you’ve made stuff during the CC0 era – cool. But from now on, you’ll need to own a Moonbird to keep doing so.”

The news sent Moonbirds soaring. The collection’s floor price spiked 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 past 24 hours.

Colin Hesterly, one of Moonbirds’ co-founders and Senior Art Director at Yuga Labs, will lead the project’s new art direction.

“It’s been almost a year since we emerged from the darkness,” said Hesterly in a video posted today, dubbed the Moonbird Chronicles, but now “it’s time to ascend to the light,” in what he calls a world that seems different.

The move to end Creative Commons licensing comes nearly two years after co-founder Kevin Rose’s surprise announcement on Aug. 4, 2022, when he posted, “We believe this move honors and respects the values of the internet and web3 and starts a new and important phase of the project.”

Once a $4 billion ecosystem, Yuga Labs has been in a significant downtrend that culminated in a sizable restructuring last week. The company best known for its Bored Ape Yacht Collection (BAYC) NFTs is now focusing its effort on Otherside, its 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 their plans for Otherside are ambitious in all the right ways. Allowing Moonbirds to have a shared home in Otherside and be amplified as part of the Yuga ecosystem was a no-brainer.”

Moonbirds is also working to bring physical collectibles to market, inspired by the success of other NFT projects like Pudgy Penguins, which has seen success since in Walmart stores across the U.S.