What Are Meebits? Metaverse-Ready NFTs From the Creator of CryptoPunks – Decrypt

Launched in 2017, CryptoPunks were one of the earliest examples of an NFT crypto collectible; a series of 10,000 pixel-art profile pictures (PFPs) with randomized traits.

They proved to be a runaway success, with NFT enthusiasts paying tens of millions of dollars for the 24×24 pixel images of apes, aliens and zombies. But for CryptoPunks’ creators Larva Labs, that was only the beginning.

In May 2021, Larva Labs returned with Meebits, another Ethereum-based PFP NFT project with double the supply and an additional dimension. 

What are Meebits?

Like CryptoPunks, Meebits are a series of NFT characters with randomly-generated traits. There are some differences, though; unlike their two-dimensional precursors, Meebits are 3D characters rendered in voxels (so-called because they’re pixels with volume), and there are 20,000 Meebits in total. 

Of the 20,000 Meebits, 18,881 are humans, 711 are pigs, 256 are elephants, 72 are robots, 57 are skeletons, 18 are visitors and 5 are dissected (think humans without skins). Visually, Meebits resemble characters from games such as Minecraft or Roblox—and therein lies the key selling point.

Meebits and the metaverse

Larva Labs is gambling that the 3D models that comprise its Meebits will play a crucial role in the burgeoning metaverse, a persistent, shared virtual world where users interact using avatars. 

While some big tech firms are building centralized metaverses where they control all the virtual assets on the platform, Larva Labs and other Web3 pioneers hope to build a truly decentralized metaverse, where users own virtual assets in the form of NFTs—which can be migrated between different metaverse platforms.

As such, the ability to own a 3D model of your very own virtual avatar is a compelling prospect – at least, one compelling enough to shoot the project to total all-time sales of $515 million and a floor price of 4.4 ETH as of August 2022, according to data from CryptoSlam. 

If you buy a 3D model of one of its blocky voxel characters, you will also receive the entire 3D model and high-definition render of your Meebit. You can port this directly into any metaverse project that supports it – although currently, few do.

Although the Meebits look diverse, they have one thing in common: they are, invariably, expensive. That said, some Meebits, particularly the rarer ones, are more expensive than others. Meebit #6337, an algorithmically generated 3D skeleton in a suit, sold for about half a million dollars at a Christie’s auction in September 2021.

The 3D NFTs trade as Ethereum ERC-721 tokens on a proprietary marketplace without any fees, but you can also trade them on any Ethereum-based NFT marketplace, such as OpenSea.

Meebits and Yuga Labs

In March 2022, Yuga Labs, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, bought from Larva Labs the intellectual property rights for CryptoPunks and Meebits. “This means that we now own the brands, copyright in the art, and other IP rights for both…