Orange Cap Games Swallows Yuga Labs’ Moonbirds in Bold Web3 Power Play
GameFi just got a new predator. Orange Cap Games—fresh off its latest funding round (probably fueled by vaporware promises)—has snapped up Yuga Labs’ prized Moonbirds NFT collection. Terms? Undisclosed, naturally—because why bother with transparency when you’re playing with other people’s JPEG money?
The acquisition signals a land grab for NFT intellectual property as the market ’recovers’ from its 98% drawdown. Moonbirds, once the darlings of crypto’s bored-ape-adjacent crowd, now find themselves caged by a gaming studio betting on ’utility.’ Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, Yuga Labs continues its fire sale of non-core assets—because even blue-chip NFT peddlers need liquidity when the floor price crashes harder than a leveraged degen’s portfolio. Web3’s circle of life: build, hype, dump, repeat.
Moonbirds trading revived after IP sale
The Moonbirds collection is relatively smaller and less successful compared to the Crypto Punks. Moonbirds started with a floor price above 28 ETH, to slide as low as 0.30 ETH. The IP sale announcement boosted the floor price to 0.43 ETH.
Despite this, some of the latest Moonbird sales ask for as much as 3.99 ETH, depending on the rarity and qualities. The NFT market has been mostly abandoned by crypto insiders, displaced by meme tokens. For some collections, attempts were made to cross over to physical items. While the IP may remain appealing, the NFT themselves rarely invited active trading.
The Moonbirds collection minted a total of 10,000 items, with an initial mint price of 2.5 ETH. Currently, the collection is held in 5,841 wallets, with a total market cap of 4,500 ETH for all NFT.
Even during the slow market, Moonbirds immediately reacted with a spike in trading volumes. In the past day, the collection saw a total of 149 sales. Daily trading volumes expanded by 579.5%, rising to 69.51 ETH.
Recently, Moonbirds discontinued its Talons reward program for NFT holders. The NFT collection has been linked to crypto AI agents, using the images and lores to create AI personalities linked to the NFT.
CryptoPunks also benefited from the recent change in ownership, as their floor price remains NEAR a three-month high at over 45 ETH. BAYC NFT retain a floor price above 15 ETH and are one of the widely represented avatars on social media.
Orange Cap Games to expand the Moonbirds universe
Orange Cap Games will use the Moonbirds IP to grow the initial universe and integrate it with its real-world products and games. The gaming company stated that Moonbirds retain untapped potential, which was obscured by the NFT bear market.
Additionally, the digital footprint of the collection will grow with new use cases and engagement.
Orange Cap Games will retain its partnership with Yuga Labs by adapting Moonbirds as 3D avatars in the metaverse environment of Otherside.
Moonbirds will remain an ethereum collection for now. For scaling and faster transfers, Orange Cap Games has agreed to only migrate the collections to ApeChain, the native L2 network of Yuga Labs.
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