Key Takeaways

• Larva Labs, the creators of the iconic CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs NFT collections, unveiled a new metaverse-focussed series called Meebits yesterday.
• Punk and Glyph owners could mint their own Meebits for free, while a public release of 9,000 NFTs sold out within a few hours.
• Initially priced at 2.5 ETH, the series has been divisive. Some have since sold for six-figure sums on the secondary market.

Larva Labs, the creatives behind the beloved CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs NFTs, have launched a new collection. Meebits caused a storm yesterday, but some raised eyebrows at the entry price. 
Larva Labs Unveil Meebits 
“Meebits” is a series of 20,000 distinctive 3D avatars designed to be used in the metaverse. In a blog piece announcing the collection, Larva Labs wrote that they “hope that the Meebits will be the 3D avatar for virtual worlds, games, and VR.”
In some ways, the collection closely resembles that of CryptoPunks. Each Meebits character comes with different attributes that denote a level of scarcity. Skeletons, visitors, and robots, for example, are much more scarce than humans. 
The collection initially went live with a community grant that allowed Punk and Autoglyphs owners to mint their own Meebits for free. One character could be minted per Punk or Glyph, which allowed those with multiple Larva Labs pieces to take a significant supply of the Meebits collection. The community minting period is live for one week. 
Shortly after the community grant started, a public sale of 9,000 Meebits went live in a Dutch auction format.
They were initially priced at 2.5 ETH—about $8,400 at today’s prices. The price of the NFTs then fell as time went on, though most of the pieces were quickly snapped up. Within six hours of going live, the public release was sold out. This meant that one Meebit was priced above 2.4 ETH at sellout time.
According to data from Dune Analytics, Larva Labs made a staggering $79,947,566 million from the public sale. 
Meebits Sale Proves Divisive 
Although the Dutch auction format was used to establish the fair market value of the series, many crypto followers took shots at the initial price tag. 

Some pointed to the recent LazyApes sale that went live last week and became the talk of the NFT community over the weekend. They were priced at a much more affordable 0.08 ETH, but the creators don’t have the same prestige that Larva Labs do. 

Larvalabs royally fucked up the meebits sale.

20,000 meebits & they want 2.5 eth ($8000) each for the 9000 they’re selling.

Targeting $72M net on the public sale.

High price with no scarcity, no historic value like punks.

Comes off like a straight cash grab. Hard pass from me

— davis 🐺🦊 (@basedkarbon) May 3, 2021

Moreover, by generously rewarding early Larva Labs supporters, the community grant effectively enriched those who have already benefited from Larva Labs (Punks and Glyphs fetch eye-watering sums on the secondary market these days). While such airdrops are often looked on favorably in the NFT and DeFi space, they rarely allow users to hoard multiple pieces in a rare series. 

The community minting period runs into next week, which means that some new pieces may start appearing on the secondary market over the next few days. Several of the more common human Meebits are already listed on OpenSea with a floor price below 2.4 ETH.
However, as expected, the rarer characters in the series have quickly commanded high price valuations. Yesterday, a visitor, which loosely resembles the sought-after aliens in the CryptoPunks series, sold for 303 ETH. Meanwhile, a robot and skeleton sold for 110 ETH and 99 ETH respectively.  
A dissected character, thought to be among the most scarce in the collection, has received multiple million-dollar offers. It’s currently listed for 2,888 ETH. 
Amid the conversation on Crypto Twitter, Larva Labs shared a note expressing their thanks to the community. “What an amazing day, thank you everybody!” they wrote. 

😶😶 The Meebits are sold out! 😶😶 The Community Grant will remain open for the rest of the week, so still plenty of time for punk/glyph owners to claim theirs. What an amazing day, thank you everybody! 😶

— Larva Labs (@larvalabs) May 3, 2021

The Meebits launch isn’t the only thing Larva Labs is working on this month: on May 11, nine CryptoPunks will go on sale at Christie’s, the auction house that sold Beeple’s magnum opus NFT for $69.34 million in March. The set is estimated to fetch $7-9 million.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.