Christie’s Head of NFTs Joins Yuga Labs To Lead The CryptoPunks Brand

Noah Davis, the man responsible for bringing the historic auction for Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days to Christie’s, will officially be joining Yuga Labs as the Brand Lead for CryptoPunks. The announcement came from a pair of tweets from Davis and Yuga Labs Co-founder Greg Solano aka Gargamel.

Yuga Labs’ first major CryptoPunks move post-acquisition

Noah Davis published a tweet thread about his new position came yesterday, Sunday, June 19th.  In the first tweet, Davis notes that he will leave his current position with Christie’s in July.

Significantly, the news is the first real development with the CryptoPunks collection since Yuga Labs bought it from Larva Labs back in March of this year. Indeed, Yuga Labs emphasized back then that it would take a cautious approach to handling the CryptoPunks. Of course, the Bored Ape creators did immediately give Punk holders full commercial rights over their NFTs. Other than that, things have been fairly quiet regarding the CryptoPunks.

Given that, it comes as no surprise that a bulk of the messaging from both Davis and Solano focused on Yuga Labs’ continued effort not to make any moves that might irk Punk holders. As Davis stated:

“it’s important to confirm what we WON’T be doing… simply put: I WILL NOT F*** WITH THE PUNKS. What does that mean? It means no Punks on lunchboxes or cringe TV shows/shitty movies… no arbitrary rushed utility or thoughtless airdrops. It means if you love your Punk(s) because they are what they are (just Punks) then you and I see eye to eye…”

Was there insider trading based on the announcement?

The news about Yuga Labs’ latest hire was met with mostly positive and congratulatory replies from CryptoPunks holders on Twitter. With that said, there were some unhappy community members. Specifically, there were accusations of insider trading going on around the announcement.

To explain, there was a flurry of secondary sales volume on the CryptoPunks in the days leading up to the announcement. As a result, some on Twitter believe that certain insiders heard the news before it became public. In fact, CryptoPunks did see a significant increase in its floor price, from 49.52 ETH on June 18th, to 67.9 ETH at the time of writing.

There may well be an analysis of which wallets were buying up Punks before the announcement. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Yuga Labs and Davis deal with the CryptoPunks moving forward.