10/11/2023 Yuga Labs co-founder's wild $1.5 million NFT spending spree starts with rare CryptoPunk

Quick Take

  • Yuga Labs co-founder Wylie Aronow, aka Gordon Goner, has spent more than $1.5 million on NFTs from marquee collections like CryptoPunks, Doodles and the artist Beeple.
  • Aronow’s spending spree, which a couple days ago he teased on X, comes amid a small rebound in NFT trading volumes in the month of October.

It looks like Yuga Labs co-founder Wylie Aronow has taken it upon himself to try and resuscitate the ailing NFT market.

After taking to X on Monday to tease his intentions of buying NFTs that aren't part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection created by Yuga Labs, Aronow, aka Gordon Goner, has gone on perhaps one of the wildest non-fungible token spending sprees since the last bull run. After starting off with the purchase of a rare CryptoPunk on Monday for 600 ether ($1.14 million), Aronow has spent more than $1.5 million in total, according to The Block Research data.

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More than a dozen new tokens bought, Aronow has spread the love around, buying from well-known collections outside the Yuga Labs universe, including NFTs from Doodles, Meebits, Pudgy Penguins and famous digital artist Beeple.

"Going to grab some non-BAYC NFTs this week. Don't freak out. I'm still ape papi and I love you very much," Aronowpostedto his more than 155,000 followers on Monday. "In all seriousness, I had always wanted to join more communities across the web3 space but felt I had a responsibility to restrict myself from doing so while still working at Yuga," he thenpostedon Wednesday.

While Aronow co-founded Yuga Labs, easily the highest-profile creator of NFTs, he took a leave of absenceearlier this year, citing health problems.

'More momentum'

"Yuga Labs founder goes on a buying spree of popular NFT collections to add more momentum, volume and traders to the market, similar to what celebrities and big figures used to do when NFTs were at their peak to induce FOMO," said The Block Research Analyst Brad Kay. "It's definitely out of the ordinary. Not everyday someone buys $1.5 million worth of NFTs across many collections."

Aronow's aggressive buying follows the NFTs market's best month in a while. In October, NFT volumes rose by more than 20%, according to The Block Research data. But the sector continues to wrestle with a downturn that has forced both Yuga Labs and the marketplace giant OpenSea tolay off staff.

Arts

https://www.theblock.co/amp/post/262266/yuga-labs-co-founders-wild-1-5-million-nft-spending-spree-starts-with-rare-cryptopunk

Interesting NFTs
Marinalandia
The aquatic world in a world to observe, to recreate, like the glacial landscapes. Both are a planet within ours, full of colors in the tropical case or minimalist in the glacier case, with strange species and wonderful animals each in its environment. This visual toy brings you a piece of that world in a fantastic setting.
CryptoPunk 4156
By C352B5
JACKPOT JESS
*waves*! My name's JACKPOT JESS. I once peed on Cleopatra's cat. They had it coming. It's not common knowledge, but my ancestry connects me to Cleopatra. Purrhaps this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.
#81347
By OthersideDeployer