Noah Davis, the man in charge of running the historic auction for Beeple’s Everyday life: The first 5000 days to Christie’s, Yuga Labs will officially join as Brand Lead for CryptoPunks. The announcement came from two tweets from Greg Solano, aka Gargamel, co-founder of Davis and Yuga Labs.

Yuga Labs first major CryptoPunks are moving after the acquisition

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

Significantly, the news is the first real development of the CryptoPunks collection since Yuga Labs bought it from Larva Labs in March of this year. In fact, Yuga Labs emphasized at the time that they would be careful when dealing with the CryptoPunks. Of course, the creators of Bored Ape immediately gave the Punk owners full commercial rights to their NFTs. Otherwise, things have gotten pretty quiet around the CryptoPunks.

Given that, it’s not surprising that much of the news from Davis and Solano focused on Yuga Labs’ continued efforts not to take steps that might anger punk owners. As Davis said:

“It’s important to confirm what we WILL NOT do… simply put, I WON’T F*** WITH THE PUNKS. What does that mean? It means no punks on lunch boxes or scary TV shows/shitty movies…no random, rushed utilities or mindless airdrops. That means if you love your punk(s) for what they are (just punks) then we agree…”

Was there insider trading as a result of the announcement?

The news of Yuga Labs’ latest hire drew a mostly positive and congratulatory response from CryptoPunks owners on Twitter. That being said, there have been some unfortunate community members. In particular, there were allegations of insider trading in connection with the announcement.

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

There could well be an analysis of which wallets were buying up punks prior to the announcement. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Yuga Labs and Davis deal with the CryptoPunks in the future.