Yuga Labs Burns Nearly $1 Million Worth of Ethereum Gaming NFTs—Here’s Why

Yuga Labs, the startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), announced early Thursday that it has completed the burn of 4,295 Ethereum NFTs related to the crypto game HV-MTL.

This comes the day after Yuga Labs sold two of its gaming IPs to blockchain gaming studio Faraway—HV-MTL was one of these IPs. With Faraway now in charge, the gaming studio requested that Yuga Labs burn the nearly $1 million worth of HV-MTL NFTs it held.

“Burning” crypto assets refers to the act of sending them to an address where they cannot be reclaimed, effectively destroying them. With a total supply of 30,000 HV-MTL NFTs, this burn accounts for 14% of the total supply—which many have hoped will boost the collection’s price by trimming the overall supply.

According to NFT Floor Price, as the news of the acquisition broke on Wednesday, the floor price—or the price of the cheapest listed NFT on a marketplace—of HV-MTL dropped 16% with a significant increase in trade volume. Then, over the coming hours, as the Yuga Labs-owned NFTs were burned, the floor price jumped 31% to a floor price of 0.064 ETH.

That’s still a drop in the ocean from the collection’s all-time high price of 2.069 ETH (or $3,470) in March 2023. Even so, at Wednesday’s peak price of about $224 worth of ETH, the burn would’ve been valued at a minimum of $962,000 and potentially higher, since some of the NFTs might have had traits that could see them command higher prices than the floor.

HV-MTL Forge is a crafting game which requires gamers to create a habitat and maintain the health of their HV mechs. You must own a HV-MTL NFT in order to play the game, but the official website says that “non-holders will have an opportunity to try a limited version of Forge.” This version does not appear to be publicly available at present.

Now in the hands of Faraway, the game is expected to go under some changes. “As we take charge of HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara,” Faraway said in a tweet, “our immediate goal is to drive as much utility as possible to the primary NFTs that make up these collections.”

For HV-MTL, the first step was introducing a new points system that lets players earn rewards by engaging in “new activations with interoperability” across the Faraway network.

Edited by Andrew Hayward