Dust Labs — DeGods and y00ts creators — raised a $7 million seed round
Y00ts generated over $7 million worth of secondary sales since Monday despite minting delays

The company behind the Solana-based DeGods project, the most valuable Solana NFT collection, is at it again.

Dust Labs is in the midst of a whirlwind week — complete with a few hiccups — between a $7 million seed raise and the release of its newest NFTs, y00ts.

The “y00ts mint t00b” collection has topped OpenSea volume charts for the past 48 hours, amassing 227,000 solana (SOL), or over $7.1 million in secondary sales at the time of publication, per CryptoSlam data. Its floor price peaked at 167 SOL on Wednesday.

The hype behind y00ts, short for y00topia, is in part due to its scholarship whitelist program and its custom version of copyright, promising to reform the traditional monetization system for NFT collections.

Only collectors accepted to the y00tlist are eligible to mint a t00b NFT. Essentially two different collections, t00bs are vials that can be burned to mint y00ts NFTs.

DUST, the DeGods ecosystem utility token on Solana, is necessary to mint y00ts.

The full NFT reveal hasn’t occurred yet, and a derivative collection called y00ts Yacht Club, has already been developed and sold out.

Initially scheduled to drop on Sept. 4, the y00ts mint was delayed due to a “blocker bug” five minutes before start time, according to the team.

Since going live on Sept. 5, the project’s volume is greater than that of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection within the last seven days.

However, even the waitlist mint, scheduled for Sept. 6, ran into unknown issues and has been rescheduled.

Despite the delays and complications, Twitter user alexjm.eth lauded the project for having “singlehandedly sparked bullish sentiment in the midst of a painful bear.”

Another collector, NFT influencer Franklin, decided to sell his y00ts mint spot and make a 90 SOL profit. He is the 6th largest Bored Ape collector with 60 BAYC NFTs in his portfolio.

y00ts have taken over NFT Twitter. I was able to sell my mint for 127.41 SOL after fees. I spent about 37 SOL on the DUST, and paid 6.85 SOL to the team through royalties on my sale. It was a major accomplishment to make this list and I will work hard to make future lists! https://t.co/zeyhIKqXGO
— Franklin has 60 apes (@franklinisbored) September 6, 2022

Y00ts and DeGods’ founder Frank responded to Franklin via Twitter, stating that it’s “gonna be hilarious when degods flip apes this year though.”

We would like to announce that we have raised a strategic round of $7M to build out the $DUST ecosystem.

AMA with @frankdegods & our CEO @kevindegods on Thursday, September 8th. pic.twitter.com/VxzdZeu3P0
— Dust Labs (@dust_labs) September 6, 2022

Backers of the startup’s venture included Foundation Capital, Solana Ventures, FTX Ventures, Solana NFT protocol maker Metaplex and top Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden.

The company tweeted that it intends to build a “B2B SaaS start up to help NFT projects provide the most value back to their holders.”

A new approach to intellectual property

Dust Labs is experimenting with a new copyright and ownership system for y00ts NFTs they call ⓨ, as a replacement for the more common copyright symbol ⓒ.

The power behind ⓨ, according to the y00ts team, is that any active community member can start their own “club” or sub-community — based on shared interests, memes or merchandise — and register the derivative project with ⓨ.

Each sub-collection is a governing body that can benefit from royalties on every y00t that sells with any of their customized traits. This system may also make it easier to approve or reject requests to use an NFT’s intellectual property (IP).

This comes at a time when many blue chip NFT collections are altering their own terms of service when it comes to copyright and IP rights.

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