Who are Yuga Labs?
Yuga Labs describes itself as a community-led operation that is focused on the potential of web3 in the face of imagination, not limitation.
“In the Yugaverse, fans and players are owners and creators, and in the game of web3, everyone can create and play together on one team.”
yuga.com
Yuga Labs was founded by Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano and is considered to be the best marketer in the NFT marketplace, with its extremely popular NFT collections including the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
Bored Ape Yacht Club
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs created by Yuga Labs. Its huge surge in popularity has led to widespread media coverage and heavy investment from stars from around the world.
This is not Yuga Labs’ only NFT collection, they have added several more following the success of BAYC. Here are a few of their additions:
And they’re now launching their own metaverse called the Otherside.
The Otherside
Yuga Labs announced the impending arrival of their own metaverse, the Otherside in a tweet on March 19th 2022. With an anticipated April launch date, we still don’t know too much about what this project is or what it will do.
The Bored Ape inclusion in this preview suggests that it will definitely feature NFTs, which always seemed inevitable for a project from Yuga Labs, but Animoca Brands involvement in the project seems to suggest that it will look to tie gaming into Yuga Labs’ already successful NFT projects.
On top of this, Yuga Labs seem to be confirming that the metaverse will be ‘powered by ApeCoin’ (the utility token associated with BAYC) so it will be interesting to see how this impacts the marketplace.
ApeCoin
ApeCoin had what could be considered a turbulent launch, but it does look like the Bored Ape token will stabilise and has the potential to grow due to its prominence for both BAYC and the Otherside.
In essence, ApeCoin is a utility token created for Bored Ape. It is currently being airdropped to most owners of BAYC NFTs and other Yuga Labs NFT owners.
ApeCoin is technically self-governed through the ApeCoin DAO. The framework is laid out to protect the ApeCoin Ecosystem Fund by following a proposal process. Members of the DAO can vote on how and where the fund is distributed by the APE Foundation.
Whilst Yuga Labs insist that ApeCoin is separate and self-governed, it’s believed the share from Yuga Labs and involved parties looks to be around 370 million tokens, so they still have a significant stake in the success of the currency.
