Yuga Labs, three owners of the three largest NFT brands on the market, has raised $ 450 million in a $ 4 billion valuation, the company announced today. The team behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club plans to start with games and their own Metaverse project and spend that money building a media empire around NFTs.
The team describes a metaverse project called Otherside as an MMORPG aimed at connecting a wider NFT universe. They want to create a “gamed”, “fully decentralized” and “interoperable world”, “said the co-founder of the Bored Ape Yacht Club by the pseudonym Gordon Gonner. Wylie Aronow says. “I think the real experience of ReadyPlayerOne will be performed by the player.”
The announcement comes just weeks after Yuga Labs made a major move to consolidate NFT spaces and acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. The acquisition puts three of the most profitable NFT collections under one roof, giving Yuga Labs a larger list of IPs to use when planning games and the Metaverse. .. The company also launched the cryptocurrency ApeCoin last week. Tokens are managed independently and are used as the primary currency of Yuga Labs properties.
Yuga Labs is partnering with “several different game studios” to bring Otherside to life, said CEO Nicole Muniz. The game isn’t limited to Bored Ape owners, and the company plans to create development tools that allow NFTs from other projects to work in their world. “We effectively open the door to the walled garden and say,” Everyone is welcome. ” “
The Metaverse project is all the rage right now — see Facebook renaming it to Meta—but Yuga Labs believes other companies are doing the Metaverse idea wrong, It gives startups a prominent opportunity. Greg Solano, co-founder of Yuga Labs, who goes under the pseudonym Gargamel, says people won’t connect by spending time together in a shared virtual space without anything happening. Instead, he says, people form a bond from being placed in a position where they have to cooperate.
“I’m kicked in the ass, so I just play with people and make friends,” says Solano. “Basically, I don’t think deep social experience essentially comes from” hello “walking around with Zoom Chat. Yuga Labs refused to provide a timeline for Otherside releases. Play-to-Earn games are also planned for later this year.
The largest funding round for any NFT company to date has been led by Andreessen Horowitz, who has invested heavily in Web3 space. Previously, he funded OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and Coinbase. Also participating in the funding round are game studio Animoca Brands, cryptocurrency companies Coinbase and MoonPay. Andreessen Horowitz’s general partner, Chris Lyons, joins the Yuga Labs board of directors. Financing discussions were first reported by the Financial Times last month.
“There is a future for dystopia that Meta is the dominant digital experience provider of this kind.”
“For me, Yuga Labs is in combination with these other start-ups. [Web3] Chris Dickson, head of the cryptocurrency division of Andreessen Horowitz, told The Verge. “There is a dystopian future where Meta is the dominant digital experience provider of this kind and all money and management is left to the company.” (Interestingly, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen said. I belong to Meta’s board of directors and have invested in Facebook early on.)
Yuga Labs has been financially successful so far. The leaked pitch deck shows that the company reduced transactions primarily related to the NFT brand last year, earning $ 137 million with a staggering 95% profit margin. (Yuga Labs refused to comment on the numbers from the deck.)
But at this point the company has barely built. According to OpenSea data, the company’s NFT collection has a maximum of 40,000 users, and the company has released only one game for a limited period of time. This means that Yuga Labs is basically given hundreds of millions of dollars to build a game company, or at least a Web3 version of 2022, from scratch behind a very lucrative art project.
Its success is what investors are thinking about when funding Yuga Labs. “They built this very vibrant community and this cultural phenomenon,” says Dixon. But in the end, the company is making the same big bets that many other companies are currently making. So one form of Metaverse project will be the next explosive. Now they need to build it.