By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 16th, 2024
To have an edge in the growing NFTs market, Yuga Labs has partnered with different game studios.
Yuga Labs, the firm behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collections, has announced the completion of a $450 million funding round. The funding round was led by a16z crypto, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund. As a result, the company is now valued at approximately $4 billion.
Other notable investors in the just-completed funding round include Animoca Brands, Coinbase, and MoonPay.
According to the media, the company plans to build a media platform on NFTs with the money, starting with games and its metaverse project. Moreover, the NFT market is expected to further grow in the coming decades. This is especially because more industries are expected to incorporate NFTs soon.
Yuga Labs is developing a metaverse dubbed Otherside. According to the team, Otherside is an MMORPG meant to connect the broader NFT universe. According to Wylie Aronow, a co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club who goes by the pseudonym Gordon Goner, they will create a state of art gamified world.
To have an edge in the growing NFTs market, Yuga Labs has partnered with different game studios, according to CEO Nicole Muniz. Moreover, by having interactive features in its Metaverse, there are higher chances of winning the market.
“You only play with people and make friends because you’re getting your ass kicked,” says Greg Solano, a Yuga Labs co-founder who goes by the pseudonym Gargamel. “We don’t think deep social experience comes from essentially a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi.’”
Yuga Labs, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and Metaverse Market
Yuga Labs is competing with the likes of Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: FB) on the Metaverse market. Nevertheless, the company believes it is a just course to ensure a competitive healthy market.
“To me, Yuga Labs, combined with these other emergings [Web3] companies, is an important counterweight to companies like Meta,” Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, tells The Verge. “There’s a dystopian future where Meta is this kind of dominant digital experience provider, and all of the money and control goes to that company.”
The NFT market has significantly grown over the past two years. For instance, DappRadar insights show NFTs sales reached $25 billion in 2021, compared to just $94.9 million the prior year. The meteoric rally can be contributed to the proliferation of institutional investors in the past few years.
In its acquisition portfolio, Yuga Labs recently acquired NFT projects CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. The ecosystem uses a native token dubbed ApeCoin, which traded around $11.96, up 9.2 percent in the last 24 hours.