Yuga Labs’ February investor deck is an interesting document, combining gaming, a new currency, and an ever-growing pool of digital goods that fans of Yuga’s well-known NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club may buy and sell. I went over the deck again last night and this morning to have a better understanding of the company’s finances, aspirations, and future prospects. But we can’t really delve into those details until we learn more about Yuga’s plans – recall that the business received $450 million at a $4 billion value earlier this week.
No one is having more fun than the web3 guys today, who are in the practically unusual situation of witnessing their current obsession (blockchain-based assets and related applications) become the subject of widespread investor and consumer attention. That doesn’t happen all the time. Yuga has lofty aspirations for the next years, with popular NFT initiatives under its belt and some indication of capacity to exploit one collection of digital assets to create another. It also has a new half-billion dollar in the bank to assist it to realize its goals. Let’s talk about what it wants to develop and how the economics work out this morning. Yuga is ready to make a lot of money if all goes according to plan.
The Apes’ Boredom Universe, Yuga aims to create something that “expands the cosmos” of the Bored Ape Yacht Club while also “inviting the greater NFT community.” To put it another way, the firm aims to expand on its early success while allowing for more engagement. That’s a decent estimate. Yuga isn’t a fan of today’s efforts to create metaverses. “Purpose,” “shared objectives,” and “real stakes,” as well as “connections,” “decisions,” and a “narrative,” are all missing from today’s metaverse activities, according to the business. It summarizes its point of view by stating that a basic virtual social center is insufficient to command customer attention over a longer time horizon.
It’s no secret that when it comes to establishing a game-changing NFT project, Bored Ape Yacht Club has set a high bar. What began as a group of cartoon apes and a membership to a swamp club that didn’t exist has grown into a community, and some could even call it a movement that is sweeping the NFT globe. I recall when I got my first monkey and the naysayers were out in force – “So, what’s the point of all of this? Isn’t there any utility?!?!”
People use the keyword “utility” to criticize NFT initiatives they don’t comprehend. The truth is that apes were useful straight away, and now the initiative has gone a new direction with the Bored Ape Kennel Club, which is another bonus for ape owners and a FOMO-creator extraordinaire for those who passed on primates. While it’s been fascinating to see the apes’ floor price rise like a rocket ship, what’s occurring today is a paradigm shift that I believe many other projects will try to emulate with varied degrees of success.
