Yuga Labs is the company behind the creation of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. It has since pioneered the monetization of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a business enterprise—developing their self-made products, taking on management of other NFT collections, and creating a metaverse in the process.
History of Yuga Labs
Yuga Labs began with a text sent in February 2021: “Let’s make an NFT.” The company was founded by Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, a pair of creatives—one with a master’s in fine arts—who found themselves interested in entering the non-fungible token (NFT) frenzy. Under their pseudonyms, Gargamel and Gordon Goner, they founded Yuga Labs only a week later. The company was named after a sorcerer villain in the Zelda video game franchise who can turn people into paintings, making it an apt name for a business dealing in digital art.
Gargamel and Gordon Goner were soon joined by two collaborators called Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass. Together, they conceived and created an NFT collection made up of 10,000 apes with different features, inspired by profile picture (PFP) predecessors like CryptoPunks. However, they took their concept one step further, building a compelling story around their collection and promising that NFT holders would have special access to community benefits.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) opened its pre-sale in late April 2021, and when the mint went live to the public, the collection sold out in 12 hours. In total, Yuga Labs, brought in over $2 million. The NFTs were an immediate hit. There were hundreds to thousands of weekly sales in the early months, each valued at thousands of dollars. In June, Yuga made a new batch of NFTs, the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC), available to BAYC holders. In August, they released digital “serum” to allow BAYC holders to create the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC).
Having released tens of thousands of NFTs into the world, Yuga watched as the popularity of BAYC and its other products soared—partially because of celebrity participation. Basketball start Steph Curry famously bought a Bored Ape for $180,000 and made it his profile picture on social media. He was joined by NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, who bought a Mutant Ape. Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Mark Cuban, and Justin Bieber are among the celebrities that followed suit.
Yuga earned $127 million in 2021 based on the groundswell enthusiasm. But in 2022, the company turned to expanding its empire—mostly through acquisitions. After announcing Nicole Muniz as its new CEO, Yuga Labs acquired two NFT collections from Larva Labs in March 2022: Meebits and CryptoPunks. Less than a week later, Yuga launched the ApeCoin token and its metaverse project, Otherside.
Following its rapid ascent in the NFT and metaverse spaces, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in a funding round in March 2022, valuing the company at $4 billion. Since then, it has worked on refining branding, fleshing out the details of the various products under its control, developing business and celebrity partnerships, and making philanthropic efforts. In early 2023, ex-Activision Blizzard COO Daniel Alegre took over as the new CEO of Yuga Labs.
Yuga Labs’ products
Yuga Labs focuses on developing and managing NFT collections and an associated, major metaverse project called Otherside.
Bored Ape Yacht Club (and related NFTs)
BAYC is a collection of 10,000 NFTs depicting cartoon primates. These PFP-type digital assets, modeled in the style of CryptoPunks (which Yuga would later acquire), were minted on the Ethereum blockchain in 2021 through programmatic mixing of over 170 features to create each unique ape—a process called generative art. Apart from CryptoPunks, they may be the most recognizable NFTs on the market, and their prices have historically reflected it. BAYC holders can access exclusive content provided by both Yuga Labs and the community, and this has included merch, admission to special events, and the rights to other NFTs.
Two other NFT collections quickly joined the BAYC ecosystem. Holders of the BAYC were airdropped a new NFT in June 2021 from the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) collection. These PFP assets depicted dogs intended to be companions to the apes, and though they could be minted for free, a secondary market became very lucrative to any BAYC holders who decided to sell. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) followed closely with BAKC. Yuga airdropped “serum” to BAYC holders, and when they used the serum on their apes, they were given a new, mutant ape. These similarly became quite valuable almost immediately.
ApeCoin (APE)
peCoin (APE) was launched in March 2022, around the time that Yuga held its $450 million funding round. This Ethereum-based token was meant to be used to provide a mechanism for community governance in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and Yuga-related enterprises.
Other NFT collections
In addition to its home-grown NFT collections, Yuga Labs acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs in March 2022. While the older CryptoPunks became the basis for every NFT collection (and the ERC-721 token standard itself), Meebits was developed only about one year prior to this acquisition. Afterwards, Yuga worked to solidify intellectual property rights for holders of these NFTs, revamp their websites, and rebrand where it felt necessary. It later acquired NFT-focused companies WENEW (previously own/run by Beeple) and 10KTF.
Otherside
In 2022, Yuga Labs announced it would be developing Otherside, a gamified metaverse that mixes aspects of web3 worlds and massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). BAYC and MAYC holders would be granted land within the metaverse, thus tying in Yuga’s foundational products.
Yuga Labs Essentials
Yuga Labs is a company that develops and manages NFT collections like home-grown Bored Ape Yacht Club (and related NFTs) and acquired projects like CryptoPunks.
Although profile picture (PFP) NFTs prior to BAYC were collectables with little function, Yuga’s novel approach creating a community of exclusiveness and access for holders has brought the company unprecedented success in the space.
Since the early success of BAYC, BAKC, and MAYC, Yuga has focused mostly on acquisition of other popular NFT collections and creating an ecosystem around their NFTs—including a token (ApeCoin) and a gamified metaverse (Otherside).