NFT collection startup Yuga Labs’ new CEO, Daniel Alegre, has a tall task ahead of him at his new gig: rallying momentum around thousands of digital ape jpegs and CryptoPunks that once sold for millions—all while the crypto market is spiraling.
A key part of Alegre’s plan is the continued buildout of the Yuga Labs virtual world, Otherside, the CEO explained Wednesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah. These metaverse plans, which have been ongoing since Yuga’s virtual land sale in 2022, are “audacious” and will “take time,” said Alegre, who was the former president and COO of video game company Activision Blizzard before joining Yuga Labs end of last year.
“As an NFT holder, you will be able to participate in drawing what we're building, which is this Otherside metaverse,” he said, without offering many more details.
Since Yuga Labs’ land sale raised $320 million last year, token holders have had two brief “trips” into that virtual world—short visits intended to show the community “what the evolution can be,” Alegre said. Yuga Labs' gave users their first visit to Otherside in the summer of 2022, and followed up with a second trip about eight months later.
But it remains unclear when the company plans to officially open the doors to Otherside. And details are still thin for how the world will look, and how the company will measure success. Alegre kept things vague, saying Otherside will “bring communities together” to “interact with themselves” and “bring new and innovative Web3-based experiences starting with gaming.”
The concept of virtual worlds, for entertainment and for business uses, has captivated the tech industry but it's not yet clear whether consumers will buy into the concept. Facebook-parent company Meta is building its own virtual world dubbed Horizon World. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Tech on Tuesday, Meta VP Vishal Shah said consumers will ease into digital worlds gradually: “I don’t think it’s like a light switch, where one day you’ll suddenly feel like you’re in the metaverse, whereas the day before you weren’t,” Shah said.” I think it will be an iterative process over the course of many years.”
Alegre specified that Yuga Labs makes money via issuing new events, secondary trading of its NFTs, and partnerships with brands like Gucci. Yuga Labs is likely still sitting on a heap of capital from its whopping $450 million seed round it raised in March 2022, led by Andreessen Horowitz. That was prior to the Terra scandal, FTX collapse, and subsequent enormous crypto crash, which contributed to Bored Ape NFTs’ price floor hitting a 20-month low earlier this month, now at 33.45 ETH, or approximately $65,000, according to NFT Price Floor.
