Bored Ape Yacht Club’s popular collection of non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) are seen all over the world. Caricature for hamburgers.
Now, it’s expanding into the virtual world with the release of Otherside – a metaverse platform from the group’s developers, Yuga Labs.
What is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)?
Bored Ape Yacht Club (or BAYC) is a collection of ten thousand NFTs with master designs that have unique properties and attributes.
Created by Miami-based developers Yuga Labs, BAYC has, over time, become one of the crypto industry’s most popular and valuable NFT Profile (or PFP) image suites since its launch in April 2021.
The BAYC group is valued at $1.4 billion and has a minimum price of around $149,000, according to CoinGecko.
Yuga Labs also created the $534 million Mutant Ape Yacht Club (or MAYC), and owns the rights to other projects, including CryptoPunks, a $1.3 million series of eight-bit avatars.
Now, Yuga Labs is leveraging its brands to create a metaverse platform called Otherside. The metaverse is an immersive shared virtual world where participants interact using avatars.
The other is just one of many metaverse platforms vying for user attention. It differs from video game experiences in that its structure will not be linear and players will be able to freely explore immersive virtual worlds at will.
How will the others work?
Another company will focus on digital communities and ownership opportunities powered by blockchain technology, with a virtual land and native currency, apecoin (APE), that will be used economically in the Otherside ecosystem.
Otherside is being developed in collaboration with metaverse technology company Impossible and Animoca Brands, a Web3 technology developer for entertainment and video games, owner of The Sandbox, another metaverse platform.
More than ten thousand players will be able to interact with each other simultaneously on the other side using MSquared (M²), a network specially developed by Improbable for large-scale metaverse projects.
The technology will also facilitate natural voice chat that will allow thousands of players to talk to each other at the same time, according to Otherside.
The M² platform also features integrated game streaming functionality, i.e. users will not need to own modern PCs to interact with Otherside via internet browsers and mobile devices.
What has been released so far?
In March 2022, audiences got their “first taste” of the sequel when Yuga Labs released a tractor.
In the animated short, with the soundtrack to the song “Break on through (to the Other Side)” by Doors, a bored monkey is kidnapped by a flying creature after drinking a blue substance obtained from the bottom of a swamp.
The trailer also mentions other NFT projects: spinoff MAYC, Cool Cats, CryptoPunks, CrypToadz, Meebits, Nouns, and World of Women.
See you on the other side in April. Powered by apecoin pic.twitter.com/1cnSk1CjXS
– Yuga Labs (yugalabs) March 19, 2022
The launch of the trailer follows the launch of Apecoin (APE), a cryptocurrency from the Bored Apes ecosystem. Holders of NFTs from the BAYC and MAYC pools are entitled to redeem 10,094 and 2,042 tokens for free, respectively.
APE can be traded like any other cryptocurrency and has a total market cap of $2.1 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
While the image of the token matches the BAYC logo and Yuga Labs claims it will use the cryptocurrency in products and services in the future, APE is not officially affiliated with NFTs or Yuga Labs, but with ApeCoin DAO, an independent decentralized organization.
In a statement during the token launch, the DAO said, “It may be tempting to claim that apecoin is from the Bored Ape Yacht Club to keep things simple, but that is not entirely the case.”
How do you get “another verb”?
That month, Yuga Labs launched a mysterious website that allowed people to register Ethereum wallets with the company and complete identity verification (or KYC). Both apecoin and this site will be pivotal when Yuga Labs announces the release of Otherdeeds.
Other verbs are NFTs that represent a deed to a virtual land in the Otherside universe and as an access token for participating in product tests, according to “Litepaper” — a document summarizing future intent — for Otherside.
It states that each virtual piece will also have “its own configuration of natural elements, resources, natural attributes” and other attributes.
People rushed to secure these virtual bonds when the sale began in late April via the other website, which limited the offer to 55,000 and the issue price was 305 APE (about $5,800 at the time).
People who bought NFTs also needed Ethereum to pay gas fees. Holders of BAYC and MAYC NFTs can issue Otherdeeds for free within 21 days of the sale starting.
Within 24 hours, more than $500 million in APE was spent issuing Otherdeeds, congesting the Ethereum network and sending blockchain transaction rates skyrocketing.
As a result, over $147 million in ether (ETH) was burned processing transactions and Yuga Labs agreed to refund gas fees for transactions not processed during issuance.
In the future, Otherside will own 200,000 virtual lands, which will be released over time, according to the project’s website. To date, the project’s turnover has exceeded $1 billion, according to the CryptoSlam website.
The other side is home to thousands of “koda”, strange creatures distributed randomly across all the other ten thousand acts.
At this time, it remains to be seen how they’ll make their way into the metaverse project, but their origins will be explained during “Voyager’s Journey,” an 11-part narrative gameplay experience available to players with Otherdeeds NFTs, that will introduce core aspects of the metaverse project.
“First Flight” and beyond
In July 2022, the world got a “peek” at the other side when 4,300 “Voyagers” took part in the “first flight”.
The first tech show of the metaverse project offered a tour of its central location called “Biogenic Swamp” (or “Biogenic Swamp”, in free translation), which led to a battle against Koda.
In the future, Otherside wants to be part of an open metaverse, where users and assets can move freely between different platforms. The M² platform, where it is being developed, was designed with a focus on interoperability to create a fully integrated metaverse.
Anonymous co-founder of Yuga Labs Gordon Goner says that “the future will lean toward an open, interoperable metaverse,” where assets are “user-owned (not rented) and able to move off the platform.”
When it comes to web2 we compete with giants. But we believe the future will bend toward an open and interoperable metaverse, with user-owned (non-tenanted) assets able to exit the platform.
—GordonGoner.eth (@GordonGoner) July 15, 2022
Right now, joining Voyagers on their tours can be expensive, and the BAYC project is known for its exclusivity status.
As the project progresses, the balance between accessibility and exclusivity associated with previous Yuga Labs initiatives will determine its contribution to Web3.
*Translated by Daniela Pereira do Nascimento with permission from Decrypt.
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