Yahoo Finance’s David Hollerith joins the Live show to discuss the team behind ‘The Bored Ape Yacht Club’ raising $450 million to build an NFT metaverse.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: We’ve got some big fundraising news in the NFT space. Yuga Labs, the team behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, raising $450 million to build an NFT metaverse. Let’s bring in Yahoo Finance’s David Hollerith, who’s following that story for us. David, this is an intriguing vision. Lay it out for us.
DAVID HOLLERITH: Yeah, Akiko, as you said, Yuga has raised 450 at a $4 billion valuation from Andreessen, also video game maker, Animoca Brands, and others like the crypto exchange, FTX. Now for context, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, which launched last April is a basic idea of sort of having a tokenized profile picture of an ape in different variations that’s minted to the Ethereum blockchain.
Now this NFT also comes with unique community perks like social media channels, exclusive in-person events, and merchandise. And over the past year, the Board Apes have been bid up a lot. I mean, Bored Apes have sold as high as $3 million in the past. But their minimum price to own one of these NFTs is about $300,000 as of now.
So back to the raise. It might sound hard to believe since this company has only been around for a year, and they’re selling essentially JPEGs tied to the blockchain. But now they’re valued at $4 billion. And based on that, on a leaked pitch deck that’s been sort of making the rounds that Yuga Labs created, last year, the company reportedly earned $127 million. And it expects to exceed that to $455 million in net revenue this year.
Now, based on their LinkedIn page and what others have sort of said, the company has about 11 full-time employees. So the scale that’s going on here in terms of what Yuga Labs has delivered in the past year is sort of overwhelming. Now, in recent weeks, they’ve also been busy. They’ve acquired two popular other NFT collections, the intellectual property, CryptoPunks and [INAUDIBLE].
And they’ve also launched their own cryptocurrency, Ape Coin. Now Ape Coin gets back to what they’re planning to do in the future, which is, it’s supposed to power this decentralized Metaverse they’re calling outside, which, on Monday, they released sort of a trailer for it, sort of a snapshot of what it could look like.
Now this Metaverse, essentially, it sounds like a series of gaming and entertainment apps that are sort of involved, and they’re all operating under this Ape Coin cryptocurrency. Now the partnerships that are being involved, especially with the investors in this raise, are sort of going all towards this ecosystem that’s being built. Now, at the end of the day, to the Bored Ape NFT owners are also sort of owning the IP in case, you know, something like these characters show up in the games.
So it’s beginning to come together, and it’s very interesting to see sort of this next iteration about what an NFT project might look like. There are a few different ideas that are being sort of all bundled into one. And that’s sort of what this future roadmap for Yuga Labs is starting to look like.
AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, Yuga Labs Metaverse looking very different from the vision–
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