🐵 Apes 4ever strong

It’s Monday, and prices are largely up in the past week. 

There’s a lot going on right now: Bitcoin protocol Beyond is enabling the bridging of bitcoin assets to Base, and Zelle is going global by adding stablecoin payment functionality. 

We’ve come so far. The real question is: Are we still early anymore?

— Kate Irwin

BAYC’s next moves

Over three years later, the Apes live on.

At the fifth Apefest over the weekend, there was poker, there was bling, there was a marriage proposal, there was merch, and there was news: Yuga Labs is building an IRL “clubhouse,” developing an animated series, and selling digital avatars on Telegram as part of a deal with Snoop Dogg. 

It’s like 2022 never ended. 

Yuga Labs co-founder Greg “Garga” Solano took the stage at the event to drop the deets about the planned Miami space, which is expected to include a library-inspired room for coworking during the day and a rooftop bar for knocking back whiskeys at night.

In this vision, it’s a dark, moody space with a check-in desk where BAYC NFT holders get access cards to verify their NFT ownership and grant them access to members-only areas of the clubhouse. 

To me, what’s been revealed of the Miami clubhouse aesthetic resembles the look of the West Hollywood Soho House, which also leans into a dark social library feel with some of its seating areas, and has a rooftop garden restaurant with trees and a glass top.

The BAYC NFT collection, which has seen over $3.3 billion in all-time sales, is also apparently getting its own namesake animated series. That’s thanks to a co-production between Yuga Labs and Jeffrey Huang, an entrepreneur who goes by “MachiBigBrother” online and has been tied to a slew of past crypto projects. 

It sounds like news straight out of the NFT bull run years ago — back when The Red Ape Family was a thing and Coinbase announced, and then killed, a BAYC-inspired series of its own. In case you forgot, that year Snoop Dogg and Eminem also tossed their BAYC NFTs into a music video, and Reddit’s co-founder tweeted out this extremely cringe clip promoting a reality show with NFTs as its stars try to “put the FUN in non-fungible.”

For what it’s worth, Snoop Dogg still owns his leopard-print Bored Ape all these years later. In fact, he’s continuing his association with the IP by selling BAYC avatar packs on TON via the new Telegram mini app Mint. 

Snoop previously sold Telegram gifts back in July, netting $12 million in sales across nearly one million assets. Obviously, there’s some cash to be made selling limited edition items on Telegram.

Mint CEO Jack Booth told me in an interview that all BAYC, MAYC and Otherside NFT holders will be automatically allow-listed for the upcoming Snoop x BAYC Telegram drop, which consists of randomized packs of Telegram avatars with different rarities that can be opened digitally. 

Allowlisted wallets can buy at least five packs per wallet. Each pack will cost 30 TON, Booth said, which is roughly $66. We don’t yet know how many packs will be for sale in total, but the quantity may be adjusted based on perceived demand (pretty sure they want these to sell out). The drop is expected to go live sometime next week.

“There’s a massive opportunity here to bring IPs and just walk them, hand-hold them, into the platform, because they all want to grow their channels and their subscriber bases on other channels, but they also want to monetize,” Booth said of Telegram.

In the gaming space, Yuga’s also made progress with its Bathroom Blitz game within its Otherside platform. Otherside will also be promoted on Amazon Gaming, and Yuga hopes to onboard new players to crypto through the collab that’ll bring an Amazon box-inspired character to the upcoming social game. 

Yuga’s also finally given Otherdeed holders a reason for hanging onto their assets besides waiting for a promised resource-related game, which is slated to launch next year.

Each Otherdeed holder will also get access to the Otherside Development Kit to build out their own experience, according to Yuga Labs Chief Product Officer Michael Figge. 

“The ODK is a set of tools that allows you to build in Unreal Engine to create next generation blockchain experiences,” Figge said. “Our vision is for you to be able to drag and drop, upload and go live.”

Despite all this news, the floor price for a BAYC NFT remains down in the past month — and a far cry from their all-time high of over $350,000 apiece over three years ago.

Since their inception, I’ve watched the apes with curiosity. Despite being undeniably cringe in many respects, there’s a dogged determination they’ve held onto all these years. 

It’s very possible Otherside may turn out to be a costly passion project that doesn’t churn out revenue. It’s also possible its Miami clubhouse could ultimately be a losing business, too. 

All that said, it’s still fun to see Yuga push forward with its IP instead of leaving it in the dust and riding off into the sunset with their fortune. 

So regardless of what you think of the apes — at least they’re still in the game.

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