On April 30th, Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, made their move into the metaverse space with the official launch of Otherside.xyz(.) Visitors to the website were greeted with an impressively theatrical animated trailer depicting a Bored Ape going on some kind of mind-bending trip to the strains of ‘Break on Through’ by The Doors after consuming a mysterious liquid. Scrolling down revealed more details of the project.
Launched just over a year ago in April 2021, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection quickly hit the headlines and ownership became a celebrity status symbol. Priced at around $200 at launch, all ten thousand Bored Apes sold out within twelve hours and now trade for upwards of 400k, surpassing Cryptopunks as the most valuable NFT project by market cap.
To date, the highest price fetched by a Bored Ape on the open market is held by Bored Ape 8817, which Sotheby’s auctioned for a cool $3.4 million to crypto investor Brandon Buchanan.
In March of this year, Yuga Labs launched Apecoin ($APE), which will serve as a token to govern the future of the Bored Ape community. ApeCoin is billed as “a token for culture, gaming, and commerce used to empower a decentralized community building at the forefront of web3.” Having already acquired Cryptopunks and Meebits earlier that month, Yuga Labs has been laying the groundwork for Otherside for some time.
The Otherside project is ultimately an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) connected to the BAYC ecosystem. The team notes that “The game will blend mechanics from MMORPGs and Web3-enabled virtual worlds.” While the game and metaverse themselves are very much in the development stage, what went on sale on April 30th were the first 55,000 ‘Otherdeeds’, which will serve as ‘land’ in the Otherside metaverse. A total of 100,000 Otherdeeds were allocated, with the other 45,000 going to Bored Ape holders (10,000), Mutant Ape holders (20,000), and ‘Yuga and other project developers helping to create Otherside’ (15,000). A further 100,000 Otherdeeds will be ‘exclusively rewarded to Voyagers who hold Otherdeeds and contribute to the development of Otherside.’
All Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Bored Ape Kennel Club, and CryptoPunks holders will be provided with Otherside-ready 3D models of their NFTs at game launch, available as playable characters. Other players will be able to import and create their own characters in the game using Otherside’s bespoke Software Development Kit, which will allow creators to make items for the Otherside as well as sell them in the game’s marketplace — not just characters, but also outfits, tools, structures, and even games.
Aside from that, Yuga Labs isn’t giving much away about how the game will actually work, although they make some impressive technical claims. “With the power of Improbable’s M2 technology, 10,000+ players will be able to interact simultaneously in a single place, connect with natural voice chat (even in crowds of thousands), experience rich, immersive gameplay supported by AI and physics, and move between metaverses.” In all, Yuga Labs reckons Otherside will be able to handle more than half a billion operations per second, orders of magnitude greater than most online game worlds.
Of course, those wishing to get involved need Apecoin to purchase the Otherdeeds and, eventually, to interact with the Otherside metaverse.
The launch itself, however, was not received entirely positively by the wider NFT community amid surging gas prices, an Ethereum network crash and multiple phishing scams, leading many to question the sustainability of the project. It remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that Yuga Labs is emerging as a dominant player in the NFT/Metaverse marketplace.
This is a very interesting metaverse and NFT project to watch. It’s also interesting to see most crypto and metaverse and NFT projects using “.xyz” or “.io” to launch their websites.
Thankyou! so much for always bring us amazing articles. THE otherside(.)xyz site is impressive 🙂