The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, the most popular, is experiencing difficulties: Yuga Labs, its parent company, is being laid off. This is the second time in less than a year that the company has had to lay off employees, a sign of poor economic health, while its metaverse project seems to be making no progress.
“ It's a very difficult day today. » It is with this euphemism that Garga, the CEO of Yuga Lab, the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, announced that the company was going to lay off employees. The news was shared on X (ex-Twitter) on the evening of April 26, 2024. “ Over the past few months, I've done everything I can to change what we do, and how we do it, and I've had to make some very tough strategic decisions. Unfortunately, this includes restructuring, and some positions within the company are affected. »
Advertisement
He did not specify how many employees were affected by this wave of layoffs, nor how the restructuring of the company would take place. Garga nevertheless indicated what he believed to be the source of Yuga Labs' woes: the company ” got lost “, due to ” labyrinthine business processes. » The CEO intends to return to a startup atmosphere, with employees focused only on certain missions.
The Metaverse is sinking Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs
This is the second time in less than a year that Yuga Labs has laid off employees. The last wave took place in October 2023, and one of the company's co-founders indicated that after the layoffs, 120 employees would remain. Today, no figures have been provided.
The October 2023 departures were already intended to focus the company on its metaverse project, called Otherside. However, this project would be very far from being up to par.
Otherside promised users to be a sort of exclusive club in the metaverse, in which Apes could meet up and have access to new games and content. Over $300 million worth of land parcels were sold in this metaverse, and Yuga Labs had even mentioned the idea of an MMORPG, based on Bored Ape NFTs. But for now, this metaverse mostly looks like a very pixelated and disappointing version of The Sims.
Advertisement
During a presentation event, organized at the beginning of 2024 and which the owners of NFT Bored Ape were able to attend, Otherside proved to be very frustrating. Players were only able to wander around a specific area of the game, and meeting in a virtual bar to take photos while twerking in the toilet. For a metaverse accessible only after purchasing an NFT for several tens of thousands of dollars, some owners expected more. “ It looked more like a first draft than a project in development for 2 years and costing tens of millions of dollars “, summed up one of them.
The crypto market has started again, but not that of NFTs
Is Yuga Labs right to focus its efforts on Otherside? The concept of Metaverse, meant to be a sort of virtual world, never really took off, despite Meta's immense effort to make it happen. Two years after the announcement with great fanfare of the opening of its metaverse, Yuga Labs is not sure of transforming the trial: there is still no official launch date for Otherside.
Above all, it is not only with Otherside that Yuga Labs encounters difficulties. The floor price of its flagship NFT collection, Bored Ape Yach Club, has been falling for several years. While an NFT sold for around 128 ETH in May 2022 (equivalent today to nearly 380,000 euros), today the average price is 15 ETH (44,400 euros), according to NFTPriceFloor data.
These figures are all the more alarming as the cryptocurrency market has started to rise again. In 2023, the sector actually experienced a bear market, a widespread fall in prices which impacted both bitcoin and Web3 projects, including NFTs. But since the beginning of 2024, the market has been in good shape again, and bitcoin and ether, the two main cryptocurrencies, are at very high prices. NFTs never came back.