Yuga Labs hopes to make $50M with new Mecha Apes collection

According to a leaked document seen by Protos, Yuga Labs intends to launch a new collection of NFTs by the end of this year called Mecha Apes with the intention of raising another $50 million and 100,000 metaverse land pieces.

The company’s sold-out 100,000-piece “Otherdeeds for Otherside” NFT collection, raked in a total of $600 million, with each deed sold at an initial price of $6,000. Since then, the floor price has dropped to a nominal $2,700 as both the value of ether and the ether floor price plummeted during the current bear market. NFT trading volume is also down 99% from its high of last year. 

There’s no information online about Mecha Apes, but a “Mecha Piece” has been featured as one of the artifacts in the Otherdeeds. The Otherdeeds are described by Yuga Labs as a place “where 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.”

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Many on Twitter have also speculated that the Otherdeeds will be used for a play-to-earn metaverse game and the artifacts on the metaverse land will potentially be tradable in-game.

Yuga Labs has always been very secretive about its NFT launches, however, it outlined some of its plans and ideas in a seed funding earlier this year which raised $450 million. Yuga Labs intends to build a media empire on Web 3.0 that includes games and art based in the metaverse.

Some of the investors that were roped in via crypto venture fund Andreessen Horowitz include Animoca Brands — which partnered with Yuga Labs to develop its metaverse game — Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Ventures, Googe Ventures, Mark Cuban (despite saying that metaverse land is the “dumbest shit ever”), cryptocurrency exchange MoonPay, investment banking firm LionTree, Samsung, Snoop Dog, and Steve Aoki. The valuation round valued the company at $4 billion.

Following the issues with the launch of the Otherdeeds, where buyers clogged the blockchain resulting in high transaction fees, Yuga Labs also claimed that it intends to create a blockchain of its own for its crypto token called ApeCoin, in order to address scalability issues.

Yuga Labs has so far dominated the NFT space and even purchased the rights for the famous collections called Meebits and CryptoPunks, which has the highest trading volume so far with 991,000 ether traded, followed by the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the creation that shot them to fame with 661,900 ether traded. 

Trading volume for the Otherdeeds is also one of the highest from all NFT collections with 342,900 ether traded so far.

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