Bored Ape Creator to Sell $300 Million in Virtual Land

• The creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club is about to sell $300 million in metaverse land for its game “Otherside.”
• Yuga Labs will issue digital “deeds” for up to 55,000 plots of metaverse property.
• The sale is expected to be the biggest non-fungible token launch to date.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s creator will start selling more than $300 million worth of metaverse land plots on Saturday.

Yuga Labs plans to sell digital non-fungible token “deeds” to virtual real estate in its new game “Otherside.” Each deed costs 305 ApeCoins, or about $6,000. The NFT’s give buyers access to a supply of up to 55,000 plots of metaverse landscape.

The Yuga Labs and its partner Animoca Brands stand to make $335 million, which would make it the biggest NFT launch ever, the Financial Times said.

The digital land was originally intended to be sold at a Dutch auction, but Yuga Labs said on Twitter on Thursday that the company would move toward a flat-fee payscale for the NFT’s.

Anticipation for Yuga Labs’ metaverse sale also lifted ApeCoin, the native digital currency of the APE ecosystem, as much as 50% in the past week.

The sale also could gauge how resilient investor interest is in the metaverse, a full-scale three dimensional virtual world that’s considered part of the internet’s next iteration, or Web3. In November, Metaverse Group made a $2.43 million purchase in Decentraland. A week later, video game publisher Atari made a $4.3 million purchase of land in the SandBox metaverse. 

Meanwhile, NFT’s have become an extremely lucrative asset class and range anywhere from $100 to millions of dollars. The craze has pushed total NFT sales volume to $25 billion over the past year as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs descend upon the nascent Web3 space.

But digital assets have slumped since the start of the year amid a hawkish

Federal Reserve

and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Weekly NFT sales have been more than cut in half from its early January peak of nearly $1 billion, according to data from NonFungible.com. But the past week has seen weekly NFT sales jump 85% to $456 million from $246 million in the prior week.