JKL

Some news to share: I am stepping back in as CEO of Yuga Labs. Wylie and I are grateful for all the contributions and operational rigor Daniel has brought to the company, and appreciate his thoughtfulness and mentorship over the past year. I’m reinvigorated to be taking the reins for our next chapter. Looking at what’s ahead for Yuga, we need to execute with a more cryptonative focus across the entire company. There’s a couple things that are top of mind for Wylie and I: -BAYC: Appreciate everyone coming out to the first “Bored Meeting” this past weekend. To sum up our thinking around BAYC in the briefest possible terms, the utility of BAYC comes from the network. From everybody who is in the club. That’s why ApeFest is so special, why Made by Apes has seen explosive adoption, why the clubhouse itself is so hype, and why BAYC is able to collab with some of the biggest brands in the world. We want to unshackle the BAYC team at Yuga as much as possible to execute against its vision. More focus, more agility. So it can do the above, and create the space for the magic and crazy shit we used to get up to more often. Focus and agility requires autonomy. Step 1 is already done. A new company, “BAYC LLC”, was created as a Yuga subsidiary and will be responsible for everything BAYC. We’ve got a crack team of ninjas on the BAYC team, but there’s still a couple important roles to be filled over there. -Otherside: Otherside should be the living room of web3. The default space you go to in order to play and hang with your community (no matter what community that is). Otherside is also a massive swing for the fences. We’ve got a lot of work to do. The only way it gets built properly is if you all come in and experience it more often. When we set out to build Otherside, the goal was to make it a public, iterative process. I’m confident in the work our team has done to get us back to this plan, and our communication is going to ramp up this week starting with “Apes Come Home.” And we need to follow it up with a lot more frequent communication starting now and throughout the year. -Gaming: We need to approach games at Yuga with a tighter focus on what works. For us, that’s a barbell approach: 1) crazy fun play patterns that any kid at heart can enjoy. The more wildly fun and mass market, the better: like Dookey Dash. This is all about opening the funnel and flooding our ecosystem with millions of new users, and leveraging that to create opportunities for creators, IP holders, and pro players. Stoked for how this is coming together with our friends at @farawaygg 2) Cryptonative mechanics and platforms, like [redacted]. We’re going on three years since Yuga was founded, and we couldn’t be more excited about some of the stuff we’ve got in the pipeline. Extremely grateful for the team that’s assembled here across all our brands. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I couldn’t imagine doing it with any other team, or any other community of builders. Thanks for your support. For those who will be there, I’ll see you at NFT Paris.

wanted to put together some longer form thoughts on hv-mtl ahead of the launch tomorrow - Two years ago, the summer after BAYC launched, @gordongoner and I had an idea for a brutally hard old school arcade game. It was going to be trippy and excessively dark and we were pretty stoked on it. Hopefully some of that original creative we had back then will come to life someday. But the general concept behind the game stayed with us even if the creative got shelved: An impossible-to-beat game with a limited number of plays available, where, at the end of it, each player would be granted a unique NFT character tied to their position on the final leaderboard. We wanted it to feel like a game that exists on only one old school arcade cabinet in the world, and it’s only available for a week before the whole thing burns to the ground. But if you play, and you kick ass, you’d get a unique character to take with you that would serve as a totem for the game experience, a flex showing off your skills against a globally competitive leaderboard, and your key (and your character) for the next limited-time game event. The idea stuck with us because it embodied in a very simple way what we found most interesting about the potential of gaming NFTs. First of all, the obvious things: Verifiable digital scarcity. Provenance. Ownership and hardcore flexing. New opportunities for esports. It felt like something that we, personally, would mint the living shit out of just based on that. But most importantly it leaned into the fact that in crypto, as a game sunsets, parts of it—like an on-chain character—could live on. Rather than just going poof when a game is shutdown. (Moment of silence for my beloved druid, floating in nothingness ever since the original EQ server he was on got unplugged) So what better way to display this use case for gaming NFTs than with an absurd, ephemeral game, built to exist only for a short time? When that first game sunsets, a brief pause– and then onto the next one. Bring those characters back. Pick up where they left off, or drop them into an utterly new, different experience. These 'mini-games' would then eventually ladder up to a tentpole experience that would be that much richer for all the love that went into the journey. Dookey Dash was born out of a lot of these ideas. Plus some of our usual BAYC insanity. It was a riff on the endless runner genre popularized by stuff like Temple Run. Except you’re in the sewers beneath the Yacht Club, competing to be the first to get to the end of the tunnel, where a magical key awaits (stuck in a monkey’s butthole though, important in life not to take yourself too seriously). Dookey Dash was live for just a couple weeks. At the end of it, we had our winner in @Mongraal, a Fortnite pro with insane reflexes. Mongraal and everyone else who participated in Dookey Dash got a little mech, called a HV (pronounced Heavy). There are 8 types of HV’s, each corresponding to a different section of the leaderboard. These HV's are currently in their 'Evo 1' form. Basically, Charmander stage. They're a little cute even though yeah they could probably fuck you up. As far as mechs go, they are basically pre-adolescent. Forge is how we take a HV from Evo 1 to the next stage. You won't need twitchy reflexes like you did with Dookey Dash. This space is creative, social, and funny, so Forge was designed to tap into all that. You can win and just be... chilling. The game starts off as a mix between a pet game and a casual world builder, but later develops into a dungeon crawler. Unlike Dookey Dash, Forge will be live for a couple months (then poof again). Stoked to see what everybody builds in the Forge, and to break into the rift with you all. For those looking to stat studying up, the team has put together a game guide (hv-mtl.com/forge-game-guide) and FAQ (hv-mtl.com/forge-faq), but there's also some video content breaking down the same coming ahead of launch tomorrow.