Yuga Labs – the owners of the two most popular NFT collections – has announced the completion of a $450 million fundraise to develop its NFT metaverse project. This brings the company’s valuation up to $4 billion.
- News of the raise emerged in a company press release on Tuesday, which revealed a16z as the leader of the funding round.
- Andreesen Horowitz has become deeply involved with investing in all things web 3 and appears to have followed through on Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)’s proposed investment deal as well.
- The investment leader is joined by Metaverse game ‘The Sandbox’, crypto exchanges FTX and MoonPay, and others.
- Together, the provided funds will scale Yuga’s team, and support joint ventures and partnerships that it has planned.
- Yuga owns the intellectual property for BAYC, CryptoPunks, and Meebits, the first two being the most highly valued NFT collections on the market. They have market caps of 1,060,611.52 ETH ($3.1 billion) and 716,147.28 ETH ($2.1 billion) respectively.
- The Metaverse project the company is pursuing is called Otherside, which will be an interoperable world connecting the entire NFT universe.
- Greg Solano, a Yuga Labs co-founder, believes the game will stand out from other Metaverse projects which are less competitive.
- “You only play with people and make friends because you’re getting your ass kicked,” he said. “Basically, we don’t think deep social experience comes from essentially a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi.’”
- Despite the growing excitement around NFTs, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin isn’t exactly a fan – especially not of Bored Apes. “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he said of their incredibly high value.