explainer. The company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club is now worth $4 billion: This is Yuga Labs | cash

Yuga Labs has already been raising millions of dollars in venture capital since last month Up in the air. On Tuesday evening the loot finally came in.

The investment round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has made investments in Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Coinbase and OpenSea. Together with a few other companies, they inject $450 million into Yuga Labs, Technology website The Verge writes†

The Bored Ape Yacht Club, or BYAC, is a collection of 10,000 NFTs. An NFT token, or a non-fungible token, is a unique proof of ownership of a digital object. To buy an NFT Monkey, you need digital currencies (crypto), which you can get through an online exchange like Coinbase or Binance.

This group is one of the most popular at the moment. For example, celebrities like talk show host Jimmy Fallon, singer Justin Bieber, rapper Eminem and celebrities Paris Hilton have a bored monkey. At the time of writing, a total of over €1.2 billion has been sold to Bored Apes. You can buy the cheapest version for about 277,000 euros converted.

The company is the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club, but it has bought Earlier in March Also two other NFT groups. Yuga Labs also owns Cryptopunks and Meebits, the three most valuable NFT chains to date.

As a maker, the company takes a 2.5 percent commission on every sale of a boring monkey. Last year, her earnings turned over 115 million euros in net income, he writes Information company The Block†

Yuga Labs was founded by four innovators from the Bored Ape Yacht Club group. They hide behind a pseudonym, but BuzzFeed News I was able to find two of the names through Yuga Labs’ deed of incorporation. The company also handles licensing to other companies and is currently working on the “Otherside” video game.

The cryptocurrency bearing the Bored Ape Yacht Club logo was officially launched on Thursday, March 17th. However, this is not the Yuga Labs project itself, the company’s communications employees repeatedly repeat to the press. ApeCoin was created by ApeCoin DAO.

the sun decentralized autonomous organization It is a popular regulatory method for people who are enthusiastic about cryptocurrency and NFT. In the DAO, all decisions are made in groups, where everyone can vote based on the number of tokens they have. So it reminds us of the tax ballot: Those who have more, have more to say.

ApeCoin DAO will make decisions about how the coin will be used and developed. The plan appears to be to use the currency in many products in the BYAC universe, such as the game being developed by Yuga Labs.

ApeCoin DAO received the blue version of the BYAC logo from Yuga Labs. In return, the company received a large share of ApeCoin, which was distributed in the amount of one billion dollars, He writes for Bloomberg News† Fifteen percent went to Yuga Labs and another eight percent to the company’s founders. Then 14 percent went to “Launch Partners,” including investment firm Andreesen Horowitz, which already partially owns Yuga Labs. The Charity Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation also received one percent of the coins.

Fifteen percent of the coins are reserved for bored monkeys. The exact breakdown is complex, and includes other combinations as well, but it boils down to this: the more bored monkeys, the more valuable ApeCoin you get for free.

About 47 percent remain with the ApeCoin DAO itself. At its peak, a single ApeCoin was worth around €36. Value at the time of writing Just under 12 euros per coin†

In theory, it is a ready-to-use method to help determine the payment method for various digital products around BYAC. However, a significant part of the token is in the hands of its creators, Yuga Labs and large investment firms.

The Yuga Labs investment round comes during a boom in the cryptocurrency and NFT sector. The company actually sits in the middle of two big profiles.

On the other hand, you have web3: an idea for a new kind of internet that is less centralized around big technology platforms like Facebook and Google. This should be done through things like DAOs, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies.

On the other hand, you have the metaverse: also a futuristic version of the Internet, where the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds must be fixed.

The video game that Yuga Labs seems to want to develop, the company cleverly combines both phases. It can be a big virtual world, where you can use boring monkeys, Cryptopunks or Meebits, and maybe also your own ApeCoins. The company is also said to have plans to sell virtual plots of land.

So the high value of Yuga Labs you don’t get just because the sale of Bored Ape Yacht Club continues to bring in money. Other products around the NFT group should also bring in a lot of money. This year, the company estimates it will earn 414 million euros in revenue.

Investment firms like Andreesen Horowitz, who has also invested in cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, the NFT Open Sea market and a slew of other Web3 startups, have been keen to get a piece of the pie right from the start. They now have a lot of money for it, because if the spreads pay off, they can make a lot of money with it.