Yuga Labs Sets November Launch for BAYC Metaverse Project Otherside

Oct 25, 2025 10:30 AM EDTby Ortega Rafael • 3 min read

From NFT Icons to Virtual World Builders

Yuga Labs, the company behind the infamous Bored Ape Yacht Club, is preparing to launch its ambitious metaverse project Otherside on November 12th, according to announcements made at the company’s ApeFest gathering in Las Vegas. This marks a significant strategic shift for a company that became synonymous with the NFT boom at its peak, now betting big on another early 2020s digital frontier.

From NFT Icons to Virtual World Builders
A Long-Awaited Virtual World
Betting Big on the Next Digital Frontier
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The timing is particularly notable given how dramatically the NFT market has cooled since its 2021-2022 frenzy. While BAYC NFTs once commanded six-figure sums and became status symbols among celebrities and crypto enthusiasts, trading volumes and values have plummeted across the digital collectibles space. Industry analysts suggest this metaverse push represents Yuga’s attempt to build sustainable utility beyond speculative asset trading.

A Long-Awaited Virtual World

Otherside has been in development since Yuga Labs raised a massive $450 million funding round in 2022 specifically for this project. At the time, company leadership described their vision for an “interoperable, gamified, and decentralized” virtual world that would expand the BAYC universe beyond static profile pictures.

Since that initial announcement, the company maintained relative silence about the project’s progress until launching an alpha version earlier this year. The extended development timeline reflects both the technical complexity of building a robust metaverse and the challenging market conditions that emerged as crypto winter set in.

Sources familiar with the project indicate that Otherside aims to blend gaming elements with social experiences, allowing Bored Ape owners and potentially other users to interact in a persistent digital environment. The platform reportedly builds on the original cartoon primate aesthetic that made BAYC recognizable, while expanding into more immersive 3D environments.

Betting Big on the Next Digital Frontier

What’s particularly interesting about this launch is how Yuga Labs is leaning into the metaverse concept precisely as other major tech companies have scaled back their ambitions. Meta’s massive metaverse investments have yielded questionable returns, and many earlier buzzword-driven virtual world projects have failed to gain traction.

Yet Yuga appears to be betting that its established community of Bored Ape owners—numbering around 10,000 core token holders—provides a built-in user base that other metaverse projects lacked. Whether that community engagement can translate into sustained metaverse activity remains the billion-dollar question.

Market observers will be watching closely to see if Otherside can deliver on the ambitious promises made during its funding round. The success or failure of this launch could signal whether web3-native companies can successfully transition from digital collectibles to more complex virtual experiences—or if this represents another case of chasing fading tech trends.

The November launch date gives Yuga Labs just over a month to generate excitement and prepare its infrastructure for what could be one of the most significant tests of consumer interest in the metaverse concept since the peak of the hype cycle.

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