is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
It’s dusk, and bugs are chirping all around me. I’m wandering through the middle of a big, virtual swamp toward the sound of thumping bass off in the distance. There isn’t much else nearby — some trees, a couple of other players. It’s mostly just me and the sound emanating from a large wooden structure strung up with lights sitting farther out into the swamp.
When I finally arrive, it rises above me: the official clubhouse of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. I make for the door to head inside. Except I find I can’t get access; even though the lights are on in the house, the doors don’t actually open. There’s nothing to do.
These were my first steps inside the virtual world themed after the infamous cartoon monkeys that became the symbol of everything about the NFT craze. Even though the NFT hype has died down, Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC and a few other NFT collections, is about to make a big new digital push with another early 2020s buzzword, a metaverse called Otherside.
Otherside has been a long time coming: The company announced its intention to build Otherside after raising $450 million in funding in 2022, with one of BAYC’s cofounders saying at the time that the company hoped to build an “interoperable,” “gamified,” and “decentralized” virtual world. Yuga Labs has mostly been quiet about the project since then, finally launching an alpha earlier this year. Today, at the company’s ApeFest event in Las Vegas, Yuga Labs announced that Otherside will be officially launching on November 12th.
“It’s basically one of the most ambitious projects ever attempted in the space”
“It’s basically one of the most ambitious projects ever attempted in the space, and it’s finally starting to take shape,” Yuga Labs chief product officer Michael Figge tells The Verge.
The short version of the pitch is that Otherside is something like Roblox or Fortnite, but with crypto: you can use NFTs as avatars to explore virtual worlds created by Yuga Labs and by other players. You can log in with a crypto wallet, but you don’t need an NFT to participate or just hang out; you can just join from a browser using more traditional methods like your email.
“We think that there should be a very low barrier to entry for somebody to try out Otherside, because once they do try it, it’s a really great way to get exposed to what it’s like to actually own digital assets,” Figge says.
There’s a bunch of crypto stuff everywhere you look. NFT avatars, NFT plots of land, blockchain-based currency. Yuga hopes it can build a creator ecosystem around all of this, giving builders a more compelling deal than competing metaverses because these digital assets exist outside of its world and can be moved elsewhere in the future. You can also mostly ignore all of this and just run around Otherside without diving too far into the crypto of it all, if you want to.
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