In late March 2022 a leaked pitch deck from Yuga Labs started making the rounds.
The slides were so well put together that they do not require a voiceover to understand them. For this reason, many suspect this be a publicity stunt for Yuga Labs’s Ape Coin and their metaverse project called the Otherwise.
In this article I am going to briefly summarize Yuga Labs’s deck so you don’t waste your time clicking through it.
If you are not too familiar with Ape coin then I recommend you read my 101 guide titled What is Ape Coin.
What’s in Yuga’s exposed pitch deck?
It is worth check for yourself above but if you don’t want to go through the whole slide deck then here is a brief summary:
1/9. How the Yuga Labs deck presents the team
The pitch kicks off with the quality of the team.
The founders are anonymous with ridiculous names such EmperorTomatoKetchup and all of them have a Bored Ape for a profile picture.
The next slides names the executive team (COO, CEO etc.) and lists their experience.
All of them have experience in major media companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Spotify etc.
They also highlight their diversity in terms of gender.
On the C-level tier you have:
Guy Oseary. This guy (haha get it) is a pioneering media mogul and has worked with client such as U2 and Madonne.
Next you have Nicole Muniz who is the CEO who also has a background in scaling brands from seed to growth.
Jasmin Shoemaker is the COO with 15 year in tech including Apple and Facebook.
Finally you have Patrick Ehrlund who is the Chief Creative officer with 15 years of brand storytelling. He has worked with HBO, Kanye West, Google and others.
So a pretty impressive array overall.
2/9. How great the Bored Apes are
Yuga Labs go on to boast how important the Bored Apes community is.
For example, they describe how Bored Apes have “catapulted into mainstream consciousness” with a massive engaged following on social media and with community events such as Yacht parties and online treasure hunts.
They also showcase their market dynamics and how they account for 10% of transactions volume on OpenSea, an NFT trading site.
3/9. Yuga Labs deck reveals secrete plans about the future
The main point of this section is that the future is metaverse.
Everyone is dipping in: Facebook, Microsoft etc. But so far the experience has been underwhelming.
One industry that is not boring is gaming.
Here people come together to play and form meaningful bonds. Yuga says “we are not building a metaverse but an interoperable gaming metaverse, a MetaRPG”. An RPG is a common acronym used in gaming to denote Role Playing Game which is a common gaming category.
This isn’t the only type of game. For example, there are other game such Genopets crypto where you bank your steps in order to earn and use crypto tokens for use within the game
The reason they will succeed, they claim, is that they have a story and brand with cultural significance.
Their metaverse will be different because it will have an in-game currency (ApeCoin), land and resources and people will be able to bring their NFT character into the game.
This is basically what every metaverse project aims to do so I am not entirely sure how this is different.
4/9. Yuga Labs deck reveals the secret weapon: The SDK
Where Yuga does seem to stand out is that they also plan to have an SDK (software development kit) that will allow anyone to build things.
It seems this will be something like an in-game apps store where you can create or customize things.
This in combination with the multitude of high quality games that will become available is what make it so exciting.
5/9. How Yuga Labs deck presents APECoin
APECoin will be the currency of their metaverse.
BTW, if you want to buy it check out How to buy Ape Coin.
APECoin will be the currency for their app store but they will also encourage trading and bartering.
They also confusingly say that they might introduce a soft currency for spending.
6/9. Yuga’s narrative about Kodas and Bored Apes
The deck goes on to introduce the backstory for the metaverse.
This section introduces a celestial creature called a Koda.
Kodas carry the universe’s creational energy and without them the universe is doomed.
The Kodas have discovered intelligent life on earth and have used their cosmic energy to create the Apes in a last effort to save everyone.
7/9. Yuga Labs’s slides about the land sale
The deck reveals a plan to launch the metaverse project with a land sale.
There will be 200K land plots in total.
100K plots will be minted to start with. 30% of this will go to existing Ape NFT holders while 70K will go to the general public.
The plots will contain hidden NFTs such as characters and resources.
There is a 5% chance that a plots also contains a Koda.
After the land sale people will be able to trade their NFTs.
8/9. Yuga’s roadmap
The land sale will be only the beginning.
The Yuga Labs deck reveals that the team plan to offer an amazing gaming experience that feels “unreal”.
Their plan is to launch an APE festival in June.
Then in August they will launch the mystically named “Trial of Jimmy the Monkey”.
In the last quarter of the year they plan to introduce multiple games (probably) such as MechaDog and Mecha Monkey.
I guess we will find out in the near future what these are all about.
9/9. Yuga Labs deck on financials
The last section talks about their financials.
They talk about an expected revenue from the first land sales to be about $200M. In hindsights they ended up raising more than this.
They expect Net revenue for 2021 to be $455M. This will predominantly come from land sales.
Wrapping up Yuga Labs leaked pitch deck
All in all Yuga’s team come’s across as qualified to pull this off.
While the gaming industry is massive, AAA games are very hard to pull off.
In this instance, Yuga is entering unknown territory as no one knows what a fully fledged metaverse project really looks like.
The deck shows a promising plan.
It remains to be seen wether Yuga can execute on their promise.
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