Yuga Labs Previews New Character, Possible NFT Collabs in Video

Yuga Labs unveiled a high-quality teaser video late Friday night featuring a handful of other NFT collections, a possible Bored Ape Yacht Club companion and clues to a BAYC metaverse. The video opens with an Ape fishing outside. The ape pulls a bottle of glowing potion out of the water and decides to drink. That’s when things get weird.

Earlier in the week, BAYC founder Garga told Discord members that a pitch deck — that was the subject of reports regarding virtual land sales of more than $350 million and other future roadmap items — was “old” and “outdated.”  See a copy of the pitch deck here:

Though the founders have disputed the pitch deck, some of the details in the official video match illustrations in the documents. Such as this image of a plot of land in the deck.

The deck also includes information on the character seen below. According to the deck, these are Kodas — celestial creatures who have “used their last remaining cosmic energy to birth one final microverse into our dimension.” There will be 10,000 of the Kodas, which will be randomly included in the 100,000-plot land sale, documents show.

But the biggest source of speculation was the image here, featuring Yuga Labs’ recently acquired collections CryptoPunks and Meebits along with World of Women, Cool Cats, Nouns and CrypToadz. The video fueled rumors Yuga Labs would purchase those collections as it did with Larva Labs’ IP (though Nouns and CrypToadz are CC0, meaning their art can be used without attribution and for commercial purposes).

A video leaked before Yuga Labs tweeted showed a different image, without CryptoPunks and with a little character, later identified as Billy Bones, an NFT in the Blankos Block Party game. 

The leaked video pushed the prices up on all the featured collections. In the last 24-36 hours, there has been more than 2,000 ETH of volume on CrypToadz, raising the floor price from around 2.4 to 3.9 ETH. World of Women did more than 800 ETH and floor price went from 8.88 to 10.69 ETH and Blankos Block Party did more than 296 ETH in sales.

Some eagle-eyed video watchers spotted some familiar items on the Koda.

BAYC has long been a part of 10KTF's work. Currently, holders of blank items and a certain set of NFTs (including BAYC, Bored Ape Kennel Club, Cool Cats, CrypToadz and World of Women, among others) can create derivative items. Some think that due to this tie-in, that 10KTF could be a future acquisition of Yuga Labs.

It’s also possible a land sale is imminent. In the deck, a roadmap listed a “Metaverse 1-100k Land Sale” along with $APE token in March. A Koda airdrop is due in May, documents show. 

Despite this news, nothing official has been released from Yuga Labs. As of this morning, moderators are reminding members of Garga’s statement.