Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs continued its recent shake-up announcement of a restructuring initiative on friday, which will include a new round of layoffs after a previous wave last October.
Yuga Labs co-founder Greg “Garga” Solano, who returned as CEO in Februaryannounced the news via Twitter on Friday, sharing screenshots of a Slack message sent to the team.
“I owe everyone a frank and honest explanation of what led to this decision. Simply put: Yuga has lost his way,” he wrote. “Getting ourselves centered and on track means being a smaller, more agile and crypto-native team. A team that does fewer things, but does them brilliantly.”
It is unclear how many positions will be affected by the restructuring. Declutter contacted Yuga Labs for clarification but did not immediately hear back.
gmm, really tough day today. I am determined to transform yuga and return us to our roots, and that means making tough decisions. by far the hardest part is saying goodbye to some talented team members. This was my message to the team this morning. pic.twitter.com/gBkoNf2iK3
— Garga.eth (Greg Solano) 🍌 (@CryptoGarga) April 26, 2024
Yuga Labs was founded in early 2021 and launched the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project onto Ethereum three years ago this week. Within a few months, the collection of 10,000 unique profile photos (PFPs) became the largest brand in the space, with NFTs starting from a price of almost $430,000 worth of ETH in April 2022 on secondary marketplaces.
The startup expanded quickly. It raised $450 million as of March 2022 at a valuation of $4 billion and acquired the influential CryptoPunks NFT project IP from creator Larva Labs. The ApeCoin (APE) crypto token from the Bored Ape ecosystem, which is officially said to be created by an independent foundation, launched and rewarded NFT holders (and Yuga Labs itself) with a huge windfall.
Yuga Labs then went hard into gaming with the announcement of Other sidea metaverse game supported by NFT land plots that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales end of April 2022. But after that sale, it was criticized for its design and the significant network costs that result, the Bored Ape ecosystem has faced several challenges.
The NFTs have recently fallen to a price that… 90% less than at its peakYuga Labs has yet to launch Otherside despite several short test events, and the company has sold some of its created gaming IP earlier this month in an effort to refocus and streamline. Solano wrote that since returning as CEO, he has seen an organization that has grown too big and is not performing enough.
“The creative spirit that drove this company from the beginning has been clouded by labyrinthine business processes,” he wrote. “We work hard and we care, but somehow we end up on groups and committees. We plan more than we ship.”
“Yuga was with about a dozen people when someone knocked on the door with enormous appreciation. The ethos then was just: only ship things that make you happy, but also do it like your ass is on fire,” he continued. “We had our luck and moments of brilliance, but in many ways we were playing the game on easy mode: creator royalties thrived and electrified our entire ecosystem.”
He quoted the recent sale of HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara gaming IP, and said that because of marketplaces moving away from honoring creator royalties in recent years they have now been playing in ‘hard mode’ and have to go ‘from zero to one again’.
But Solano said he has a plan that will be unveiled soon, and it appears to focus on staying lean and taking fewer, but faster swings.
“In the history of Yuga, our biggest home runs are things that shipped from a glint in our eyes in less than three months,” he wrote.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.