The breakout star of the NFT age, Yuga Labs, may have just acquired an impressive domain name upgrade.
Yuga Labs, which launched the Bored Ape Yacht Club in April 2021, has seen the project become a cultural phenomenon, making many of its early NFT members extremely rich in the process.
An active community, a savvy leadership team, and media attention combined to make Bored Ape Yacht Club and its associated projects some of the hottest NFTs around. Yuga Labs benefited from this buzz, raising $450 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation in March 2022.
Shortly after revealing its funding, Yuga Labs launched Otherside, a metaversal world it created that saw the company sell 55,000 Otherdeeds in a virtual land rush that reached $561 million in sales in the first 24 hours.
The domain name Otherside․com is currently in PendingTransfer status. This indicates a change of domain registrar is eminent, which at times can be an early indicator of a domain name sale. Yuga Labs aka BAYC who currently use Otherside․xyz could be potential buyers + others. pic.twitter.com/s8y6VpgUpi
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) June 4, 2022
Yuga Labs acquired Otherside.xyz for $30,000 before the product’s public launch, but has the company just purchased Otherside.com, too?
Domain researcher Jamie Zoch noticed that Otherside.com was on the move, with the domain now at a privacy-protected Google registrar account. Coincidentally, Otherside.xyz is also at a privacy-protected Google account. Yuga Labs’ choice of registrars is Google, with Yuga.com also under Whois privacy protection at Google.
While a registrar move isn’t enough to confirm Yuga Labs acquired the name, it does suggest that Yuga Labs is the likely buyer. There are other potential buyers for the name, but none that I can see use Google as a registrar.
Note: an early version of this article erroneously cited some Whois privacy protection information.
