Bored Ape’s Creators May Have Acquired Otherside.com

Since its creation in April 2021, the Bored Ape Yacht Club and its founders have been on quite a ride. From making international headlines to attracting the likes of Eminem, Madonna, and Jimmy Fallon to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, these “jpegs” have turned into six-figure assets.

In the process, Yuga Labs, the company that operates the Bored Ape Yacht Club, has raised $450 million at a $4 billion valuation.

In March 2022, Yuga Labs started to advertise a new product, Otherside, a platform that will allow the development of virtual experiences on Otherside land, purchasable through an Otherdeed NFT. Of course, Yuga Labs’ NFT collection, including Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, and CryptoPunks will be central to the Otherside.

To house its Web3 project, Yuga Labs needs a Web2 home. At launch, Yuga Labs chose Otherside.xyz, with the .xyz extension being a popular choice among cryptocurrency and NFT brands.

However, Whois data suggests that Yuga Labs may have acquired Otherside.com, but it hasn’t been deployed yet.

The Otherside.com domain name moved to a privacy-protected Google Domains account in June 2022 in a move spotted by Jamie Zoch. Coincidentally, Google Domains is the registrar that Yuga Labs uses to maintain the registration of Yuga.com.

In late September 2022, Otherside.com moved registrars again, this time landing at AppDetex, a brand protection service for Web3 companies. While Otherside.com remains under privacy protection, the move to AppDetex does suggest that the owner of Otherside.com is a Web3 brand.

AppDetex has worked with Yuga Labs for some time, and Twitter contains a few stories of domain owners receiving trademark complaints from AppDetex on Yuga Labs’ behalf. This thread, for example, documents AppDetex’s complaint against the domain OthersideNFT.com.

AppDetex is also the registrar for Yuga Labs-owned domains such as ApeCoin.com.

Otherside is a major project from Yuga Labs and if it ultimately has ambitions to attract an audience beyond the current Web3 community, owning Otherside.com would certainly make it more relatable and accessible.