What You Need to Know About the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Otherside NFT Drop

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT ecosystem is expanding. Last month it was the launch of ApeCoin, an Ethereum token to power Web3 applications—and now it’s Otherside.

What is Otherside? It’s a metaverse game world that will bring together various NFT projects including the Apes, CryptoPunks, Meebits, Cool Cats, and more. Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs is developing the experience in partnership with NFT game publisher Animoca Brands.

On Saturday, Yuga Labs will launch “Otherdeed” NFTs for the game, which are believed to serve as a deed to some type of virtual land in the metaverse game, similar to such NFTs for The Sandbox and Decentraland. Otherdeeds will both be sold to the public and also provided to existing Bored Ape and Mutant Ape owners.

Ahead of the drop on Saturday, here’s what you need to know.

What are Otherdeeds?

Otherdeeds are NFTs for Otherside, a metaverse game experience that Yuga Labs has teased out in recent weeks. A teaser trailer for the game shows Bored Apes and Mutant Apes sharing the screen with CryptoPunks and Meebits (which Yuga Labs recently acquired), along with other notable NFT collections like Cool Cats, World of Women, Nouns, and CrypToadz.

That said, while many NFT collectors believe that an Otherdeed will serve as some sort of deed to virtual land in the game world, that hasn’t been officially announced yet. However, a leaked investment pitch deck that Yuga Labs co-founder Garga reportedly admitted was real (but “outdated”) describes its metaverse and virtual land plans in great detail.

The deck suggested that there will be 200,000 total land plots across multiple drops/sales, with 10,000 alien “Koda” creatures randomly distributed among them. Yuga has since poked fun at the leak, tweeting, “OK but what the fuck is a Koda,” once the Otherside drop was announced.

While the first NFT drop is happening tomorrow, it’s unlikely that a functional game will be ready to launch anytime soon. Animoca’s own metaverse game The Sandbox has been selling land plots for a couple years now and that Ethereum game still isn’t open to the public. But by issuing NFTs, Yuga can fuel the hype cycle and generate trading in advance of the eventual launch.

How can I buy one?

Yuga will hold the mint for Otherdeeds on Saturday, April 30, with a total of 55,000 NFTs available for purchase. They can only be purchased with ApeCoin (APE), and will sell for 305 APE apiece—that’s about $6,100 as of this writing. The sale will start at 9pm ET via the official Otherside website.

However, not just anybody will be able to buy an Otherdeed at this point. Yuga and Animoca opened a mysterious website in March that required people to register an Ethereum wallet and complete know-your-customer (KYC) checks—and only people who successfully completed that process will be able to purchase one of the 55,000 NFT deeds.

People who completed the process will need both APE and ETH (for gas fees) in the approved wallet to purchase Otherdeeds. Yuga will let people buy up to two Otherdeeds in a single transaction in the first wave but will expand the limit over the course of the sale depending on the level of Ethereum gas fees, as detailed in this post from Thursday.

Yuga originally planned a Dutch Auction format for the sale, in which the price to mint an NFT gradually falls over time, but declared on Thursday that such auctions are “actually bullshit.” Instead, the price will remain the same and Yuga will gradually increase how many Otherdeeds can be purchased in a single transaction with a wallet.

What about Bored Ape owners?

Good news for Bored Ape NFT holders, as usual: anyone who owns a Bored Ape or Mutant Ape will be able to “claim” an Otherdeed within 21 days of the start of Saturday’s sale. Furthermore, those NFT owners do not need to have a confirmed wallet that completed KYC checks, which included providing a a user’s full name and address.

While Yuga Labs has not explicitly stated it yet, it’s expected that such land plots will be free for NFT holders to claim, given the free ApeCoin and NFT drops provided to Bored Ape owners in the past. Yuga’s post said that 55,000 Otherdeeds will be available to purchase for people with approved wallets, but did not specify how many will be given to existing NFT owners.

It’s not yet known whether there will be different types of land given to Bored Ape or Mutant Ape owners, or if perhaps Bored Ape NFT owners will receive other benefits. Bored Ape NFTs are worth significantly more than the later Mutant Apes on secondary markets, and Bored Ape owners were granted about five times as much free ApeCoin during last month’s launch.