“GRADE ME AFTER APEFEST”: Yuga Labs CEO Garga Teases Otherside Updates And “A Spot That’s Always Open” Ahead Of ApeFest In Interview With DCRoth

As Bored Ape Yacht Club members around the world ape into Sin City for ApeFest 2025 in Las Vegas tonight, Yuga Labs CEO Garga teased that he plans to talk Otherside updates and a lasting crypto legacy for the Bored Ape Yacht Club that features “a spot that’s always open” during Friday’s flagship event!

Over the past two years, keynote speeches from Garga have become a staple of ApeFest. In Hong Kong in 2023, he announced a partnership with Magic Eden. At ApeFest 2024 in Portugal, he and the Yuga Labs team announced ApeChain and launched it that very night. And in a recent interview with DCRoth, when asked for some alpha about what he plans to talk about this year, Garga said Otherside and cementing Apes’ legacy while alluding to the highly anticipated IRL Clubhouse.

 

 

“When I took back over as CEO a year and a half ago, I really wanted Otherside to fulfill its vision and ambition,” he said. “To me that meant creating a really rich vibrant world that anyone in our community would love to explore, fall in love with the visuals, and enable it to be the best place for creators to monetize their own 3d worlds and experiences. I think we are on the precipice of fulfilling that vision. Now that’s the start of something, it’s not the end.”

From there, Garga talked about his desire to make sure Apes aren’t just a flash in the pan crypto project.

 “The other thing I really wanted, and this is more about legacy than anything, its making sure that Bored Apes stand as one of these crypto assets that stand the test of time in a sea of stuff that will come in and out of fashion,” he said. “We’ve been working really hard on something that equaling long time coming for BAYC that in excited to start sharing more for, but that’s the one that’s near and dear to my hear too….With BAYC its always been about how can we create a club that can be, and we are finding very interesting ways for people to have fun and do stuff onchain and in person. Just expanding the utility of what it could mean to hold an NFT…And I think the next phase for Bored Ape is not just having a once a year moment where we can all get together. But actually, having that spot that’s always open for us to return too.”

 

That “spot that’s always open” may very well be the long awaited BAYC Clubhouse, which has been one of the most talked about projects around the swamp since it was first teased on the club’s Roadmap 2.0 back in September 2021.

 

While we still don’t know much about BAYC’s potential IRL Clubhouse, we do know that the project’s former Creative Director, Jeff Nicholas, gave us a glimpse of the planned vibe back in the summer of 2024. 

“Think about it like a high end dive bar,” Nicholas said in May 2024. “I’ve been saying not so divey that your feet stick to the floor, but also not so high end that it's uncomfortable. Dave on our team likes to say that we are not building Cheesecake Factory, we are not building Hakkasan. But it’s more like our real-life version of Cheers with a ton of member perks and great vibes. It’s going to be really really sick.”

 

Garga’s keynote speech tomorrow will go down as one of the biggest moments in club history. For weeks, he’s told members to “Grade me after ApeFest” as he’s teased the future of BAYC and its legacy across the timeline and Discord.

 

The Bored Ape Gazette is here in Las Vegas and will be bringing you live updates and coverage throughout tomorrow’s ApeFest event. Stay tuned for updates!