HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: The Yugaverse Looks Back At The Otherside Mint Three Years Later And Ahead To The Metaverse’s Grand Opening This June!

It’s a historic day around the swamp as Apes, Meebs, Voyagers, and more celebrate the three-year anniversary of the Otherside mint and look ahead to the launch of the first iteration of the persistent, always on metaverse this June!

On this day three years ago, April 30th, 2022, things were anything but boring.

Yuga Labs distributed 10,000 plots of land to Bored Apes, 20,000 Otherdeeds to Mutant Apes, and reserved 15,000 Otherdeeds for itself and partner developers to help build out its online universe. Meanwhile, Bored Ape Yacht Club members and non-members alike minted 55,000 Otherdeeds for 305 $APE, or about $7,320 USD, each, in an epic gas war where people paid up to 2.5 ETH (roughly $7,000 USD) just to get their transactions through.

The mint was so massive it crashed Ethereum, prompting Yuga Labs to call on the ApeCoin DAO to consider building its own chain, which it eventually did!

“We're sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Yuga Labs tweeted after the mint. “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We'd like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.”

 

 

Over the next year and a half, there were some highs, like the First Trip, but plenty of lows. The Web3 world didn’t receive consistent updates on Otherside for months at a time, and many began to wonder whether the metaverse would ever become reality. These doubts were compounded by the broader crypto bear market and changes at Yuga Labs itself, including leadership shakeups and behind-the-scenes friction with ImprobableIo. It’s safe to say Otherside had a rough go.

But everything changed in February 2024 when Yuga Labs Co-Founder Garga stepped back in as CEO.

Garga immediately invited the community into Otherside for a town hall and announced that Yuga Labs would once again partner with ImprobableIo to make its metaverse!

“The previous leadership at Yuga was focused on building a lot of Otherside’s capabilities from the ground up,” Garga said in May 2024. “But building everything yourself takes a long time and we didn’t want to ship on a Web2 cadence, we wanted to ship like our butts were completely on fire. So when I took over the CEO spot 2 months ago I decided to make a big change. Going forward, we are contributing everything we built, all the shit that we worked hard to do, and we are putting it on M squared. Otherside is going to live on M squared. We are buddies with IO again. We are locking arms with Improbable, and we are migrating Otherside to M squared and they are returning the favor by building out some additional capabilities for us. Honestly, we are all super stoked about it.”

Following the announcement, Garga and the ImprobableIO team began inviting the Yugaverse into Otherside almost monthly for Project Dragon, a Web3 shooter game where players ran around the metaverse, battling friends and capturing command posts.

In February 2025, the community set a Guinness World Record for most concurrent players in an online FPS game during a Project Dragon event, just one year after Garga’s return.

 

Looking ahead, the future of Otherside looks bright, with two major releases on the horizon.

The first release is set for this June, when Yuga Labs launches the first iteration of its persistent metaverse. That means an always-on Otherside where anyone can ape in to hang out across the three flagship islands, play games like poker, hangout in Otherside’s version of Twitter Spaces dubbed Bubbles, and jump into ODK experiences like CryptoVonDoom’s Bathroom Blitz.

The second major release will come this winter, and it will focus on Otherdeeds and their resources.

“We're focused on two releases this year: June release for persistent world with all the things I've been talking about (main islands online, transacting on ApeChain, fun social features like Bubbles, Poker, etc, and ODK games like Bathroom Blitz) and a Winter release focused on Otherdeeds with a fast follow for resources starting to be emitted.”

 

Garga has also teased that Otherside will feature an overarching storyline for the entire metaverse to experience.

“There's an overarching meta story to Otherside, centered around Chaos and Creation,” he wrote. “The blue Soma energy that powers creation and building and the red and pink energies of Chaos and destruction. Each of the main islands have their own way that these things come into play.”

 

The Bored Ape Gazette will continue covering all things Otherside and will keep you posted on the anniversary festivities happening around the swamp today. Stay tuned for updates!