Activision Blizzard President Joins Bored Ape Yacht Club as CEO

After three years as President and COO of Activision Blizzrd, Daniel Alegre announced on Friday that he will move on to a “new opportunity” in 2023. This new opportunity is to join the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the one of the main NFT players. world. Alegre has been named CEO of Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, to start in the first half of 2023.

Yuga Labs’ the next big project is Otherside, a “metaverse” game currently in development for PC and mobile browsers. Otherside will be a mix of MMORGs like World of Warcraft, owned by Activision Blizzard, and platforms like Roblox, where a lot of the content is user-generated.

“When it comes to the metaverse, we compete with giants,” Yuga Labs founder Greg Solano, aka Gargamel, wrote in a blog post on Monday. “In order to propel Otherside and our other ambitious projects to new heights, we’ve known for a long time that we wanted to bring in someone with a proven track record of building at the highest level possible.”

Alegre became President and COO of Activision Blizzard in 2020. Previously, he spent 16 years at Google, where his roles included President of Global and Strategic Partnerships, then President of Retail, Buying and global payments. Alegre will serve at Activision Blizzard until the end of March, he said in a tweet. Nicole Muniz, the current CEO, will remain at Yuga Labs as an advisor.

Yuga Labs is the largest NFT company in the world. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are blockchain tokens that certify ownership of a digital asset. Their proposed goal is to grant digital goods the same ownership rights enjoyed by physical items: the ability to sell an in-game costume, for example, just as you would be able to sell an actual costume once you you are done with it.

So far, the most common type of NFT is profile picture collection (PFP), run largely by the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs created by Yuga Labs last April. Driven by both speculation and a desire to flaunt — owning expensive avatars has been compared to buying a Rolex – people have lost five, six and even seven figures on Bored Ape NFTs. Yuga Labs has five of the 10 most successful NFT collections, including CryptoPunks and Meebits, collections it purchased from competitor Larva Labs in February.

Much of the excitement and speculation surrounding NFTs has been dampened by the “crypto winter”. Amid rising interest rates and fears of a recession, cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ether have fallen 62% and 68% respectively since the start of 2022. Companies like Yuga Labs continue to develop platforms, games and services, hoping that crypto prices will recover as inflation subsides.

Yuga Labs’ next step is to attract people who wouldn’t spend six dollars, let alone six figures, on a collectible NFT. Otherside is his attempt to do so. The goal is to create a game that is accessible, fun for everyone, and able to convert crypto-skeptics. An in-game creation suite will allow players to create services and items that can be sold for crypto. The idea is that an in-game economy, fueled by crypto and NFTs, will incentivize creators in ways not possible with standard games, where creators must use services like Patreon to monetize their content.

“Since bursting onto the scene with Bored Ape Yacht Club in 2021, Yuga Labs has quickly made a name for itself through a powerful combination of storytelling and community building,” Alegre said in a press release. . “The company’s pipeline of products, partnerships and intellectual property represents a huge opportunity to define the metaverse in a way that empowers creators and gives users true ownership of their identity and digital assets.”