Yuga Labs Founder Garga Returns as CEO to ‘Unshackle’ Bored Ape Team

The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s creator has a new leader: Yuga Labs co-founder Greg “Garga” Solano announced Wednesday that he’s returning as CEO, replacing former Activision executive Daniel Alegre after less than a year at the helm.

“I am stepping back in as CEO of Yuga Labs,” Solano tweeted. “Wylie [Aronow, Yuga Labs co-founder] and I are grateful for all the contributions and operational rigor Daniel has brought to the company, and appreciate his thoughtfulness and mentorship over the past year. I’m reinvigorated to be taking the reins for our next chapter.”

Alegre tweeted that he was “grateful to have had the opportunity to lead this great team and to have connected globally with so many community members. Yuga has such a bright future.”

It’s unclear whether Alegre will leave the company or transition into another role. A Yuga Labs representative declined to comment to Decrypt and would not elaborate further on Solano’s announcement.

Solano's return announcement comes just days after Yuga Labs announced that it had acquired Proof, the digital art-centric startup behind the Moonbirds NFT collection. Yuga Labs plans to integrate Moonbirds within its upcoming Otherside metaverse game and embrace Proof’s art focus in relation to its existing CryptoPunks and TwelveFold collections and beyond.

But the Proof deal received mixed reactions from Bored Ape NFT holders, as have other moves around the company over the last couple of years. Bored Ape Yacht Club prices peaked in April 2022 and have dwindled substantially.

While that’s true of most NFT collections amid a broader market plunge, competing collection Pudgy Penguins briefly surpassed the Bored Ape Yacht Club last weekend in terms of floor price, or the price of the cheapest listed NFT on a marketplace. The Penguins floor has shot up 5x in value over the past three months while Apes have remained largely stagnant.

Yuga Labs also weathered layoffs last October, has delayed and reshaped its plans around Otherside, and faced community frustration over NFT minting issues around its games.

In his tweet, Solano said he intends to run Yuga Labs with more of a “crypto-native focus across the entire company.” The first step there, he said, was to spin the in-house team behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club into a subsidiary called BAYC LLC that will have more autonomy to pursue initiatives around the prominent Ethereum NFT collection.

“We want to unshackle the BAYC team at Yuga as much as possible to execute against its vision. More focus, more agility,” he wrote, adding that he aims to “create the space for the magic and crazy shit we used to get up to more often.”

Furthermore, he wants to position the yet-to-launch Otherside metaverse as the “living room of Web3. The default space you go to in order to play and hang with your community (no matter what community that is).”

“Otherside is also a massive swing for the fences,” he added. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. The only way it gets built properly is if you all come in and experience it more often. When we set out to build Otherside, the goal was to make it a public, iterative process.”

Yuga Labs plans to host an “Apes Come Home” playtest event later this month for Otherside, and Solano promised more communication around the game going forward.

As for its broader gaming strategy, which includes a new free-to-play version of Dookey Dash and other collaborations with studio Faraway, Yuga aims to target mainstream players. “The more wildly fun and mass market, the better: like Dookey Dash,” he said.

On the other hand, echoing his earlier sentiment, Solano also wants Yuga Labs to embrace more “crypto-native mechanics and platforms, like [redacted].” “[Redacted]” was a mysterious item on the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s 2021 roadmap graphic. Solano did not elaborate further on that point.

Bored Ape Yacht Club prices spiked about 5% after the news was announced, hitting a current price of nearly $66,500 worth of ETH—the highest floor price registered in almost three months, according to data from NFT Price Floor.

“We’re going on three years since Yuga was founded, and we couldn’t be more excited about some of the stuff we’ve got in the pipeline,” Solano added. “Extremely grateful for the team that’s assembled here across all our brands. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I couldn’t imagine doing it with any other team, or any other community of builders.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.