Yuga Labs is the studio behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club,a collection of 10,000 generative ape avatars distinguished by randomly combined traits such as fur type, facial expression, clothing and jewelry.Founded in February 2021,the company launched the collection on April 23, 2021, priced at 0.08 ETH per ape.
The collection was created by four friends who worked under the pseudonyms Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Sass, and who were identified in February 2022 as Greg Solano, Wylie Aronow, Kerem and Zeshan Ali. None of the four founders made the artwork themselves. The lead artist on the original collection was All Seeing Seneca, working with Thomas Dagley, Migwashere and a couple of other artists who remained anonymous. Seneca has since said she was not satisfied with how she was compensated or credited for the work. Sales were slow after launch, until a widely followed NFT trader publicized bulk purchases of the apes on social media, after which the collection sold out within twelve hours.
On August 28, 2021, Yuga Labs launched the Mutant Ape Yacht Club,,a collection of 20,000 NFTs in which existing Bored Apes could be paired with a Mutant Serum token to generate a new mutant-themed image without altering the original ape.Half of the Mutant Ape collection was created this way, with the remainder sold through a Dutch auction.In March 2022, Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections.
