Yuga Labs cuts employees, focuses on metaverse extension amid restructuring

Yuga Labs CEO Daniel Alegre announced a company restructuring and workforce reductions in a Friday memo. 

"After a recent period of thoughtful consideration, I have decided that we need to restructure the Yuga Labs teams," Alegre wrote in a blog post. "The implication of these changes is that a number of roles have been eliminated across the company, impacting some of your colleagues."

"When I joined Yuga six months ago, my first priority was to lay out a clear vision that focused our team on the creative storytelling and community building that is at the core of Yuga," Alegre added. "I realized very quickly that there were a number of projects that, while well-intentioned, either spread the team too thin or required execution expertise beyond our core competencies."

The company will focus on growing its community and brand engagement, "going all-in" on the firm's metaverse extension Otherside and bolstering internal developments moving forward. 

Yuga's plummeting sales

Despite bringing in millions in weekly sales volume earlier in the year, Otherside volumes have stagnated since April to see just $356,000 in sales in the first week of October, The Block's Data Dashboard shows. 

Yuga's blue-chip NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club saw its floor price fall 62% this year from 69.49 ETH ($83,400) on January 1 to 26.19 ETH ($42,800) on Oct. 6.