Yuga Labs, the owner of three of the biggest NFT brands on the market, has raised $450 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation, the company announced today. Bored Ape Yacht Club’s team plans to use the money for a media empire centered on NFTs. They will start with games and their own metaverse project.

The team describes its metaverse project, called Otherside, as an MMORPG meant to connect the broader NFT universe. Wylie Aronow, cofounder of Bored Ape Yacht Club and pseudonym Gordon Goner, says they hope to create an interoperable world that is “gamified”, “completely decentralized” and “gamified”. “We believe that the Ready Player One experience is player-run .”

This announcement comes just weeks following Yuga Labs’ major move to consolidate NFT space. Purchasing CryptoPunks and Meebits From Larva Labs . This acquisition brought together three of the most valuable NFT collections — and gave Yuga Labs more IP to draw from when creating its game and metaverse plans. The company also launched a cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, last week; the token will be governed independently and used as the primary currency in Yuga Labs’ properties.

Yuga Labs is partnering with “a few different game studios” to bring Otherside to life, says CEO Nicole Muniz. Bored Ape owners won’t be the only ones who can play this game. The company also plans to develop tools that will allow NFTs from other projects access to their worlds. “We are opening the doors to effectively a walled yard and saying ‘Everybody is welcome .'”

Metaverse projects are all the rage right now — see Facebook renaming itself to Meta — but Yuga Labs thinks other companies are going about their metaverse ideas wrong, giving the startup a chance to stand out. Greg Solano, co-founder of Yuga Labs, who goes under the pseudonym Gargamel, said that people won’t bond if they spend time together in a virtual space without any activity. He says that people are more likely to bond when they are placed in situations where they need to work together.

“You only play with people and make friends because you’re getting your ass kicked,” Solano says. “Basically, we don’t think deep social experience comes from essentially a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi.'” Yuga Labs declined to provide a timeline on the release of Otherside. An additional play-to-earn-game is planned for later in the year.

The funding round, one of the largest for an NFT company to date, was led by the firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has been investing heavily in the Web3 space. The firm previously funded OpenSea and Dapper Labs. The funding round also includes the crypto-firms Coinbase and MoonPay, as well as game studio Animoca Brands. Chris Lyons, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz will join Yuga Labs’ board. Funding talks were first reported last month by the Financial Times.

“To me, Yuga Labs, combined with these other emerging [Web3] companies, are an important counterweight to companies like Meta,” Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, tells The Verge. “There is a dystopian future in which Meta is the dominant digital experience provider and all of that money and control goes towards that company,” Chris Dixon, who heads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, tells The Verge. )

Yuga Labs has been financially successful to date. A leaked pitch deck indicates that the company made $137 million last year, primarily by taking a cut of the transactions tied to its NFT brands, with an astounding 95 percent profit margin. (Yuga Labs declined comment to the deck. )

But the company has built fairly little at this point. Its NFT collections have 40,000 users at most, according to OpenSea’s data, and the company has only released one game for a limited period of time. That means Yuga Labs is essentially being given hundreds of millions of dollars to build a gaming company — or at least, the Web3-ified 2022 version of one — from scratch, off the back of a hugely lucrative art project.

That success is what investors are thinking about when funding Yuga Labs. Dixon says, “They created this very energized community” and the culture phenomenon. The company is making the same big wager that many others are now, that some metaverse project format will be the next great thing. They just need to make it.