The Bored Ape Yacht Club has a new CEO

Yuga Labs, the almost-two-year-old company that’s valued at $4 billion and oversees the three most valuable NFT projects—the Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, and Meebits—is getting a new CEO. 

Today, the company announced that former Activision Blizzard President and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Alegre will join the company in the first half of next year (an SEC filing by Activision Blizzard states that his employment agreement with the company expires at the end of March 2023). 

Alegre, who revealed on Friday that he would leave Activision Blizzard after almost two years at the company, will replace current CEO and partner Nicole Muniz, who will stay on at Yuga Labs as a strategic advisor and partner. Yuga Labs attached Alegre’s new Mutant Ape—his mutant has a stitched together cowboy hat, a rotten eye, and a face covered in snot—to the press release announcing his hiring. Whether he has other NFTs or has purchased items from Bored Ape collaborations with the likes of Adidas, Old Navy, or Rolling Stone is not known.

At Activision Blizzard, Alegre worked on expanding franchises including Overwatch, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft, the latter of which heavily inspired Yuga Labs cofounders Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano to build Otherside, the company’s interoperable gaming metaverse that it has staked its future on. Yuga Labs, which raised a $450 million seed round led by A16z in March, is using the funds to build out Otherside with metaverse technology company Improbable and Animoca Brands. In July 2022, Yuga NFT holders got their first experience at Otherside when 4,300 owners participated in an early access tour called “The First Trip.”

“In order to catapult Otherside and our other ambitious projects to new heights, we’ve known for a long time we wanted to bring in someone with a proven track record of building at the highest possible level,” Aronow and Solano wrote in a blog post announcing the new hire.

Alegre, who also serves as member of the board of directors of the mattress brand Sleep Number, may have some restless nights ahead given the legal and regulatory challenges that he’ll inherit. On December 8, Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP filed a class action lawsuit with the U.S. Central District Courts of California alleging that Yuga Labs and a host of celebrities including Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Jimmy Fallon, had hyped up and misrepresented  the value of their NFTs in an effort to encourage members of the public to buy them. Included in the complaint are details alleging that Yuga Labs used the NFT concierge service MoonPay to conceal how they compensate celebrities. The suit also posits that Yuga Labs partner and music manager Guy Oseary, who is also a MoonPay investor, may have orchestrated many of these deals.

In October, Bloomberg reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Yuga Labs’s NFTs and associated token, ApeCoin, are unregistered securities. And last June, Yuga Labs sued the artist Ryder Ripps, alleging false designation of origin, false advertising, cybersquatting, trademark infringement, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, conversion, and tortious interference. Ripps had helped spread the conspiracy theory that the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s imagery was laden with racist and Nazi iconography and then launched a rival NFT collection.

Alegre, though, is no stranger to having to handle corporate controversies. Prior to Activision Blizzard, Alegre spent 16 years at Google during which he oversaw retail and shopping, strategic partnerships, and the company’s Asia-Pacific and Japan business, which has seen some of Google’s biggest controversies over the past few years including how it handled censorship laws in China. Last year, Activision Blizzard faced a lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which accused the company of a “’frat boy’ workplace culture.” In addition, it settled a lawsuit that had been filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, creating a fund for employees who had been victims of discrimination and harassment. (Both cases were initiated by events that predated Alegre’s arrival at the company.)

Alegre will also have to contend with public skepticism of NFTs, and the onset of crypto winter in the last eight months, which had led to a precipitous drop in value for many NFTs, including collections that Yuga owns.

None of the recent turmoil in the crypto market seems to have deterred Yuga Labs’s founders. As Aronow and Solano wrote in their welcome blog to Alegre, “We’re extremely bullish on NFTs and the utility this technology brings in the long term. Yuga Labs will continue to stretch the boundaries of what is possible and keep our community updated on all the cool shit we’re working on along the way.”