Last week, Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs released its latest NFT-gated game, HV-MTL Forge, but it hasn't yet helped the dragging performance of the company that owns several of the top NFT collections, Brady writes.

Why it matters: Yuga Labs is the standard-bearer for the industry of non-fungible tokens. It owns Bored Apes, Mutant Apes and CryptoPunks, along with a number of other important NFT collections.

The big picture: The giant question mark around Yuga Labs is the Otherside virtual world that it's building and that fans have already sunk millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency into.

• If the company can't keep driving interest to its collections, it's likely to discourage other entrepreneurs from entering the NFT business.

Driving the news: Very soon, Yuga will announce a cadence for revelations that will give its NFT owners and fans a sense of how often they will see new pieces of work.

• The giant milestone for Otherside, according to new CEO Daniel Alegre, will be when Yuga can start letting others build on it.
• When 20 or 30 NFT collections can create ways their NFTs will show up in Otherside and they can start making experiences in the world independent of Yuga.

It's personnel: Late last year, Yuga poached Alegre from videogame giant Activision Blizzard, where he was COO.

What they're saying: In an interview with Axios, Alegre said, "We have this grand vision of what we will execute with Otherside that was set out in the early days of Yuga."

• But he granted the firm committed an unforced error in making fans wait too long before reveals of what it was working on.

Between the lines: Yuga Labs entered the metaverse hype last year when it sold deeds for its Otherside virtual world, raking in about $320 million.

• It took users on its "First Trip" into the space a couple months later. There wasn't another trip until March 2023, about eight months later.

In each trip, users got to interact, talk with each other, and form into groups perhaps anticipating playing with each other one day, but in terms of a long-term experience, people are still waiting.

What we're watching: Alegre plans to give users more short-term experiences like these more often until Otherside is finally launched as a full, persistent world, with the full suite of social and gaming experiences to justify the wait.

• Alegre, like any company leader, didn't want to name a target date, but he said he doesn't want people to still feel uncertain about it a year from now.

The bottom line: "What we do really well here at the company is we know that a mint is only the first part of the overall experience," Alegre said.

Go deeper.

Bored Apes are way, way down from their sky-high prices, but $57,000 is pretty impressive still for a picture of a monkey, Brady writes.

Be smart: Floor price is a term-of-art unique to NFTs. Every collection of NFTs has a mass of common tokens that lack special traits. Those tokens all tend to trade at the same price, the lowest price the collection fetches. So the price for those is the "floor."

• NFTs with more valuable traits can sell for much, much more. Apparently for Bored Apes, some of the most sought-after traits are gold fur or apes holding daggers in their mouths.

Yuga Labs has plenty of money to spend on getting the buzz back. It raised $450 million last year. It pocketed $300+ million in selling Otherdeeds.

• Yuga would also own a supply of its own NFTs, such as Bored Apes, Mutant Apes and apecoin, all of which would have value in the market they could use.

It might have been SBF who walked away from Taylor Swift, not the other way around, Brady writes.

Driving the news: The New York Times reported today that it was actually SBF who changed his mind about the deal (maybe because he realized he was short on cash).

• FT had previously reported that $100 million was on the table for the superstar to promote FTX.

Catch up fast: When news first came out about the potential Swift deal, the prevailing narrative was that it was the pop star who walked away, out of legal concerns (for example).

• Sources told the Times that she had signed the deal for a sponsorship of her tour after six months of talks, but it was SBF himself who backed out.

Of note: The larger story is a sort of history of celebrities in crypto, with a focus on how Sina Nader, FTX’s head of partnerships, secured a deal with Tom Brady and his then-wife, Gisele Bündchen, each of who was paid primarily in FTX stock.

• That's not worth anything now.

Quick take: Sam and Tom had such a nice bromance, but I bet they are never ever getting back together.

• Like, ever.

🥶 Investigators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are poised to file a case against Celsius Network and former CEO Alex Mashinsky as soon as this month. (Bloomberg)

🖼 NFT royalty payments hit a two-year low in June, according to Nansen data. (CoinDesk)

🍊BlackRock's Larry Fink called bitcoin an "international asset" as his firm pursues a spot ETF for the original cryptocurrency. (Fox Business)

⚓️ Ark Invest's Cathie Wood said BlackRock doesn't have the edge in getting a spot bitcoin ETF approved. (Fortune)

In case you aren't on Twitter, this is a meme that's going around, Brady writes.

How it works: Basically, people take this image and write a semi-controversial opinion to go with it.

• The painting is "Freedom of Speech" (1943) by Norman Rockwell, in his series The Four Freedoms.

Be smart: ETHBTC is a metric used to measure the relative clout of Ethereum's ether (ETH) to Bitcoin's bitcoin (BTC). If the metric is going up, ETH is gaining ground on BTC in the eyes of the market.

• Since they are the only two coins (besides stablecoins) that really matter, a lot of people like to watch it.
• Particularly hard-core Ethereum fans who think that one day ether will be worth more than bitcoin.

Lately, ETHBTC has been trending down.