Yuga Labs plots seven-city Asian swing across 12 days

In Brief:

• Over a 12-day run, Yuga Labs will carry its Asia Tour to Shenzhen, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore, according to a post from the Bored Ape Yacht Club account on X.
• The stretch comes after roughly 30 community meetups staged worldwide inside a 45-day window, among them a June 30 Seoul gathering at which CEO Michael Figge tackled the slide in BAYC’s floor price.
• This marks the first extended regional campaign since Figge stepped in during April, a period in which Yuga shuttered ApeCo and pulled control of ApeCoin back in-house.

Seven cities in 12 days: that’s the shape of Yuga Labs’ Asia Tour, which takes in Shenzhen, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore.

Word of the leg came via the Bored Ape Yacht Club account on X, though no dates were attached to the individual stops.

Only three of the seven destinations are repeats. Because Yuga’s previous Asian stops were Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul, the tour breaks new ground in Shenzhen, Tokyo, Manila and Singapore.

What happened in Seoul

The Seoul date landed on June 30, hosted at the Gangnam headquarters of Hashed, a South Korean crypto venture firm. Figge showed up in person, only weeks after his appointment as chief executive.

Rather than sidestep the numbers, he met them head-on. The BAYC floor had topped out at 153.7 ETH back in 2022; by the night of the event it stood at 8.83 ETH.

Anyone judging the project by the price chart alone, Figge argued, comes away with the mistaken impression that it’s stuck in a bear market. He drew a parallel with bitcoin’s 2013-to-2015 slump and noted that the count of unique BAYC holders keeps climbing.

He backed that up with a turnover statistic: across the last two years, 72% of NFT buyers were newcomers who never experienced the prior cycle.

Community sits at the top of Yuga’s priority list, Figge said, with the company keen to deepen bonds built in person instead of on a screen. More community events are planned as Yuga widens its network, he said, and he offered thanks to holders who stuck around through the slump.

In the 45 days leading up to the Seoul stop, the company had run some 30 community meetups around the globe.

What Yuga said it’s building

A roadmap presented at the event spanned a Miami clubhouse, ApeFest, a lifestyle brand, a peer-to-peer marketplace, the Otherside metaverse and animation.

Those items line up with the post-boom strategy the company has been describing publicly. Ape-themed NFTs turned Yuga into a unicorn in the early 2020s before the market’s decline squeezed it, yet the firm has continued to press ahead on animation, gaming and Otherside (official site).

Figge’s first months

Figge’s promotion to CEO was announced on BAYC’s fifth anniversary, with co-founder Greg Solano shifting into the board chair role. Solano remains in charge of creative initiatives.

Having joined Yuga in 2021, Figge had already been running the company as acting CEO for several weeks by the time the news broke. His earlier titles there include chief product officer and, before that, chief content officer and chief creative officer, roles in which he steered creative development across BAYC, Otherside, CryptoPunks, Meebits, 10KTF and Moonbirds. In 2021 he co-founded WENEW alongside Beeple, a company Yuga bought in late 2022.

APE climbed 92% in one session on April 24, reaching $0.223 after spending months under $0.12. Volume surged 2,130%, approaching $300 million.

According to on-chain records, a freshly created wallet offloaded 75 ETH and entered a $1.03 million leveraged long on APE just hours before the announcement became public, going on to hold roughly $713,000 in unrealized profit.

Figge subsequently set about dismantling the separate management layer Yuga had maintained for ApeCoin. ApeCo is being wound down, its independent head Cam is on the way out and the role itself is being scrapped, with everything due to wrap by June 2026. That overhaul comes on the heels of AIP-596, passed in June 2025, which dissolved the ApeCoin DAO and moved operations under ApeCo.

The Asia history

The region was already a priority before this tour. Yuga staged ApeFest in Hong Kong in 2023 — the event’s first outing beyond New York — pulling in over 2,000 attendees from 60 countries.

Its debut Yacht Club Open House followed in Kai Tak on Nov. 5, 2023.

Announcing the South Korea expansion earlier this summer, the company said Seoul had “been on the Asia Tour list this whole time.”