Gucci Onboards BAYC Parent Yuga Labs in Multi-Year Deal to Explore Metaverse Ventures

Gucci is ready to venture deeper into the Web3 space, with its interests lingering around NFTs and the metaverse technology. The high-end Italian fashion house has signed a multi-layer deal with Yuga Labs, the parent company behind popular NFT series like Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks among others. The aim of this partnership is to see how the metaverse can be the next destination for fashion and entertainment purposes.

“Stay tuned as a new narrative takes shape, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital,” the 102-year-old luxury fashion brand wrote in a tweet.

Gucci also shared an image of what appears to be an elixir bottle branded as Gucci x Yuga Labs in the hand of a BAYC Ape in the backdrop of a metaverse ecosystem.

The market opportunity for the metaverse could reach an estimated $800 billion (roughly Rs. 59,58,700 crore) over the next two years, research reports suggest. Social media, gaming, as well as the automobile industry are expected to be beneficiaries of the boom in industrial metaverse adoption.

Infact just last week, a DappRadar report said that the trading of lands in metaverse ecosystems reached an all-time high in Q1 2023 with 147,000 trades, churning $311 million (roughly Rs. 2,557 crore).

With this evident growth in the metaverse market, Gucci seems to be gearing up to be an early adopter of the technology. Although for now, Gucci's plans with its latest partnership with Yuga Labs' remain unclear.

Last year, Gucci announced that it is expanding its crypto payments support by accepting ApeCoin (APE) as a mode of payment. The Ethereum-based token belongs to the BAYC NFT ecosystem

Back in May 2022, the Florence, Italy-headquartered brand started accepting crypto payments in its US stores.

As part of its NFT-related initiatives, Gucci has struck partnership deals with vinyl toy maker Superplastic and NFT art platform SuperRare.