Yuga Labs’ Apefest is the future of festivals. It’s less about what happened at their 5th year in Las Vegas during ComplexCon and more about what happens before and after.
Composability is key to any festival or community’s longevity. After 15 years of covering live events, I see most people stay within their own friend groups that don’t mix often enough with others. Apefest brings together tens of thousands of apes who connect year-round on X, Discord, and Telegram, building relationships across communities that blend widely online and reflect deeper in person. People recognized each other not so much by their face, but by voice, pseudonym, and how they’ve shown up online and for the community. The mix of disparate connections was something I’d never seen before at a festival, but will much more in the future.
Yuga’s metaverse play, The Otherside, will only amplify that experience greatly online and off.