Anyone holding an Otherdeed has owned a plot of land in the Otherside metaverse built by Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), since the spring of 2022. Since Septemb
Anyone holding an Otherdeed has owned a plot of land in the Otherside metaverse built by Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), since the spring of 2022. Since September 9, 2026, it has been clear what is eventually meant to happen on that land: Yuga has announced an on-chain resource economy of 74 goods in which ApeCoin is the only route for moving value in and back out again. There is no launch date. This piece collects what is documented, what Yuga has left open, and what a holder in Germany should take from it for their tax return.
The short answer first: what has been announced is a design, not a product. Testing will begin only on plots that Yuga owns itself, and only with a narrow slice of the resources. Nothing measurable changes today for the ApeCoin price, and nothing changes for landowners until the contracts are running on chain.
The announcement came as a post on X and describes an economic system rather than a game. In that post Yuga calls the step “the kickoff of one of the most sophisticated game economies ever built on blockchain” and states explicitly that this is not an ordinary product launch. The trade publication BlockchainGamer.biz broke down the mechanics two days later.
Three things are established. The system is meant to cover 74 resources held directly on the blockchain. Harvesting on someone else’s land means paying the owner a fee, and the owner alone sets how high it is. And ApeCoin is the single channel through which value flows into the economy and out of it.
Almost everything a holder would need in order to do the arithmetic was left open: no launch date, no sign-up route, no participation terms, no cap on the harvest fee, and no word on how payment is handled technically. Yuga says it has already simulated the economic systems internally; the next step is to switch on the contracts on chain.
On-chain resource means this: each of the 74 goods is a separate entry in a contract on the Ethereum blockchain, not a row in the operator’s database. Whoever owns one can in theory pass it on without the operator having to agree. That distinction is exactly what makes the resources interesting for tax purposes, and there is more on that below.
Items are meant to be craftable from the resources. One restriction applies in the first test round, and Yuga names it openly: resources can be reset, whereas crafted items stay with the players. Some items are meant to exist only during the test phase. Nowhere does it yet say what triggers a reset or how players would learn about one.
A second layer is formed by the Kodas, an older NFT collection from the Otherside universe. Koda owners are meant to receive gameplay advantages, and MegaKodas are meant to grant further benefits in return for a tribute. Yuga has not spelled out what those advantages consist of, what a tribute costs, or how either feeds into harvesting and crafting.
A game economy with a single token as its gateway is good news for that token at first glance: every euro that wants in or out has to pass through ApeCoin. Whether that turns into noticeable demand depends on two figures, and both are small today.
The first is the price itself. ApeCoin traded on Monday morning at roughly $0.157, or €0.140. Daily turnover runs at $13m to $16m and market capitalisation at somewhere between $118m and $157m depending on the data provider, because providers assume different circulating supplies. The price sits about 99.4 percent below the all-time high of $26.84 set on April 28, 2022. Maximum supply is one billion tokens.
The second figure is the comparison with the 2022 land sale. Yuga issued 100,000 Otherdeeds at the time, 55,000 of them in a public sale at 305 ApeCoin each; the remaining 45,000 could be claimed within 21 days by holders from the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC). Those 55,000 plots therefore brought in 16,775,000 ApeCoin, worth roughly $2.64m at today’s price. Reports from the spring of 2022 put the proceeds at more than $320m. The same token amount, two orders of magnitude apart. How the wider ecosystem around the token and its own chain has fared since then is something we gathered in September in our overview of ApeCoin and ApeChain.
The harvest fee works like a turnstile in an open field: the landowner sets the price, and Yuga has so far named no ceiling.
The sentence that offers Otherdeed owners the most in economic terms is the shortest in the whole announcement: harvest on someone else’s ground and you owe the owner a fee, with the owner setting the level. That turns a collectible into a plot of land with the prospect of income, on paper at least.
On paper, because three conditions are missing without which no income can be estimated. There is no cap on the fee, and therefore no reference point for a market price. The payment route is not described, so it is unclear whether the fee is settled automatically on chain. And the first test round runs exclusively on plots that Yuga owns itself, where the fee does not arise at all.
Here comes a point that coverage of the announcement has consistently left out, and which affects everyone who wants to buy or sell a plot today. Otherside land no longer sits in a single collection but in two. Yuga had offered holders the chance to burn their original Otherdeed in exchange for an Otherdeed Expanded, which opens access to gaming experiences outside Otherside as well. The fan outlet The Bored Ape Gazette reported some time ago that more than half of the original Otherdeeds had been swapped.
The holdings on OpenSea bear that out as of October 12, 2026: the original “Otherdeed for Otherside” collection still lists 32,860 items across 13,792 owners, while “Otherdeed Expanded” lists 70,311 items across 11,655 owners. Together that comes to 103,171 plots, roughly the 100,000 from the first wave. Looking for a plot therefore means looking at two sets of listings with two different floor prices, and not only on the largest NFT marketplace.
The floor price stands at 0.0840 ether for the original collection and 0.075 ether for Otherdeed Expanded. At an ether price of around $2,562 that works out at roughly $215 and $192 per plot respectively. For comparison: the public sale cost 305 ApeCoin each in 2022.
Turnover says more than the floor price. In the seven days to October 12, plots in the original collection changed hands for roughly $9,140, and for roughly $21,220 in Otherdeed Expanded. Across both collections that is a little over $30,000 in a week, spread across more than 103,000 plots. A venue where fewer than one plot in three hundred trades over seven days has a pricing problem: single sales move the floor sharply, and sellers looking to offload larger numbers find no counterparty. Which venues still exist at all for collections like these is something we set down in our stocktake of NFT marketplaces.
From this newsroom’s point of view, the announcement stands in disproportion to the market it is meant to land in. In favour of the billing as “one of the most sophisticated game economies ever built on blockchain” is the sheer scope of the design: 74 resources, a fee layer between landowners and players, and a single token as the gateway are more than most Web3 games have ever implemented. Against it stand three documented figures from this article: a little over $30,000 in weekly turnover across both land collections, an ApeCoin price 99.4 percent below its high, and a timetable that since September 9 has consisted of exactly one sentence, namely that testing begins on Yuga’s own plots.
Buy an Otherdeed today and you are therefore not buying a source of income but a bet that the contracts arrive and that somebody then harvests on the plot. Both may happen. Total loss is equally possible with a collectible at this level of turnover, and that holds even if the game does ship. We described the same tension between announcement and market reality across four companies in early October, in our overview of Web3 gaming in 2026.
32,860 against 70,311: Otherside land is spread very unevenly across the two collections.
The metaverse itself has been open to visitors since November 12, 2025. Yuga launched the Otherside metaverse with Koda Nexus as its central world, and did so in the browser: an email address is enough to enter, and a crypto wallet can be connected but is not a requirement. Michael Figge, responsible for the product as chief product officer, justified that with a low barrier to entry: “We think that there should be a very low barrier to entry for somebody to try out Otherside.”
The practical upshot: anyone can look around Otherside without a wallet and without an NFT. Earning from the planned resource economy, by contrast, requires owning land or Kodas. The Voyagers, which Yuga wants to bring into Starpods as playable avatars over the course of 2026, are described by Figge as a “skin” in the sense familiar from conventional games; the company has named no price for them. How the German-speaking community around the project is holding up is something we counted up ahead of this year’s ApeFest.
Now to the part that appears in no international report and that decides the return in Germany. The authoritative document from the tax administration is the finance ministry letter of March 6, 2025, titled “Einzelfragen zur ertragsteuerrechtlichen Behandlung bestimmter Kryptowerte”, file reference IV C 1 – S 2256/00042/064/043. It replaces the older letter of May 10, 2022, and its most important addition is a dedicated part on filing, cooperation and record-keeping duties.
And the decisive gap sits precisely there. In margin number 5 the ministry, on the reading of the law firm Minoggio Grezesch Bachmann, “explicitly does not” take a position on the income tax treatment of non-fungible crypto assets (non-fungible tokens, NFTs). For Otherdeeds, Kodas and the 74 resources there is therefore no internal administrative guidance that a tax office would have to follow. Anyone who needs a binding ruling gets it from a tax adviser, not from a guide.
What can still be said follows from the statute. Sell an Otherdeed at a profit within a year of buying it and that is a private disposal under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Since the 2024 Annual Tax Act such gains stay tax free up to €1,000 a year, against €600 before. This is a threshold and not an allowance: one euro above it makes the entire gain taxable, and the limit applies to all private disposals in a year taken together, not to crypto alone. After a year has elapsed, the sale is tax free.
It gets harder with the resources and the crafted items. If they are issued as tradable tokens on chain and you sell them on, the same section 23 is the obvious fit. Running income from the harvest fee would sit closer to other income under section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act, where a separate threshold of €256 a year applies. One note of caution: for assets that have generated income in at least one calendar year, the section 23 period can extend to ten years. Whether that rule catches a plot of land throwing off fees has not been settled for NFTs, and the finance ministry has precisely not commented on it.
In practice that means one thing above all: anyone wanting to take part needs complete records from day one. The ministry letter demands less for private holdings than for business assets and provides a non-objection rule for assessment periods up to and including 2024, but it does expressly accept tax reports as evidence where they are plausible. Where the tax base cannot be established, the tax office may estimate it. A tax tool with a portfolio tracker takes that work off your hands, provided you record the additions from the start.
The September 9 announcement describes a complete economic model and names no day on which it begins. Until the contracts are live on chain, the income from an Otherdeed remains an expectation. Three steps help you judge the situation yourself:
(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Statements on tax are no substitute for advice from a tax adviser.)
