The web3 company Yuga Lubs, which founded the Bored Ape Yacht Club, just rocked the whole Ethereum blockchain after many users flooded to purchase the NFTS representing virtual plots of land for its upcoming metaverse project called Otherside.
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A Historical NFT Mint
Over 55,000 Otherdeeds were sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin, which costs around $5,800 during the time of purchase, according to data provided by Coin Telegraph. The project collected about $320 million and logged the "largest NFT mint in history." However, the gas fees costed millions in fees.
The Otherdeeds are minted in BAYC's native ApeCoin, which is the Yuga Labs' cryptocurrency, however, it still requires Ethereum for gas fees.
These fees are paid for the transaction on the Ethereum blockchain and they usually increase when the network gets heightened traffic, since it would mean more work to process a transaction.
Since there was a flood of transactions during the Otherdeed mint, this meant that gas fees were up as well. In a report by Coin Telegraph, they cited Reddit user u/johnfintech who noted that some buyers shelled out from a range of 2.6 ETH or $6,500 to 5 ETh or $14,000 that were solely spent in gas fees.
This means that the gas fees were more than twice the value of some Otherdeed NFTs. In total, buyers paid about $123 million to enable their transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
"Turning Off the Lights on Etherium"
When the mint ended, Yuga Labs took to Twitter to apologize for the delays in their transactions and increased gas fees.
"We're sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while. It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We'd like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction," the company wrote.
They added that they were "aware [that] some users had failed transactions due to the incredible demand being forced through Ethereum's bottleneck. For those of you affected, we appreciate your willingness to build alongside us - know that we've got your back and will be refunding your gas."
Due to the disruption, it caused the transactions on Ethereum-linked services to be slower and ultimately caused the Ethereum transaction tracker, Etherscan, to crash. The failed transactions caused several minters to lose thousands of dollars to gas fees but Yuga Labs promised that they will refund the money that they have lost.
The company also noted that this has been the largest NFT mint in history and acknowledged that the gas prices were attributed to a high demand beyond anyone's "wildest expectations," which they did not expect at all.
Yuga Labs reported raising $450 million in funding for the Otherside in March, which is a decentralized metaverse that consists of components of gamification. There is still no clear prospect about this project but the mint showed that users were willing and excited to invest in the project.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
