Yuga Labs Sees $561M in Otherside Ethereum NFT Sales Within 24 Hours

Yuga Labs, the startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) which is worth $4 billion, had his long awaited Other side metaverse mint Saturday night, clogging the Ethereum backbone and send gas price to shocking heights.

In less than 24 hours, Yuga Labs generated over $561 million from “Otherdeed” on the other side. NFT Sales.

NFT are unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership of a digital or physical asset. In the case of Otherdeeds, each is meant to be “the key to claiming land in Other side”, the next Yuga Labs metaverse Game.

Some 55,000 NFTs were minted at 305 APE each, meaning each Otherdeed costs around $5,800 considering the price of Apecoin (around $19) at the time of minting. Yuga Labs raised over $318.7 million from this mint alone.

According to data from CryptoSlam, Otherdeed has already seen over $242 million in total secondary volume traded. Of this figure, more than $190 million was intended for OpenSea.

Due to the high number of NFTs and increased demand, the Otherdeed mint, which began at 9 p.m. EST on Saturday night, immediately sparked an Ethereum gas war. Traffic on block explorer Etherscan also led to reports that the site was not working for many users.

Gas wars can occur on proof-of-work chains like Ethereum when a sudden increase in demand for fast transactions clogs a network, driving up fees as users attempt to jump to the front of the queue.

Ethereum gas fees can see extreme spikes during such gas wars, and last night was no different as fees suddenly spiked into the thousands of dollars per transaction.

While some were able to have their transactions processed within hours for a few hundred dollars in gas fees, others said they paid over $4,000 for a single transaction. (The average gwei, or Ethereum gas price, overnight was over 6,000, about 100-200 times normal.)

Transactions linked to others consumed over 64,000 ETH in gas costs at the time of this writing, nearly $180 million. Some pointed out that the fees shouldn’t have been so high if Yuga Labs had implemented some backend optimizations.

Will Papper, co-founder of SyndicateCADwrote last night that the Otherdeed smart contract has “almost zero gas optimizations”. He argued that “changing a few words would have saved over $80 million” in gas costs.

But Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has a different view.

“Don’t think optimizing the contract would help,” he said. mentioned Otherside mint. “Regardless of the details of the contract, the tax charge increases up to list price + tax charge = market price. If the gas consumption per purchase had decreased by 2 times, the equilibrium gas price would have just been > 12,000 gwei instead of 6,000.”

Yuga Labs has since promised it would reimburse those whose transactions failed.

Either way, those with BAYC or Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs will be able to claim Otherdeed NFTs over a three-week period, allowing holders to avoid steep gas charges.

Some have criticized Otherdeed NFTs, noting that they are the first Yuga Labs assets that do not grant holders the full commercial rights.

BAYC holders had conflicting opinions about chaotic mint. Some have blamed the high fees and slow transaction times on Ethereum blockchainwhile others blamed Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed smart contract and mint politics. According to data from CoinGecko, ApeCoin is down around 24% in the past 24 hours and down 12% since Otherdeed NFT coin debut.

Bored Ape co-founder Garga.eth admitted that the Otherdeed mint was a “tough time” for the NFT community.

“Needless to say, tonight didn’t go the way we wanted. I want to say sorry to the monkeys and to all those who eagerly sought to join the project, ”he said on Twitter.

Yuga Laboratories also apologized for “turning off the Ethereum lights for a while” and claimed that ApeCoin “should migrate to its own chain to scale properly.”

After the chaotic mint, Lin Dai, CEO of NFT platform OneOf, had harsh words for Yuga Labs and Garga himself.

“Decentralization should never be used as an excuse for venture capital-backed centralized business decisions,” Dai mentioned. “It’s time to take responsibility, to be accountable to the community.”