Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched its highly anticipated Otherside metaverse NFT mint on Saturday night, which sold out in three hours. 55,000 Othersdeeds were sold, generating $317 million for Yuga Labs from the mint alone.
OpenSea announced on April 30 that it will accept ApeCoin for secondary purchase of Otherdeeds on the marketplace. According to data from “beetle” at Dune Analytics, at the time of writing, Otherdeeds worth more than $444 million had been traded on the secondary market.
The Otherdeed NFT mint is sold out – we are awestruck at the demand shown tonight. Apes and Mutants, the opening of the 21-day claim period is being delayed until the price of gas drops to reasonable levels. We’ll tweet when the claim opens. https://t.co/iRz64lklbv
— Othersidemeta (@OthersideMeta) May 1, 2022
The high demand for Otherdeeds NFTs resulted in a gas war as Ethereum experienced network congestion. Some buyers were willing and able to pay higher gas fees than others to secure their mints, causing gas prices to skyrocket to thousands of dollars per transaction. More than 64,000 ETH ($180 million) was spent on gas fees during minting.
Several users were unable to mint their NFT despite paying high transaction fees. According to sealaunch data in Dune Analytics, the highest gas cost per failed transaction for a user was 5.37 ETH, while the highest gas cost per failed transaction for a single transaction was 3.76 ETH. There were 14,285 failed transactions in total.
Yuga Labs blamed Ethereum for not being able to handle the mint, saying, “We regret turning the lights out on Ethereum for a while. It seems very clear that ApeCoin will have to migrate to its own blockchain in order to scale properly. We would like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.”
In response to this, Lin Dai, co-founder of NFT platform OneOf, said, “Decentralization should never be used as an excuse for risk-backed centralized business decisions.” “We would like to encourage DAOs to start thinking”🤦🏻♂️ as if their DAO board does not consist of their VCs. It’s time to take responsibility, to be accountable to the community.”
#Decentralization should never be used as an excuse for decisions of centralized venture-backed companies. “We’d like to encourage the DAO to start thinking”🤦🏻♂️ as if your DAO board is not made up of your VCs. Time to take responsibility, be accountable to the community @yugalabs https://t.co/VcsPSOXGka
— Lin Dai (@ThePointsDai) May 1, 2022
SyndicateDAO co-founder Will Papper tweeted that Yuga Labs’ smart contract had “almost zero gas optimizations” and that “tweaking a few words would have saved over $80 million.”
_safeMint() is one of the more annoying and unnecessary parts of the ERC721 standard.
In theory it ensures that mints are going to wallets that can handle NFTs, in practice it adds gas and makes mints less safe! This condition is only hit for very non-standard smart contracts. pic.twitter.com/L4sTSeVtYg
— Will Papper ✺ (@WillPapper) May 1, 2022
Some understandably disgruntled users said they lost half their NFT wallet trying to get Otherdeeds, but still failed, and are now in stock holding ApeCoin, which has plummeted from $25.89 on April 29 to $15.32 at the time of this writing. Yuga Labs promised to refund gas fees to users who experienced failed transactions.
Today, Yuga Labs revealed Koda, a metaverse character in Otherside, who came free with some of Otherdeeds’ land NFTs for some lucky buyers, increasing the value of their land. One user tweeted, “I’m not mad at you guys anymore for yesterday. Keep giving me free money like this and I’ll marry you guys someday”. 2 Kodas here. 1 free. I love you guys.”
Yuga Labs has yet to reveal the role Kodas will play in Otherside, but NFT influencer “WillyTheDegen” has theorized that users will be able to send their Kodas on quests in Otherside to level up.
Did BAYC’s land sale just ruin the NFT ecosystem?
If you didn’t already know, we had one of the biggest weekends in the NFT space this year with the minting of BAYC ‘Othersdeeds’ yesterday. Over $200M worth of ETH was lost to gas fees or burned due to high demand and a large number of failed transactions. The feeling is that the only winners yesterday are Ethereum miners.
BAYC Controversy with Otherside Mint.
Yuga Labs had been teasing its land sale with graphs for a couple of months now. Yesterday’s mint was for the deeds that will lead to Otherside land when the time comes for the fall.
Yuga Labs is facing negative feedback right now for the route they took with the mint mechanics. Community members feel that Yuga should have done something similar to what Moonbirds did. That is, they believe there should have been
a mint point draw for eligible portfolios. This would have created an equitable solution and the gas wars could have been mitigated.
In fact, the worst case scenario for individuals was to buy $610 $APE to mint 2 Otherdeeds and receive failed transactions. Unfortunately that was the reality for many would-be buyers.
The Mint pulled approximately $317 million out of the NFT ecosystem yesterday. Some are of the opinion that this is ruining the NFT space. It kills the momentum of other projects and creates a bad image as all the failed transactions occur.
Another idea circulating is that NFT is becoming inaccessible to the “little guy.” In the case of minting Otherdeeds, people who didn’t have 2.5 ETH more for gas couldn’t mint. Web3 is all about everyone having equal opportunity and level playing field when it comes to new opportunities.