A new collection of NFTs made by the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs, was in such high demanded that it crashed the Ethereum blockchain, with people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a series of failed transactions.
The new NFTs are essentially parts of virtual land inside the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s new personally owned metaverse, dubbed Otherside. A hundred thousand pieces of land were to be made available inside this metaverse on Saturday, however there were so many people trying to acquire a piece of land for themselves that the blockchain system couldn’t handle it.
The result was that Ethereum’s system was made unusable for hours, with users making failed transactions and losing their gas money. The gas money is tied to any sort of transaction that requires Ethereum currency, with fees increasing with network congestion as more work is required to create the coin.
Lost $1600 in gas fees and didn’t successfully mint a Otherside plot. Very fun times.
— Bryan Brinkman (@bryanbrinkman) May 1, 2022
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.
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022
A total of 55,000 virtual plots of land in Otherside (or “Otherdeeds”, as they’re more commonly known) were sold by the time the process was over, with their price soaring to 305 ApeCoin or $8,200, in what is being described as the “biggest NFT sale in history.”
A total of 200,000 plots of virtual land will be made available on Yuga Labs’ new metaverse, but only half of them are available for purchase, as the other half will be given out to those who actually contribute to the new virtual world’s creation and development.
It is estimated that Yuga Labs turned a profit of near $600 million from this event.
