The latest market analysis confirmed that Yuga Labs, the creator of the popular non-fungible token community Bored Ape Yacht Club, has made more than $300 million in sales of its NFTs project in Otherside Metaverse.
On May 1, 2022, Yuga Labs successfully launched a flash sale of its “Otherdeed” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that represents digital land deeds on its new real estate venture in Metaverse, dubbed the Otherside.
Unfortunately, while the community continued recording the largest NFT mint, Ethereum (ETH) gas prices rose to unprecedented levels, making many users experience failed transactions due to blockchain bottleneck.
Although Otherdeed NFTs could be minted only in Ape coins, the project relied on ETH protocol for gas fees. Nonetheless, Yuga Labs successfully amassed $319 million almost instantly from 55,000 NFTs. At the time, each piece of land sold at 305 ApeCoin translating to nearly $5.800.
Due to experience in its similar Bored Apes Yacht Club NFT project, Yuga Labs envisioned the robust sales of its NFTs. The project anticipated a phased monetary rise in gas prices, which would then decelerate the number of users minting NFTs:
“This pattern of mint → bump limit → mint → bump limit will continue until NFT supply is exhausted. This approach would prevent an apocalyptic gas war, while also encouraging as broad a distribution as possible.”
At the time, the unprecedented surge in Ethereum gas fees attracted heated discussion online, with a Reddit user known as u/jeux99 sharing his dismay at an unexpected hike in gas fees, asking:
“Why is gas $450 right now??? I’ve seen high gas fees, but nothing like this before!”
In the same context, another Redditor, u/johnfintech, expressed his disgruntlement, citing data indicating that many users paid roughly 2.6 ETH ($6,500) to 5 ETH ($14,000) as gas fees.
Yuga Labs Apologizes For Rising Gas Fees
But in a subsequent tweet, Yuga Lab remorsefully apologized for the event, citing a series of unavoidable issues related to using Ether during its NFT launch:
“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 chain to operate at scale.”
Furthermore, Yuga Labs has vowed to compensate all those that lost their ETH holding in gas due to failed transactions. Ethereum gas has a long-standing concern among the community operating within the blockchain, including non-fungible tokens.
In November last year, Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder, proposed a new block-wide limit on the total transaction. His idea aimed to decrease the overall transaction calldata gas cost over the ETH network.
Although the crypto community warmly embraced Buterin’s suggestion, the proposal would take over four months to implement EIP-4488 on the Ethereum-sidechain testnet on Geth. Qi Zhuo, an Ethereum community member, confirmed that the protocol would upgrade the testnet in the coming weeks.
Moreover, the team behind Ethereum network expects the merge upgrade to take effect before the end of this year. In February this year, the development team successfully launched the last testnet of its highly anticipated Ethereum Merge “Kiln.”
The upgrade aims to integrate the current Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism with Consensus from Beacon to create strong and cheaper Proof of Stake (PoS). This upgrade will significantly reduce gas fees by more than 98%.
