The Otherside metaverse project created by Yuga Labs, the creators of the world’s most prestigious NFT sets, sold out all the available 55,000 ‘Otherdeed’ land NFTs within three hours of its public sale on Saturday.
According to Otherside’s official Twitter account, they explained that participating investors in the land sale bought all the NFTs in the offering. The dominating currency for the sale was Yuga Lab’s recently launched token, the ApeCoin.
The mint price was 305 ApeCoin, worth about $5,800 at the time of mint. It brought in 16.7 million ApeCoin which is, as of the time of the sales, equivalent to $317 million, making it a record-setting NFT mint. A mint is a public offering in which NFTs are sold through a smart contract on a blockchain like Ethereum.
What you should know
- The buyers had to pass a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and had their crypto wallets pre-approved on the project’s website.
- The NFTs will give buyers rights to claim land in the Otherside metaverse, a blockchain-based virtual world being developed by Yuga Labs, the creators of popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT collections.
- BAYC and MAYC holders are expected to also be able to claim free land during a 21-day period.
- More than 27,000 users bought the 55,000 available Otherdeed NFTs of a total of 100,000 minted. The remaining 45,000 are included in an airdrop open to existing holders of BAYC and MAYC NFTs.
- As a highly anticipated NFT release, the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain to soar to 8,000 GWEI ($0.020439), per data from Etherscan block explorer.
- This resulted from what is called a ‘gas war’, a situation in which many Ethereum users tried to buy NFTs at the same time and outbid each other by using the network’s transaction fees. Such bids can cause the fees on the blockchain to spike, as was the case for the mint.
- On-chain data revealed the Otherdeed gas war led to the sale running up an additional $172 million in transaction fees that cost individual buyers between $4000 and $10,000. Such high mint fees caused many to complain they were unable to make purchases.
On Twitter, Ethereum developer Foobar critiqued Yuga Labs for writing a smart contract that was not optimized for gas wars. Commenting on the gas war, Yuga Labs said the Otherside metaverse may be looking to migrate away from Ethereum to its own Layer 1 blockchain to improve scalability.
