Yuga Labs records $561M in Otherside Ethereum NFT sales

Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible tokens, recently announced the launch of the Otherside metaverse project. The sale of the virtual land for this metaverse congested the Ethereum network and increased the network’s gas fees to high prices.

Yuga Labs generates $561M from the Otherside launch

Yuga Labs generated over $561M from the sale of Otherside NFTs. The Yuga Labs “Otherdeeds” gave users “the key to claiming land in Otherside” metaverse project. Data from CryptoSlam shows that Otherdeed has recorded more than $242M in total secondary volumes.

During the process, 55,000 NFTs were minted at 305 APE for each one. This equates the price of each Otherdeed to around $5800, going by the price of ApeCoin at the time of the mint. The mint has generated Yuga Labs $318.7M.

The high demand and the high number of NFTs created congestions on the Ethereum network and spiked the gas fees to extremely high levels. Etherscan showed that the site remained down for many users because of the congestion.

Some users completed their transactions within a few hours when the gas fees were several hundred dollars. However, some users later reported that the gas fees had gone as high as $4000 for a single transaction. Throughout the NFT sale, the gas fees reached as high as $6,000.

Otherside blamed for network congestions

So far, transactions related to the Otherside project have consumed more than 64,000 ETH worth of gas fees, equivalent to around $180 million. However, some users have argued that Yuga Labs’ failure to have some backend optimisations had resulted in the fee increase.

However, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, argued that optimising the smart contract would not help. “Regardless of contract details, tx fee goes up until list price + tx fee = market price. If gas usage per purchase decreased 2x, the equilibrium gas price would have just been >12000 gwei instead of 6000.”

Some users have also argued that Otherdeed NFTs were the only assets from Yuga Labs that did not give holders full commercial rights. Some have also called the mint chaotic and blamed the Otherdeed smart contract and mint policy. The price of ApeCoin has dipped by double-digits during the past 24 hours.

The co-founder of Bored Ape, Garga.eth, responded to the community’s concerns saying, “Needless to say, tonight didn’t go how anyone wanted it to. I want to say sorry to the apes and to everyone else who eagerly looked to join into the project.”

Yuga Labs apologised for disrupting transactions on the Ethereum network, adding that ApeCoin had plans to migrate to its own blockchain to achieve the desired scalability levels.

Yuga Labs and its founders also received advice from the CEO of the OneOf NFT platform, Lin Dai, who said, “Decentralisation should never be used as an excuse for decisions of centralised venture-backed companies. Time to take responsibility, be accountable to the community.”