Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) crashes Ethereum with the “Otherside” metaverse mint on May 1st. Incredible demand and anticipation for the Otherside metaverse virtual land deed NFTs caused Ethereum gas fees to skyrocket.
What is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)s Otherside?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one the most successful NFT collections of all time. Essentially anything associated with the BAYC seems to turn to gold including the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) and the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) which are both derivative NFT collections of the BAYC original collection. The developers of the BAYC “Yuga Labs” have been purchasing all the top NFT collection competitors to BAYC as well including “CryptoPunks” and “MeeBits” making them the premier name in the NFT world. With the explosion of metaverse worlds recently, it was only natural for BAYC and Yuga Labs to follow suit and make their own metaverse and that is exactly what they did with the “Otherside” metaverse.
The Otherside metaverse will consist of 200,000 virtual land plots that can be purchased as NFTs called “Otherdeeds” with ApeCoin (BAYC native coin built on the Ethereum blockchain). Ever since Yuga Labs, the creators of popular NFT projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced the metaverse project Otherside, the anticipation for the actual sale was soaring. The cost of minting one Otherdeed was announced just before the 9pm start time of the sale at 305 $APE, or about $5,846 as per $APE’s price of $19.16 at time of opening. While crypto markets were slumping over the past week ApeCoin saw its price increase to an all time high in anticipation of the Otherside metaverse land sale.
When the Otherside otherdeed sale went live on May 1st, it caused massive disruptions for the Ethereum network – the blockchain that ApeCoin is built on. Ethereum data from Etherscan shows that users have paid almost 64,000 ETH in fees, equaling over $175 million, in the past 24 hours in relation to the Otherside metaverse. Some Ethereum enthusiasts argue that some simple minting tricks built into the contract may have helped save some of the enourmous gas prices associated with the highly in demand mint. Will Papper, the co-founder of Syndicate DAO, said the contract had “nearly zero gas optimizations” and provided a few “tricks” that could have “saved many millions.”
Yuga Labs also made an announcement about the event, stating that the mint was “so large that Etherscan crashed” and apologized for “turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while.” BAYC’s creators also promised to reimburse gas fees for users who had failed transactions and suggested that maybe ApeCoin should be mitigated to its own blockchain in the future.
BAYC ApeCoin price falls after the Otherside Metaverse land sale
ApeCoin’s price was also affected after the sale. $APE, which was among the best cryptocurrency performers in the past week or so, plummeted by about 30% in the following hours and is down to $16.50 now, having traded at $26 just a few days ago. This was somewhat expected, as investors rushed in to buy APE ahead of the sale to participate in the sale and may have planned to sell their ApeCoin after the land sale.
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