Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape NFTs that loves Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, announced the sale of its latest chips – representing plots in an upcoming multiplayer game called Otherside – on Sunday. A total of 55,000 plots were sold at a fixed price of 305 ApeCoin (a currency created by Yuga), which is worth about 00 4,500 at current exchange rates. Demand for the plots was so high that the blockchain Ethereum flooded, one of the infrastructure levels on which all cryptocurrency projects are based. As users struggled to be one of the few lucky to be able to secure an “Otherdeed”, network transaction charges were rising, until a single NFT purchase cost over 00 2,500 in charge only. One user, who successfully secured two Otherdeeds, paid a transaction fee of more than E 5 ETH (.000 11,000) in addition to .000 9,000 to purchase the land itself. Others lost thousands of pounds by failing to secure any chips at all: if a user runs out of money while paying transaction fees, the transaction fails, but the fees are non-refundable. For most of those who secured Yuga’s latest coupon, impressive charges paid off, at least in the short term: brands sold for 4.5 4,500 are already resold for more than .000 9,000. But people who have been fortunate enough to try other cryptocurrency activities at the same time have suffered heavy losses. Molly White, a cryptocurrency expert who runs a website that tracks the domain, followed many examples during the day of NFT sales of less than £ 500 that were hit with transaction charges over £ 2,000. Transaction fee $ 3,300 for $ 25 NFT (no typographical error — they paid a transaction fee that was more than 100 times higher than NFT) pic.twitter.com/mzNGMpAcGa – Molly White (@ molly0xFFF) May 1, 2022 “Gas charges, which are rising due to network congestion, have skyrocketed,” White wrote. While most sales in OpenSea, the most popular marketplace for NFTs, were for Otherside transactions, “some people have strangely continued to buy and sell cheaper NFTs,” he added. In total, more than $ 100 million was spent on transaction fees for the Otherside NFTs, while Yuga Labs received another $ 300 million in payments. When the sale was completed, the company apologized for the chaos it had caused. “We know that the Otherdeed Mint was unprecedented in its size as a high-demand NFT collection, and that would bring with it unique challenges. Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7 p.m. BST “This was the largest NFT mint in history by many times, and yet the gas used during the mint shows that demand far exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations. “The scale of this mint was so large that Etherscan crashed,” Yuga added, referring to a cryptocurrency analysis site. “We’re sorry we turned off the lights on Ethereum for a while.” The company was already facing a crisis thanks to the sale of Otherdeed: a fake post on its hacked Instagram page announcing free metaverse land led to a phishing campaign that stole $ 3 million worth of NFT. Some argued that the consequences of such a relatively small sale were evidence that the cryptocurrency sector would find it difficult to scale to provide mainstream services. “There is a lot of talk about the promise of web3. But at this rate, any sales mechanism outside of web3 works with ~ 100 times less lost charges, “wrote Gergely Orosz, a leading technology commentator. “If it’s too expensive to use or unreliable: this is something alpha at best, not ready for main use.”
