The famed Bored Ape series NFT creator, Yuga Labs, just recently announced it cleared roughly $285M worth of crypto by selling tokens representative of land in its upcoming metaverse project, Otherside. This sale disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain as multitudes of users stormed to purchase the virtual plots of land NFTs dubbed Otherdeeds.
The breakdown of what happened
Yuga Labs launched the Otherside metaverse land mint on Saturday night. The event was meant to initialise the sale of NFT-based deeds dubbed Otherdeeds representative of digital land within its yet-to-launch environment. The result was a banging hit owing to the rush by speculators to join in on the success of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) community.
The NFT startup pocketed $285M (volatility adjusted) after the sale of 55,000 Otherdeeds priced at 305 ApeCoin each. The viral sale also sent Ethereum fees to the moon. This is because, while Otherdeeds are minted in BAYC’s native ApeCoin, they still needed Ethereum for gas fees. Moreover, the network congestion experienced then only made the fees worse. This raise is being considered by many the “largest NFT mint in history”
It wasn’t made clear how the funds would have been distributed, although the company said the ApeCoin would be locked up for one year. The Otherside metaverse, on the other hand, will be a multi-player gaming environment, according to its website and is currently under development. Yuga Labs is yet to announce Otherside’s official launch.
The vibrant Ape community
Last year, the US startup created the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, blockchain-based tokens all in a set of 10,000 computer-generated cartoon apes. As non-fungible tokens (NFTs) exploded in popularity, Bored Ape prices surged to fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars each. They featured among the most prominent NFT brands, with Apes sold at top auction houses including Sotheby’s and owned by celebrities & personalities including Snoop Dogg, Mark Cuban, Paris Hilton and Madonna, just to mention a couple.
Prior to this, Yuga Labs raised $450M in March in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in the investor’s efforts to set its sights on the metaverse. Shortly after the mint, Yuga Labs apologised to Twitter stating, “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 own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.”
