Bored Ape NFT creator Yuga Labs rakes in $320M in virtual land sale, causes surge in ETH gas fees

Yuga Labs, creator of the popular 'Bored Ape Yacht Club' (BAYC) NFT collection hosted a sale of Otherdeed non-fungible tokens (NFTs), enabling the users to hold virtual land ownership in the forthcoming "Otherside" metaverse.

Monday May 02, 2022 , 2 min Read

Yuga Labs, creator of the popular 'Bored Ape Yacht Club' (BAYC) NFT collection hosted a sale of Otherdeed non-fungible tokens (NFTs)— virtual plots of land related to its highly anticipated metaverse project.

As per the reports, the primary sales generated $320 million but also clogged the Ethereum network costing investors millions in gas fees. The company took to Twitter to apologise for clogging the Ethereum network.

We are aware that some users had failed transactions due to the incredible demand being forced through Ethereum’s bottleneck. For those of you affected, we appreciate your willingness to build alongside us – know that we’ve got your back and will be refunding your gas.
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022

Otherdeeds NFTs were only available in BAYC's native coin Ape and required Ethereum for gas fees. Each piece of land was sold for 305 ApeCoin (APE) and 55,000 NFTs sold out instantly generating $320 million.

The Otherdeed NFT mint is sold out - we are awestruck at the demand shown tonight. Apes and Mutants, the opening of the 21-day claim period is being delayed until the price of gas drops to reasonable levels. We’ll tweet when the claim opens. https://t.co/iRz64lklbv
— OthersideMeta (@OthersideMeta) May 1, 2022

Due to an increase in demand, there was a surge in Ethereum gas fees, as a result of this, transactions on the Ethereum linked services were delayed and the Ethereum transaction tracker, Etherscan crashed. According to multiple media reports, Otherdeed has seen over $242 million in total secondary sales.

Earlier this month, the official Instagram account of the Bored Ape Yacht Club was hacked and a phishing link was posted.

The firm launched Bored Ape Yacht Club in April 2021, and it has turned out to be a valuable NFT project by market cap. Recently the company introduced its new ERC-20 token called ApeCoin.

The company also teamed up with Animoca Brands to create a game based on ApeCoin. As per the recent reports, NFT marketplace OpenSea has also stated that Ape will be accepted on its platform.

In the month of March, the company had raised $450 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Previously, the company had acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits from the developer Larva Labs. With this merger, the company became the leading firm in the NFT space.

Edited by Anju Narayanan