The recent NFT collection launched by Yuga Labs for its upcoming Bored Ape metaverse Otherside caused the Ethereum blockchain to collapse, and many users aren’t happy about it.
Yuga Labs is expanding its frontiers.
Yuga Labs is one of the most popular names in the NFT space. The blockchain startup is the maker of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection, which remains the most successful NFT collection yet, with a floor price of about $370,000.
Yuga Labs has made evident its intention to expand its NFT ecosystem, and on Saturday, there was an NFT drop as part of Yuga Labs’ highly anticipated metaverse Otherside, which expectedly caused a lot of activity on the Ethereum blockchain.
Otherside is a metaverse game world that will bring together various NFT projects such as the Apes, CryptoPunks, Meebits, Cool Cats, and more. The Otherside metaverse comprises 200,000 plots of land referred to as Otherdeeds that users can purchase, own, and trade as NFTs. Each plot of land on the Otherside cost $5,846 at the time of the drop.
As expected, the land deeds sold out almost immediately, with Yuga Labs raking in about $320 million from the 55,000 virtual plots put up for sale. NFT users hoping to profit from the resale had their NFT holdings worth at least $23,000 on secondary market sales on platforms like OpenSea.
CryptoSlam estimates that Otherdeed has already seen over $242 million in total secondary volume traded, $190 million of which occurred on OpenSea.
Otherside Mint: What were the issues?
As the NFT sector grows in popularity, its vulnerabilities come to the surface. Technical inadequacies resulting in massive loss of funds are now a recurring theme of NFT drops. With the reputation of Yuga Labs’, one would have expected things to happen differently.
While Yuga Labs had a lot of wins to take from the NFT drop, it was the opposite for many users who were hoping to lay their hands on NFTs within the collection. The high demands on the Ethereum blockchain resulted in a gas war, which led to users paying exorbitant gas fees to mint the NFTs.
Gas wars often occur on blockchains like Ethereum that use proof-of-work when there is a sudden increase in demand for fast transactions, consequently sending gas fees soaring as users scramble to mint NFTs before it exhausted.
Due to the high volume of activity on the chain, some users reportedly paid over $4,000 in gas fees for a single transaction. Will Papper, co-founder of SyndicateDAO, associated this issue with the Otherdeed smart contract, which he says, has “nearly zero gas optimization.”
He further stated that the problem could have been remedied by modifying a few words, which could have saved more than $80 million in gas fees.
The inefficiencies of Trading
The issues experienced during the Otherside NFT drop once again bring to light the associated problems of crypto trading. This adds to a long list of other issues, such as the security of wallet holdings, that make some approach the space cautiously.
However, while addressing the problem, Yuga Labs promised to refund users the money they lost in gas fees, estimated to be $180 million in ETH.
