The BAYC Team Raised $285M And Clogged Ethereum On The Way

The BAYC Team raised $285 million and clogged Ethereum’s network on the way due to the virtual land rush for the metaverse project Otherside so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

After a lot of waiting, the BAYC Team, Yuga Labs held its long-awaited digital land sale over the weekend which was a public debut for the Otherside metaverse proejct and while the resulting land rush generated about $285 million for the company, it created some of the biggest gas fees in the history of the ETH network with investors spending over $176 million on fees in the past day. Otherside is the biggest product launch from the Yuga Labs company and during the last night’s sale, the traders snapped up a limited supply of 55,000 Otherdeeds NFTs that represented the titles to plots of virtual lands in the 3D social space.

I just paid $14k in gas to mint 4 Otherdeeds for Otherside. I’m going to go throw up now. @BoredApeYC

— Hustler (@0xHustler) May 1, 2022

They cost about $7000 each and were available for purchase in APE cryptocurrency. In other markets like OpenSea, the cheapest price for the Otherdeed was about 7 ETH. The night was a great win for the company which raised $450 million from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz but now the BAY Team raised $285 million and issued a note:

“This has been the largest NFT mint in history by several multiples, and yet the gas used during the mint shows that demand far exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations. We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while.”

The average fee for the ETH transaction scales with the overall congestion of the network so when the traders scramble for the tokens at the same time, the prices go up and it is a phenomenon known as gas war with the users competing to have their transaction processed at the top of the miners’ queue. According to the calculator data from Dune Analytics, the average gas prices were hovering around 800 Gwei with the spikes in the realm of 6000 and 7000, and in these times, a simple transaction could cost upwards of $3000.

the best thing about crypto is that it will eliminate those fees we have to pay to banking middlemen pic.twitter.com/KYRPJoJXvq

— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) May 1, 2022

The expensive evening threw into question Ethereum’s viability as a host for bigger scale NFTs while Yuga Labs floated around with the idea of building its own blockchain:

“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.”

The company took great pains to say that they don’t control the ApeCOIN DAO but they could maybe donate some of the last night’s windfall to the cause.