Otherside NFT Minting Frenzy Resulted In $157M Burned In ETH

The Otherside NFT minting frenzy resulted in $157 million burned in ETH which was more coins burned than issued so let’s read more about it in our latest Ethereum news.

The rush to buy Otherdeed NFTs over the weekend spiked gas fees on two crypto networks and burned about $157 million worth of ETH making it the sixth-biggest source of burned ETH ever. The minting event managed to top the AHT burns of OpenSea’s exchange contract as the largest NFT marketplace, a Uniswap v3 router, and the biggest exchange by volume as well MetaMask as one of the most popular ETH software wallets.

Thanks for burning over 55,000 ETH in 24 hours apes! pic.twitter.com/85HJ6nAl1Z

— sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 (@sassal0x) May 1, 2022

Otherdeed still held the 30-day top spot on the UltraSound Money leaderboard which caused the fees to surge over the weekend are required to purchase plots of land in Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse proejct which is an extension of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. The blockchain transaction requires gas or fees to be validated and added to the distributed ledger which underpins a blockchain. For each Ethereum transaction, there’s a base fee that is always paid and when the network is busy or when the user wants to boost the transaction, the fees can be by a large margin.

The Otherside NFT minting frenzy resulted in people paying more gas fees to bump their transactions at the front of the line which clogged the Ethereum mainnet and made it slow and expensive to complete the transactions. The Otherdeed buyers with the possibility to do so paid extra gas fees to get the transactions processed faster. In another example, the interested buyer spent up to $14,000 in ETH gas to mint just two of the otherdeed NFTs. The burn mechansim introduced by the EIP-1559 took the base fee generated by the Ethereum transactions out of circulation and sent them to a defunct wallet address rather than paying them to ETH miners for validating transactions.

It is meant to help the network transition from PoW to PoS which is a more energy-efficient algorithm that requires less actual compute power and the transition lasted a lot longer than planned. When it was launched last year, the EIP-1559 was expected to take $30 million worth of ETH out of circulation per day and the Overdeed minting even took far more than that out of circulation. Right now, the network’s net issuance is negative 52,899 ETH which means that the network underwent a huge deflationary shock.