A rush to buy ‘virtual land’ in a future metaverse to be created by the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club crashed Ethereum.
The BAYC, one of the most popular NFT collections, is a series of computer-generated apes. Its owner Yuga Labs saw its much-hyped Otherdeeds sale – land plots in a BAYC-themed virtual environment called Otherside – cause chaos as transaction fees spiralled out of control.
The 55,000 Otherdeeds plots could only be bought using the project’s associated cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, which launched in March and is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. They were sold at a flat 305 ApeCoin, worth around $4,500 at the time of writing.
However due to the demand, some users able to secure a plot ended up paying gas fees which were double the price of the NFT itself. Others who were carrying out the transaction but ran out of assets partway through failed to secure the NFT but were charged the gas fee nevertheless.
A total of $285m was spent on the NFT drop.
“We know that the Otherdeed mint was unprecedented in its size as a high-demand NFT collection, and that would bring with it unique challenges,” said Yuga Labs.
“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. The scale of this mint was so large that Etherscan crashed.
“We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while.”