Yuga Labs Bag $561M from Otherside Land Sales
Yuga Labs had its highly anticipated Otherside metaverse mint on saturday night. The event which was very successful grossed $100M in 45 minutes. In the heels of this success, it also raked in $561M in less than 24 hours. A figure which surpassed the earlier anticipated amount.
Yuga Minted about 55,000 NFTs at 305 APE each (about $5,800 at $19 per APE) at the time of mint. This means that the expected figure was about $318.7 million which Yuga surpassed in 24 hours.
Data from CryptoSlam shows that Otherdeed has raked in over $242 million from secondary sales. And the bulk of these sales which is over $190 million came from Opensea.
Huge Sales Traffic Crashes Etherscan, caused Ethereum gas war
The frenzy associated with the minting of Otherside led to the crash of block explorer Etherscan. The conjestion caused by a spike in demand for Otherside triggered an Ethereum gas war.
Gas wars are peculiar to proof-of work blockchains. And it occurs when there is a sudden demand for fast transactions, which bogs down a network. And Users’ efforts to cut to the frontline leads to a spike in transaction fees.
The gas fees on saturday night rose from a couple hundreds of dollars to about $4,000 to $6,000. These figures represents approximately 100 to 200 times increase in the normal price.
Did Yuga’s Negligence cause the spike in gas fees?
Figures show that otherside related transactions consumed over 64,000 ETH in gas fees. That is approximately $180 million, a figure which some believe was unneccesary. Following this, some experts believe that Yuga’s failure to implement a few backend optimizations was the cause of the high fees.
But Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co founder differed in his opinion. In his opinion, optimizing the contract would not help because regardless of the contact, the tax fees will appreciate till list price catches up with market price.