ETH gas price soars as Yuga Labs cashes in $300 million with sale of Otherside NFTs

As the community witnessed the largest NFT coin to date, Ethereum (ETH) gas prices soared to unprecedented levels, in addition to users experiencing transaction failures due to blockchain bottlenecks.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs launched a sale of Otherdeed non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing digital land deeds on their new venture, the Otherside metaverse. With every piece of land sale at 305 ApeCoin (APE) or nearly $5,800 at the time of the sale, Yuga Labs made $319 million after 55,000 NFTs sold out almost immediately.

The Otherdeed NFT coin is sold out – we are impressed with the demand shown tonight. Apes and Mutants will postpone the opening of the claim period of 21 days until the gas price has fallen to a reasonable level. We will tweet when the claim is opened. https://t.co/iRz64lklbv

— OthersideMeta (@OthersideMeta) May 1, 2022

While the Otherdeed NFTs could only be minted in APE, it also required ETH for gas charges. Yuga Labs’ coining mechanisms foresaw the sale of NFTs in phases, while anticipating a temporary rise in gas prices, which would then slow down the number of users coining the NFTs:

“This pattern of mint → bump limit → mint → bump limit will continue until the NFT supply is exhausted. This approach is expected to prevent an apocalyptic gas war while encouraging the widest possible diffusion.”

The above screenshot was shared by Redditor u/jeux99 who shared their experience with high gas prices at the time, asking:

“Why is gas now $450??? I’ve seen high gas prices, but I’ve never seen anything like this before!”

As rightly pointed out by another Redditor, u/johnfintech, Etherscan data shows that numerous users paid anywhere from 2.6 ETH ($6500) to 5 ETH ($14000) as gas costs.

Citing some of the issues related to using Ether during the launch of NFT, Yuga Labs declared†

“We’re sorry we turned off the lights on Ethereum for a while. It seems obvious that ApeCoin will have to migrate to its own chain in order to scale properly.”

For those who have lost their ETH shares in gas due to failed trades, Yuga Labs has promised to refund the gas amount to the users.

Related: Vitalik Buterin Proposes Call Data Limit Per Block To Reduce ETH Gas Cost

Ethereum’s infamous gas costs have long been a concern among the community due to the influx of ecosystems hosted by the blockchain, including NFTs.

In November 2021, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a new block-wide limit on total transaction call data to lower the total gas cost for transaction call data over the ETH network.

Although the community embraced the suggestion, it took more than four months to deploy EIP-4488 on the Ethereum sidechain testnet on Geth. Community member Qi Zhou confirmed plans to upgrade the testnet within a month on April 27.