On Saturday night, the $4 billion firm behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Yuga Labs, held its much-anticipated Otherside metaverse mint, clogging the Ethereum main net bringing gas prices to new highs.
Yuga Labs has made almost $561 million from the Otherside’s “Otherdeed” NFT sales in less than 24 hours.
55,000 NFTs were created at 305 APE apiece, implying that each Otherdeed cost around $5,800 at minting, based on Apecoin’s pricing (roughly $19). This mint alone brought in approximately $318.7 million for Yuga Labs.
Otherdeed has already seen over $242 million in total secondary volume moved, according to CryptoSlam data. Over $190 million of that total was spent on OpenSea.
The Otherdeed mint, which started at 9 p.m. EST on Saturday, sparked an Ethereum gas war almost immediately because of many NFTs and increased demand. In addition, the site Etherscan received a lot of traffic, which led to reports that it wasn’t working for many people.
On proof-of-work chains like Ethereum, gas wars can arise when a surge in demand for quick transactions clogs the network, driving up costs as users strive to get to the front line.
Yuga Labs didn't realize they were still doing a dutch auction, it was just via gwei and not price
Ethereum gas fees can skyrocket during such gas wars, and last night was no exception, with fees soaring to thousands of dollars per transaction.
While some people were able to get their transactions approved in hours for a few hundred dollars in petrol expenses, others claimed to have paid upwards of $4,000 for a single transaction. (Throughout the night, the average gwei, or price of Ethereum gas, was over 6,000, nearly 100 to 200 times typical.)
At the time of writing, Otherside-related transactions had consumed almost 64,000 ETH in gas fees, amounting to nearly $180 million. However, some have suggested that the costs would not have been so high if Yuga Labs had performed a few back-end optimizations.
The Otherdeed smart contract has “almost zero gas optimizations,” according to Will Papper, co-founder of SyndicateDAO. He said that “changing a few phrases would have saved $80 million or more” in petrol fees.
Gas optimization 1: Remove the ERC721Enumerable extension.
The ERC721Enumerable extension is used to track the owners of an NFT on-chain. Mints that remove the ERC721Enumerable extension save around 70% in gas costs. This tiny change would have saved around $70M this hour. pic.twitter.com/nzmwjsVm2K
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, offers a different perspective.
He remarked of the Otherside mint, “I don’t think optimizing the contract would help. Regardless of contract terms, the tx cost increases until the list price + the tx fee equals the market price. The equilibrium gas price would have been >12000 gwei instead of 6000 gwei if gas usage per purchase had declined 2x.”
Yuga Labs has since offered to compensate anyone who has had transactions fail.
Those holding BAYC or Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs, on the other hand, will be allowed to claim Otherdeed NFTs over three weeks, allowing them to avoid paying hefty gas expenses.
The Otherdeed NFT mint is sold out – we are awestruck at the demand shown tonight. Apes and Mutants, the opening of the 21-day claim period is being delayed until the price of gas drops to reasonable levels. We’ll tweet when the claim opens. https://t.co/iRz64lklbv
Some have chastised the Otherdeed NFTs, claiming that they are the first Yuga Labs assets that do not offer complete economic rights to their owners.
Holders of BAYCs have mixed feelings about the chaotic mint. Some accused the Ethereum network of the high costs and sluggish transactions, while others blamed Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed smart contract and mint policy. ApeCoin is down over 24 percent in the last 24 hours and down 12 percent since the Otherdeed NFT mint began, according to CoinGecko data.
I’m out on Yuga. Lost over half of my NFT portfolio in the last couple days trying to get Ape for this because they told us it would be achievable. They lied to us. Cost me over $10k and now I can’t even sell this plummeting $Ape for half what I paid for it. I’m gutted.
Garga, a co-founder of Bored Ape. According to eth, the Otherdeed mint was a “sour moment” for the NFT community.
“Tonight did not go as planned. “I’d want to apologize to the apes and everyone else who excitedly awaited their chance to participate in the project,” he stated on Twitter.
Yuga Labs also expressed regret for “turning off the lights on Ethereum for a period,” claiming that ApeCoin will “need to relocate to its chain to scale effectively.”
Lin Dai, CEO of NFT platform OneOf, had harsh words for Yuga Labs and Garga after the wild mint.
Understand how difficult it is to launch a project with overwhelming demand, but there are plenty of ways to make it up and make it right. Do the right thing, even if it takes time.
“Decentralization should never be used to excuse centralized venture-backed enterprises making bad judgments,” Dai remarked. “It’s time to take charge and be accountable to the community.”
The future of e-commerce, according to Shopify, is in NFTs.
As a new option for brands wishing to make their stores more exclusive, the online retail behemoth, which enables small businesses to construct customized e-commerce shops, is providing NFT-gated storefronts, Shopify announced on Wednesday.
In the Shopify introduction video, which includes a skating woman who passes through a pastel portal and transforms into a Doodles NFT, a voiceover urges viewers to “invite their communities into a world that acknowledges and rewards devotion.”
The video explains that token holders can access special shopping opportunities by connecting a cryptocurrency wallet, including early access to drops and limited collections as well as one-of-a-kind experiences and other surprises.
Only individuals with existing NFT collections are able to apply for early access to Shopify’s “gm” shop, which is a gated merchandise store and a play on the Crypto Twitter acronym for “good morning.”
However, those that haven’t received approval yet can still integrate NFT token-gating apps like Shopthru or Single into their Shopify sites.
Shopify announced that it has already collaborated with the Adam Bomb Squad, Doodles, World of Women, Invisible Friends, Superplastic, Stapleverse, and Cool Cats NFT collections to develop token-gated shops as part of its token-gated business launch.
Shopify is introducing “IRL” token-gating in brick-and-mortar stores in addition to online token-gating, which restricts access to certain merchandise to authorized NFT holders exclusively.
Why is this important? The future of Web3 commerce will focus on exclusivity, for one thing. NFTs, which are distinctive blockchain tokens that denote ownership over an asset, are increasingly employed as membership cards, tickets to events, and “keys” to open benefits, despite the fact that they are frequently oversimplified as digital art or “jpgs.”
Additionally, this isn’t Shopify’s first venture into NFTs: The business has been involved with Web3 since last year, when it announced the launch of NFT sales on its platform. Brands can mine and sell NFTs on Shopify to clients using the Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, or Flow platforms.
The NFT aggregation platform Genie is being purchased by Uniswap Labs, the organization that created the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange Uniswap.
In a Bankless interview on Tuesday, Uniswap founder and CEO Hayden Adams said, “We’re attempting to transfer what we brought to the ERC-20 market to the NFT sector.”
You can buy NFTs—individual blockchain tokens that represent ownership—on a variety of different marketplaces, such as OpenSea, LooksRare, or Coinbase NFT. However, few allow consumers to buy many things at once, and none provide aggregation tools that let traders view listings on competing marketplaces.
According to Uniswap Labs on Twitter, “We see NFTs as another form of value in the burgeoning digital economy, and it’s a no-brainer for us to integrate them.”
The NFT aggregator Gem, which also enables customers to acquire numerous NFTs in a single transaction, was purchased by OpenSea just two months prior to the announcement of its acquisition by Genie. OpenSea intends to incorporate NFT aggregation functions into its primary platform, just like Uniswap.
A new tab dedicated to NFTs will be added to Uniswap’s main website later this year as part of the company’s push into NFTs, according to a statement from the company. Additionally, NFTs will be included in its developers’ APIs and widgets.
Uniswap Labs intends to airdrop an unspecified quantity of the stablecoin USDC to Genie’s early backers as a way to commemorate its acquisition. By April 15th, USDC will be given to everybody who had utilized the platform at least once or owned a Genie Genesis NFT. (The business had earlier tweeted that Genie Gem owners were eligible for the airdrop.)
Uniswap entered the NFT market for the first time in 2019 with Unisocks, an NFT that granted holders access to a real pair of socks.
The largest NFT market, OpenSea, has a floor price for Unisocks of 13 ETH (about $15,300) at the time of writing.
On Tuesday, Magic Eden, a popular nonfungible tokens (NFTs) platform on the Solana (SOL) blockchain with 112,927 SOL ($4 million) in 24-hour trading volume, announced that it had closed a Series B round for $130 million. The funding round was led by investors such as Electric Capital, Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Paradigm and Sequoia Capital valued the firm at $1.6 billion.
The newly-infused capital will be used to expand the company’s primary and secondary marketplaces, explore multi-chain opportunities, allow new hirings, and for use in research and development. Since its inception in September 2021, the marketplace now receives an average of 22 million unique monthly sessions and sees over 40,000 NFTs traded daily.
Magic Eden’s Launchpad has also onboarded over 250 projects to date. In addition, it offers customization, marketing support, and operational execution to new NFT collections coming onto the primary market. Meanwhile, its secondary market covers over 7,000 listings and sees over 92% of all NFT volume on Solana.
Furthermore, Magic Eden has also launched over 50 games and metaverse projects. In that segment, the firm oversees 90% of all gaming NFTs on Solana traded on its marketplace. Regarding the development, Zhuoxun Yin, chief operating office and co-founder of Magic Eden, commented:
“We’re thrilled to have the continued support of our investors and community and look forward to delivering on Solana and beyond.”
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