Last weekend the Web3 community went wild since one of the most anticipated events went down. Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club is going to start its own metaverse called Otherside. Very similar to other projects in that field Yuga sold land plots called Otherdeeds. A total 55.000 of these virtual land plots went for sale.

Why was the sale crashing the fee market and what are the next plans for Yuga Labs, ApeCoin, BAYC, and the Otherside?

Welcome to the Otherside

The Otherside is a metaverse similar to the Sandbox or Decentraland where users can enjoy a virtual experience. By selling Otherdeeds the company offered 55.000 land plots to the public for a price of 305 APE per Otherdeed. Buyers had also to get registered before the event to qualify for the mint.

The sale was very successful and within 3 hours all Otherdeeds were being sold. Total revenue of $320 million was created due to the event and while this is considered to be a huge success it lagged a little behind the expectation of reaching over $400 million in revenue.

Another 45.000 Otherdeeds are reserved for BAYC and MAYC holders who are again profiting from being members of an exclusive club of NFT holders. They have time to claim their Otherdeed airdrop within the next 20 days for free and all they have to pay are the gas fees.

Gas fees exploded

Users had to pay enormous gas fees ranging somewhere between $3.500 and $10.000 worth of Ethereum. This effectively halted Ethereum since fees not only applied to participants in the Otherdeed sale.

Yuga Labs was criticized for the smart contract that has been set up by the company. Critics claim that the situation could have been avoided if things were done differently. Yuga on the other hand said in an official statement that Ethereum was the bottleneck that turned things into an awful situation for everybody.

The company announced two things shortly after the sale. Participants who didn't get an Otherdeed will be reimbursed for gas fees that they lost by bidding. And since the event created such a spike in gas fees Yuga Labs is looking forward to starting its own chain. It remains speculative what the features of the layer-1 solution will look like. Yet, it remains safe to assume that ApeCoin, the Otherside, and the BAYC will play again an important role. If Yuga will tie the right incentives to this brand new chain, NFTs or possibly ApeCoin could see more traction in the future.