Yuga Labs raises ~$320M by selling 55K virtual land plots in its Otherside metaverse, causing Ethereum blockchain ripple effects and skyrocketing gas fees
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business … Ivan Mehta / TNW : How the BAYC metaverse mint raised Ethereum gas fees to thousands of dollars Emma Roth / The Verge : Bored Ape Yacht Club creator's metaverse mint rocks the Ethereum blockchain Mint Calendar : So...What's Next — Gm all. To call out the elephant in the room upfront this week … Jose Montes de Oca / Newslit Daily : 📱 Apple Abused Dominance in Mobile-Wallets Markets Cripto Letter : Yuga Labs lanza Otherside Timothy Craig / Crypto Briefing : Yuga Labs Botches NFT Drop With Bad Code, Blames Ethereum Samuel Wan / CryptoSlate : Ethereum user spends $44,000 in gas fees to mint Bored Ape ‘Otherside’ NFTs Waivly : 🤯 BAYC Otherside launch causes chaos CRYPTOPONG Newsletter : The Weekly Roundup: BAYC “Breaks” Ethereum, Okay Bears Run Solana, and Goldman Issues BTC-Backed Loan Brian Quarmby / Cointelegraph : Ethereum burning spikes to new high on Yuga Labs' NFT hype Transistori : Yuga Labs tienasi 320 miljoonaa virtuaalisilla tonteilla Mashable : Bored Ape Yacht Club caused Ethereum fees to soar to astronomical levels Web3 is going just great : Solana goes down again Chayanika Deka / CryptoPotato : BAYC's Otherside NFT Drop Triggers ETH Burning Frenzy Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE : Yuga Labs raises $320M in virtual land sales but causes Ethereum processing cost spike Michael Spencer / Web3 Digest : Metaverse Land Grab Sparks NFT Yuga Spawned Chaos Mark Arguinbaev / The Merkle News : What Really Happened With ApeCoin's Otherside Metaverse Land Sale NFT Drops : #036: Coinbase NFT, Akutars, and Otherside Meta Coinmonks : NFT Marketplace OpenSea is Now Accepting ApeCoin | Curated CoinCodeCap #1 Elizabeth Howcroft / Reuters : Bored Ape NFT company raises around $285 million of crypto in virtual land sale Degen / Spin It Up : Hello, World! — It's either a great or terrible idea to start this newsletter … Chris Katje / Benzinga : ApeCoin Plummets After Otherside Land Sale; Yuga Labs Wants Its Own Chain But Vitalik Buterin Says That's Not The Answer Blockgraze / Block Graze Newsletter : Crypto Weekly Roundup: Allegory of Goblin Town Jamie Redman / Bitcoin News : The Largest NFT Mint in History — Bored Ape's Otherside Virtual Land Sale Raises $320 Million Vishal Chawla / The Block : Otherside land NFTs sell out in hours as Yuga Labs rakes in $317 million Shashank Reddy / Shashank's Newsletter : 🦧 $300M sold in the largest NFT launch John P. Njui / Ethereum World News : Yuga Labs Proposes that Apecoin Build its Own Chain, After Otherside Mint Slows Down the Ethereum Network Siamak Masnavi / CryptoGlobe : BAYC: Otherdeed NFTs Are Currently Going for Nearly 4X Mint Price on OpenSea Elated Pixel / Elated Pixelations : De-minted drops (in 2022??) - How Yuga Labs / BAYC defecated Otherdeeds on all of us. Molly White / Web3 is going just great : Popular NFT mint spikes Ethereum gas prices; OpenSea transaction fees exceed $3,500 Tweets: @yugalabs : We wanted to say a few words about the mint tonight. 🧵 @yugalabs : We're sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while. It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We'd like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction. Will Papper / @willpapper : Nearly $100M has been spent on gas for the BAYC land sale in one hour. This is money that could have gone to Yuga or stayed in user's pockets. The contract had nearly zero gas optimizations. I'll explain a few gas optimization tricks that could have saved many millions below 👇 https://twitter.com/... Mark Beylin / @markbeylin : Just finished exiting all of my Ape related NFTs now that Yuga has revealed their true colors, I can't unsee it con artists of the highest order Molly White / @molly0xfff : the best thing about crypto is that it will eliminate those fees we have to pay to banking middlemen https://twitter.com/... Molly White / @molly0xfff : just watched someone pay a $3500 transaction fee for a $500 NFT https://twitter.com/... @yugalabs : 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. Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : Between ETH charging ~$3,500 per transaction and the other major chain, Solana being down for hours, both after so many years of development, this is not encouraging. If it's too expensive to use, or it's unreliable: this is something alpha at best, not ready for mainstream use. https://twitter.com/... Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : Many web3 projects claim to be about “the community”. But own interests and the money is often stronger: “I believe that the people who run Yuga Labs are using dark manipulation techniques in service of their personal interests, and you should assume they are bad actors.” https://twitter.com/... Misha Lederman / @mishalederman : Insane that #Ethereum's inability to scale is still holding back projects. Time for a #klever solution 🧠 https://twitter.com/... AgresTrades / @notagres : Tulips. Buying “land” in the metaverse is like someone selling you land on another planet. Sure, it would be nice to dream about living there one day... doesn't mean you will though. Greedy clowns and dumb as a door knob are now complaining about the gas https://www.cnet.com/... Aaron Levie / @levie : It's very hard to have a sustainable technical architecture underpin your app that can be entirely disrupted financially or performance-wise by another user on the system. That's not how the web works. https://twitter.com/... Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : Yuga labs - the best-known web3 company valued at $4.5B - generated ~$200M in NFT sales for themselves while forcing users to waste ~$100M in gas fees. There's much talk about the promise of web3. But at this rate, any non-web3 sales mechanism works with ~100x less wasted fees. https://twitter.com/... @champtgram : boomers had Facebook, etc We have @yugalabs 😈 Shai Goldman / @shaig : .@yugalabs quickly became the Facebook of web3 and I'm using FB in the most derogatory way possible Jacob Silverman / @silvermanjacob : Every crypto company announcement after a mint/network congestion/hack/whatever: Sorry we made all that money while most people lost theirs. We'll try to make it right with the “community” https://twitter.com/... Alex Svanevik🐧 / @asvanevik : gas usage is completely off the chart peaked at >8,000 gwei and it seems to have stabilized (!!) >5,000 gwei https://pro.nansen.ai/... https://twitter.com/... Molly White / @molly0xfff : this is why they're so high, btw. gas fees go up based on demand, and bored apes is minting 100k very-hyped NFTs at the moment https://twitter.com/... Werner Vogels / @werner : When your gas fees are higher than your transaction value... #Ethereum https://www.bloomberg.com/... @yugalabs : The hope was that those challenges would be assuaged via a rigorous gating mechanism in the form of an on-chain KYC, a max mint of 2 per KYC'd wallet, and a significant clearing price at 305 ApeCoin. @lucidcic : @Techmeme And now they owe the community about $350 million so they are actually down bad 🤣 @carnage4life : After watching people justify paying six figures for a monkey JPEGs, I'm excited to see the rationalizations for paying four to five figures for land in a virtual game that doesn't exist yet. Makes an expensive designer bags & jewelry habit seem quaint. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Will Papper / @willpapper : 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. https://twitter.com/... @iamdcinvestor : btw, a brand as careful as Yuga with marketing doesn't just casually suggest creating an alt-L1 in a tweet after a poorly designed mint shit show 100% planned, since the APE drop itself @6foot4honda : it took them this long to figure that out?! @arbitrum will win https://twitter.com/... @cryptogucci : So let me get this right. @yugalabs created a poorly optimized contract and now wants to build its own chain while blaming #Ethereum I've got a feeling Yuga is going to deeply regret this decision https://twitter.com/... John Todaro / @johntodaro1 : Raises $320m but users pay $200m in gas fees. Glad we disintermediated those pesky banks that would have taken a 5% fee. https://twitter.com/... @cobie : ApeCoin should legitimately swap from being ERC20 token to being an ETH fork with rails off (like OG BNB). Their community is too powerful. They can clone Maker, Aave, Uniswap. ApeDollar, Aape, ApeSwap. Pay gas fees in Ape. ApeFi will defeat DeFi if they take this strategic step. @__kingboo__ : @Techmeme Also mention how they decided to leave the mint process so unplanned until last minute where they even decided to change the method of minting only a few days before mint. The fact is: many of us that were KYCd and had funds were used to pump & now hold ApeCoin. @YugaLabs @notgrubles : Oh look another project realizing Ethereum is a dumpster fire. https://twitter.com/... @0xpolygon : We have a *super* solution for you @yugalabs to solve this problem. Polygon Supernets allows you to launch your own public dedicated yugalabs blockchain https://polygon.technology/... https://twitter.com/... Molly White / @molly0xfff : $3800 gas fee for a $270 NFT https://twitter.com/... @darkp0rt : Optimising the contract like this wouldn't of helped here. In fact, it would've made things worse. Ethereum can only handle X amount of transactions per block, up to a 30M gas limit. More optimised contract = more mints in one block = sold out quicker = higher gas wars. https://twitter.com/... Santiago Velez / @santiag78758327 : Lol, like this wasn't the plan the whole time. I can say this, blockchain communities are learning from government on how to manufacture crisis to make forward progress on their goals. Beautiful! https://twitter.com/... Laurie Macfarlane / @l__macfarlane : Last night the launch of a much-hyped NFT caused Ethereum transaction fees to soar to more than $6,000 The NFTs were on sale for $5,800, so the absurd transaction fees more than doubled the price of buying one. So much for ‘democratising finance’ https://www.bloomberg.com/... @carnage4life : Molly White has the details below including examples of transactions where buying an NFT for a few hundred dollars cost A FEW THOUSAND in transaction fees due to the network being congested. Surge pricing for financial transactions, another fantastic crypto innovation. https://twitter.com/... @0xquit : I assume I am an average user. This drop cost me: - 2 eth in gas - 2.5 hours of time I could've spent with family - Immeasurable stress and frustration Coming from a team of Yuga's caliber, this is quite frankly unacceptable. It could have (quite easily) been handled better. Jameson Lopp / @lopp : No need, you can always use Solana. oh wait https://twitter.com/... Danlesac.Oof / @danlesac : Normal day 1 million transactions would cost about $25,000,000, which is already silly but yesterday it cost $200,000,000+ The future is idiotic and incredibly wasteful. https://twitter.com/... @yugalabs : 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. @mooncat2878 : 2/10 So let's start with the most devastating piece of it all. The contract of @yugalabs had nearly zero gas optimizations, which lead to a HUGE gas war and means a lot of people and the whole ecosystem lost over 34k $ETH (Nearly $ 100 Million). https://twitter.com/... @cobie : Ayyy am I getting paid for this https://twitter.com/... @bitmexresearch : Have you thought about a solution from Oracle or IBM? They have decades of experience in providing databases that scale https://twitter.com/... @eljaboom : I said this a month ago. Few saw my point. Most didn't. Now I'll say this again: #APECOIN and the new blockchain will go top with mass adoption. Wait... https://twitter.com/... @bullishovna : @Techmeme Millions in gas fees burnt because the contract wasn't optimized. Then you read this tweet and it's clear that they did on purpose. #NFTCommunity how long will you let people like this manipulate you? @yugalabs is a Digital Overlord, the kind of power web 3 was created to crush. John Hart / @farmgeek : Democratising finance by charging thousands per transaction because someone else is clogging the network minting their latest scam. It would be a joke if so many people weren't falling for it. https://twitter.com/... Alex Svanevik🐧 / @asvanevik : the amount of ETH being burned right now is insane https://watchtheburn.com/ https://twitter.com/... Alex Svanevik🐧 / @asvanevik : ApeCoin has become the #3 dapp in gas usage after @Uniswap and @opensea 🙈 https://twitter.com/... @cobie : Willing to be ApeChain CEO for 1 or 2 billion @0xethandg : Otherside minted out Gas fees: $175 million Yuga Revenue: $310 million @punk6529 : ... https://twitter.com/... Eric Wall / @ercwl : I like EIP-1559. The idea of block rewards increasing => hashrate increasing => difficulty increasing => we pay $99M in electricity bills for extra security we don't even need instead of improving the scarcity of our coin, what a waste. https://twitter.com/... Tarun Chitra / @tarunchitra : On the bright side, its pretty awesome that EIP-1559's code path can safely burn $100M an hour I feel like I've never seen a CEX disperse that velocity of fee rebates in an hour (they usually batch them over a longer time period) @mulligan : The community wanted an apology. Instead they got a humblebrag. 🤷🏻♂ ️ https://twitter.com/... @darrenlautf : The Yuga team can't even make a gas optimised mint contract how they gonna make a L1 Jacob Martin / @thenftattorney : Imagine the amount of $$ we're all throwing away on gas right now being spent funding an entire theme park / village thing for creators and artists and builders and ppl... Hurts to watch... Would rather see the Yuga team make $500m today than $300m and $200m to gas fees... @carnage4life : Apropos of nothing, eBay has been able to run auctions for over 50,000 items simultaneously without requiring $100M in transaction fees for over 20 years. Another reminder of how blockchains are a massive step backwards as a consumer technology. https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : Crypto bros like to joke about TradFi but I've never had to pay $100 ATM fee because lots of people are using ATMs at the same time so... https://twitter.com/... @zeneca_33 : I love yuga but I hope we get an explanation for why their contract isn't gas optimized the way we've seen so many others be lately @nftllama : “YUGA LABS SHOULD REFUND US FOR GAS” man stfu lmfao @nftllama : Y'all getting mad at Yuga over “gas wars”. Bitch get mad at Ethereum - or better yet stop shitting on polygon/solana NFTs all the time and that'd be an option. actually matter of fact - get mad at urself - and just release your anger by buying a Llamaverse - it'll calm you. @nftllama : Why did Yuga Labs not use ERC721A or a better way to distribute WL? Money, you bozos lol More gas = higher price = more royalties and attracts more eyes on higher eth volume aka more money they know and have the money for more efficient methods no one can argue against this @carnage4life : Ethereum gas fees are surge pricing for financial transactions and this is the future of finance? More like the future of separating fools from their money. @nashcollector : A moment of silence for the person who just bought a @tinydinosnft for 0.2eth but with a 1.15eth gas fee. Any more Yuga casualties of war? https://twitter.com/... Aaron McDonald / @aaronmcdnz : As an APE holder This is very disingenuous. That's being kind. Firstly this isn't an ETH problem this is a contract and mechanism design problem. Even if it wasn't. APE was always going to do a L2. They could have waited but that sweet cash was calling. https://twitter.com/... @litocoen : i honestly think they should make apechain a rollup (l2) as an L1 they have to bootstrap their own security and *pay* massive inflation to validators as a rollup they have ethereum's security from day 1 and can even *make* money by charging a spread like Optimism and Arbitrum https://twitter.com/... Emily Nicolle / @emilyjnicolle : demand for land in Bored Ape Yacht Club's unreleased metaverse game Otherside was so high that Ethereum transaction fees skyrocketed. while the price of a land parcel was roughly $5,800, fees rose as high as $6,000 just to mint the NFTs https://www.bloomberg.com/... Marius Watz / @mariuswatz : Tell me again why gas prices are a reasonable technical side effect? The Otherside launch is a grim demonstration of the worst aspects of crypto. It's like a Kickstarter, but a million times more expensive. https://twitter.com/... Christopher D. Long / @octonion : It keeps getting dumber, like it's approaching a stupidity singularity. https://twitter.com/... @shortl2021 : 1/4. I always keep an eye on Crypto as a sentiment check. While the goings on in equity land frequently have me perplexed, Crypto land is a whole other world of crazy. https://twitter.com/... @toastpunk : If it's one thing I learned today about the #Otherside launch is that the Ethereum chain has gas efficiency limits and it breaks if tested on a mega scale. I just wonder why didn't @yugalabs build more optimisation in their contract. On purpose or overlooked? https://twitter.com/... Grady Booch / @grady_booch : “Eliminate the middlemen in the financial system” they said... https://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : If you are not following @molly0xFFF — who chronicles the sheer irrationality of the crytpocurrency/NFT “marketplace” — you are missing out not only on important information but also great entertainment. https://twitter.com/... Mike Rundle / @flyosity : Yuga learned nothing from all the mint gas optimization work done in this space over the last 4-6 months. This is amateur work in 2022. https://twitter.com/... Refik Anadol / @refikanadol : Many of my collector sold their pieces to liquefy their portfolio and many of them are upset! This is a harm to the ecosystem. We used our factor system to eliminate this and it worked perfectly! https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : Reading about how $100M has been spent by punters on gas fees in the past hour but if Yuga Labs had used some common coding practices they could have saved their users over $70M in Ethereum gas fees. And I thought badly written C++ had nasty pitfalls. 😱 https://twitter.com/...