Last weekend’s Otherdeed mint briefly sent gas prices on Ethereum skyrocketing, with some paying thousands of dollars to push transactions through.
The company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) franchise, Yuga Labs, today tweeted it has “refunded gas fees to everyone who made a transaction that failed” during its chaotic Otherdeed mint last weekend.
More than $157 million in Ethereum was burned in gas during the Otherdeed NFT mint, temporarily driving transaction fees on the blockchain to highs not seen since last autumn, which of course affected every Ethereum user.
Some Otherdeed customers reported paying more than double the sale price of 305 ApeCoin (APE)—approximately $5,800 at the time—in gas fees alone, while others saw their transactions fail but were still charged for gas. Approximately 56% of all Ether burned from April 25 to May 2 was caused by the mint.
Yuga Labs has spent 90.57 ETH, or around $265,500 on refunds, according to Etherscan. The largest individual refund has cost Yuga 2.6 ETH (roughly $7,500) while the gas fees incurred by the company during the refund process have hit about $780.
What’s all the fuss about?
Having only been with us for a year, Bored Ape Yacht Club is already a household name in crypto. A cursory glance at NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam reveals that the top three NFT projects in the world today are all in the BAYC universe.
Third place is BAYC-spinoff Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC). In second place, the original BAYC collection—in the past 24 hours alone nearly $30 million BAYC have changed hands. The top spot is currently held by Otherdeed, which has a transaction volume of $50 million in the last 24 hours.
While BAYC and MAYC are collections of NFT profile picture (PFP) avatars—essentially tokenized profile pictures that come with an eradicable deed of ownership on the Ethereum blockchain—the purpose of Otherdeed is a little more enigmatic. Many believe that the 55,000 token collection represents digital land deeds for Yuga Labs’s upcoming BAYC-inspired metaverse, Otherside.
Disgruntled NFT fans were quick to criticize Yuga Labs after the drop, suggesting the company could have opted for a more efficient launch format. Yuga Labs itself has hinted it could well migrate the BAYC ecosystem’s native ApeCoin token to its own blockchain, prompting Ethereum developer Mark Beylin to call the company “con artists of the highest order.”
The negative spin from the mint has also depressed the floor price of BAYCs. The cheapest original BAYC on OpenSea has a current top bid of 95 ETH, or just over $278,000. That’s a staggering drop of around 35% from last Friday’s floor price of $429,000.