The Bored Ape Yacht Club project managed to bring a lot of attention to the crypto community. This buzz even rippled on mainstream media outlets, as BAYC NFTs were selling for millions. Now that the NFT craze ended, the project moved to create its own metaverse called “Otherside”. When the project launched its new NFT collection, many problems occurred such as high gas fees, slow transactions, and angry users. Those problems were highlighted in the crypto community, putting the Ethereum blockchain under heavy criticism. Even Vitalik had his share of comments over the disaster. What specifically happened with OTHERSIDE NFT launch? Here’s everything you need to know, detailed from A to Z.
What is Bored Ape Yacht Club?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10000 unique Bored Ape NFTs living on the Ethereum blockchain. It was created by four friends who wanted to make dope apes, test skills and try to build something ridiculous. The project’s parent company is Yuga Labs, which also launched its pre-sale on April 23, 2021. The project believes in fair distribution and has fixed its membership and Bored Ape price as the same for all. The starting cost of one Bored Ape was 0.08 ETH.
Buying Bored Ape grants you a Yacht Club membership card and exclusive community access. More importantly, it gives you access to the BAYC Bathroom. The Bathroom contains a canvas accessible only to wallets holding at least one ape. Ape holders will be able to paint a pixel on the bathroom wall every fifteen minutes. It is yet to be operational and will go live after its pre-sale period is over. According to the BAYC website, pre-sale is at 80% and should attain the 100% mark before Q4 2022. The native and governance token of the project is ApeCoin.
What is Apecoin Crypto?
ApeCoin is the governance and native cryptocurrency of the APE and BAYC ecosystem. Its design enables it to become the decentralized protocol layer for activities within the community and its ecosystem. It is also an ERC-20 token that developers use to empower and incentivize decentralized community building at the forefront of web3. Token holders govern themselves via the decentralized governance framework controlling the ApeCoin DAO.
Holders of the token can also vote on how to use the DAOs ecosystem funds. Apart from Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club, ApeCoin is also an affiliate of the APE Foundation. APE Foundation ensures that it administers proposals by the token holder, allowing them to collaborate through open and permissionless governance. Since ApeCoin is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, the blockchain’s proof-of-work (POW) consensus mechanism secures it. The token also acts as incentivization for developers who incorporate it in their products, games, and services.
What is the OTHERSIDE Crypto Metaverse?
Otherside is the metaverse game of the BAYC project. The game is still currently under development, but the creators are prepping the ecosystem from now. The people behind the project introduce the OTHERSIDE as a “game that blends mechanics from massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) and web3-enabled virtual worlds.”
The game will have experiences such as dungeons and dragons. The experience is claimed to be always evolving, where players themselves will have a say in how the game develops.
What is Otherdeed?
In order to interact in the OTHERSIDE game and purchase land, users will need Otherdeeds NFT. The latter is the key to interacting in this virtual metaverse. Otherdeeds are capped at 200,000. The first 100,000 batch was released on the 30th of April 2022. The second 100,000 batch will be released solely to Otherdeed holders (aka the guys who purchased the first batch, or the ones who purchased them from the secondary markets) and to people who contribute to the development of the project. If you want to purchase Otherdeeds, you needed to own Apecoin.
That’s why people were rushing to claim their Otherdeeds from the first release. In fact, this “rush” caused a big controversy in the crypto space. Let’s talk about what happened.
OTHERSIDE Metaverse caused Problems – What Happened?
On the day of the release of the first 100,000 batch of Otherdeeds, there was a very high demand for those NFTs. The sale was indeed successful, but many technical challenges happened, revealing all the flaws of the Ethereum network. Let’s go over all the drawbacks that happened.
Gas Fees became SUPER Expensive
The demand for Otherdeeds became immense to the extent that the blockchain became clogged. More demand means that people are willing to pay extra “gas fees” for priority. This contributed to a bidding ecosystem, driving gas fees higher. Typically, gas fees range anywhere between $10 and $100. On the day of the release, gas fees reached more than $12,000 with an average of $3,000, for a transaction that costs $2,000!
Apecoin Price CRASHED
In order to buy Otherdeeds, you need to have purchased the APE token. Many users already bought the token days before the sale. However, with all the delays and problems that occurred the day of the sale, many got frustrated and decided not to buy anymore, or even couldn’t. This led to a massive sell on the same day, a fact that contributed to the drop in the price of Apecoin. This unfruitful event caught the eye of many traders, who saw the opportunity to short-sell APE and make hefty returns in the early morning of the 1st of May 2022.
Prior to the sale, this token increased by 150% to reach a price of around $24. On the other hand, after the chaotic sale, the price of APE sank to a current price of $17, losing around 30% in a single day.
Costly Failed Transactions
Worse than all are those whose other transactions failed after waiting for hours. Since the number of purchase attempts exceeded the supply of Otherside NFTs, not every attempt was successful. Typically, a failed transaction costs around $30, which is painful enough. These failed transactions cost some people thousands of dollars due to ridiculously high gas.
In a Twitter statement, Yuga Labs said it would refund those failed transaction fees, and said it could develop an entirely new blockchain to run its Metaverse campaigns.
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.
We are aware that some users had failed transactions due to the incredible demand being forced through Ethereum’s bottleneck. For those of you affected, we appreciate your willingness to build alongside us – know that we’ve got your back and will be refunding your gas.
Conclusion
Airdrops, new releases, and beta testing phases are always full of bugs, mishaps, and technical difficulties. It is very hard for software companies, especially ones that are in the crypto space, to launch without any problems. That’s why investors should always be wary of those circumstances and proceed with caution when participating in such events.
Expect long waiting hours, stress, and even losing money. On the other hand, this venture might make you win big, as many who participated in the Otherdeed sale managed to buy low, and are already receiving offers on their sales with triple their money. We remain on the lookout for what happens in the second 100,000 sale of Otherdeeds and how the company will deal with those refunds.
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