BAYC’s Otherside NFT Drop Triggers ETH Burning Frenzy

Ethereum’s burning rate has increased to unprecedented levels, fueled by the highly-anticipated virtual land sale related to Yuga Labs’, the startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Otherside metaverse project.

Just hours after the sale of 55,000 virtual lands NFTs – dubbed “Otherdeeds” –  went live on Saturday night, Ethereum gas fees rose to astonishing levels in tandem with the overwhelming demand.

• As per data from on-chain analytic platforms, Data Always and Glassnode, almost 70,000 ETH was burned on the same day.
• Since surging to a record level of 20,000 ETH in January this year, the figure has been on a downward trend, but the latest demand drove it higher by 250%.
• CryptoPotato earlier reported that users have paid almost 64,000 ETH in fees – nearly $175 million – with respect to Otherside.
• Moreover, the average burn rate since the introduction of EIP-1559 last August has been 5.81 ETH per minute. In the monthly time frame, Otherdeed’s NFTs are currently dominating the burn leaderboard, accounting for over 55,824 ETH after surging past OpenSea, Uniswap v3, Tether, MetaMask, etc.
• Touted as one of the largest NFT mints in history, Yuga Labs made more than $318.7 million from this mint alone.
• The sudden increase in demand for fast transactions clogged the Ethereum network resulting in gas wars. This is despite the project canceling the Dutch-style auction for its NFTs to prevent what it called “apocalyptic gas wars.”
• The creator of BAYC acknowledged the incident and vowed to reimburse gas fees for Otherdeed minters with failed transactions.

“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.”

• Will Papper, a co-founder of SyndicateDAO, argued if Yuga Labs had carried out a few gas optimization tricks, many millions would have been saved. This includes removing the ERC721Enumerable extension, using the ERC721A standard, and switching from _safeMint() to _mint().