Someone Paid $500K in ETH Fees to Mint 950 Tubby Cat NFTs

Yesterday saw one of the most highly-anticipated collections of non-fungible tokens go through its public sale. As expected, the event was heavily populated by bots, and one of them managed to mint 950 tubby cats, spending 200 ETH in gas in the process.

Explaining Tubby Cats

Tubby Cats is a collection of 20,000 unique non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that went through its whitelist and public mint over the course of this week. In a bid to incentivize decentralized ownership of the NFTs and to produce as many holders as possible, the team behind the project whitelisted almost 20,000 people who were able to mint a tubby cat for the price of 0.1 ETH.

This is what some of them look like:

However, out of those 20K spots, about 15,000 minted, and the rest was dropped to the public. As the developers of the project and many other NFT proponents warned, the event was populated by bots.

In fact, the developer of the project’s smart contract even detailed the expected gas prices for the public mint prior to the event.

For people participating in public mint, these are the gas prices we’ll likely see (between the two columns) and their associated cost per tubby.

If you are going to bid below these gas prices DONT PARTICIPATE IN MINT since your tx will fail.

Also: always mint 5 tubbies pic.twitter.com/TtfieJbkNV

— 0xngmi (@0xngmi) February 23, 2022

Here Comes the Bots

As it happens with every highly-expected public mint, the event was instantly sniped by bots. One of them managed to snag 950 tubby cats, spending 100 ETH for the mint and a whopping 200 ETH (worth around $500K) for gas.

Was it worth it? Well, breaking the mat shows that the person spent roughly around 0.315 ETH per tubby. At the time of this writing, the floor price sits at around 0.47 ETH, although this fluctuates massively. So, ultimately, it would depend on the project’s performance in the mid term.

Interestingly enough, one of crypto Twitter’s most popular participants – Cobie, formerly known as Crypto Cobain – posted that he was the one who minted the tubbies. However, he later clarified that this wasn’t the case.