Otherside land NFTs sell out in hours as Yuga Labs rakes in $317 million

The Otherside metaverse project sold out all the available 55,000 Otherdeed land NFTs within three hours of its public sale starting at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday.

According to Otherside’s official Twitter account, investors scooped up all the NFTs in an offering that accepted only ApeCoin cryptocurrency.

The mint price was 305 ApeCoin, worth about $5,800 at the time of mint. It brought in 16.7 million ApeCoin ($317 million), making it a record-setting NFT mint. A mint is a public offering in which NFTs are sold through a smart contract on a blockchain like Ethereum.

The buyers had to pass a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and had their crypto wallets pre-approved on the project’s website.

The NFTs will give buyers rights to claim land in the Otherside metaverse, a blockchain-based virtual world being developed by Yuga Labs — creator of popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT collections.

After today’s mint, BAYC and MAYC holders will also be able to claim free land during a 21-day period.

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More than 27,000 users bought the 55,000 available Otherdeed NFTs of a total 100,000 minted. The remaining 45,000 are included in an airdrop open to existing holders of BAYC and MAYC NFTs.

As a highly anticipated NFT release, the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain to soar to 8,000 GWEI, per data from Etherscan block explorer.

This resulted from a gas war — a situation in which many Ethereum users tried to buy NFTs at the same time and outbid each other by using the network’s transaction fees. Such bids can cause the fees on the blockchain to spike, as was the case today.

In the end, on-chain data revealed the Otherdeed gas war led to the sale running up an additional $172 million in transaction fees that cost individual buyers between $4000 and $10,000. Such high mint fees caused many to complain they were unable to make purchases.

On Twitter, Ethereum developer Foobar critiqued Yuga Labs for writing a smart contract that was not optimized for gas wars.

Commenting on the gas war, Yuga Labs said the Otherside metaverse may be looking to migrate away from Ethereum to its own Layer 1 blockchain to improve scalability.