Yuga Labs has sold 55,000 NFTs linked to the upcoming Otherside metaverse over the weekend. But that wasn’t all. The company generated almost $320 million from the highly anticipated mint. The NFTs were in high demand and caused congestion on the mainnet, which resulted in gas prices reaching new heights.

Moreover, Yuga Labs raked in more than $561 million from the Otherside’s “Otherdeed” sales.

Each 55,000 Otherdeed NFT was sold at 305 APE. Apecoin cost approximately $19 at the mint time, which meant that each NFT was about $5,800. CryptoSlam data shows that Otherdeed generated over $240,000,000 in secondary volume in 24 hours. At press time, the figure was at over $550million.

It was already stated that the Ethereum network became a battlefield due to the demand for NFTs. This caused an immediate gas war. Users also complained that their minting sites did not function.

A gas war is when demand spikes for space in the next block. Priority inclusion auctions are often associated with congestion in the network, higher transaction fees and users fighting for space at the front.

Yuga Labs did not realize that they still had a Dutch auction. It was only via gwei, and it wasn’t price.

— bender (@0xBender) May 1, 2022

Although some users could process their transactions quickly for just a few hundred dollars of fees, other people paid $6,000 to complete a transaction. Bloomberg reports that users spent $123 million on transaction fees in order to mint NFTs. Bloomberg spoke with Jason Wu, founder of DeFiner decentralized lending protocol:

Yuga Labs’ virtual land sale has triggered one of the highest spikes in transaction fees on Ethereum. While I’ve seen NFT launches that have caused high gas fees before, this one is undoubtedly the most prominent.

Some argue that Yuga Labs could do more to avoid the gas-wars. Co-founder of SyndicateDAO, Will Papper, said that the Otherdeed smart contract had “nearly zero gas optimizations.” According to him, “modifying a few words would have saved $80M+” in gas fees.

1. Gas optimization: Get rid of the ERC721Enumerable Extension. This extension can be used to trace the owners on-chain for NFTs. Mints that eliminate the ERC721Enumerable extensions save approximately 70% on their gas bills. This small modification would have saved approximately $70M an hour. pic.twitter.com/nzmwjsVm2K

— Will Papper ✺ (@WillPapper) May 1, 2022

Papper’s stance was, however, countered by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The latter opined that optimizing the contract wouldn’t have solved the problem. Tweet by him:

No matter what contract terms are used, the tx fees go up to list price plus tx cost = market price. If gas usage per purchase decreased 2x, the equilibrium gas price would have just been >12000 gwei instead of 6000.

Yuga Labs, on its part has committed to refunding those who have 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.

— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022

Bored Ape co-founder Garga.eth labeled the mint a “sour moment” for the NFT community, tweeting:

Needless to say tonight didn’t go how anyone wanted it to. Sorry to all the apes and everyone who was eager to be a part of this project.

ApeCoin could be migrated to its own blockchain as a result of this whole mess. While apologizing for “turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” the company said it will “need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale.”

Continue reading on BTC Peers