Bored Ape’s Land Sale Broke Ethereum. Extreme Success Or Roaring Failure?

On Saturday, April 30th, Bored Ape’s creators Yuga Labs broke Ethereum. Their new metaverse-inspired project, Otherside sold plots of virtual land to a roaring crowd of people yelling “Shut up and take my money!” In this case, the currency in question was the recently created ApeCoin. However, since Ethereum host ApeCoin and the land NFTs, the roaring crowd needed ETH to pay for the operations’ gas fees. If you’re familiar with Ethereum, you already know what happened. According to IntoTheBlock’s Lucas Outumuro, “The Bored Ape’s Otherside land sale led to more fees being processed by Ethereum in three hours than in the previous two weeks.” Of course, all hell broke loose. The gas prices across the network went through the roof, many transactions failed causing people to lose their gas fees, and others just couldn’t afford to mint the NFT lands they were entitled to. At the end of the day, the Otherside virtual plots NFTs, known as Otherdeeds, sold out. The Ethereum network pocketed around $125M just in gas fees. It didn’t survive the madness unscathed, though. Several Ethereum-based projects reported failed and/or slow operations and Etherscan, Ethereum’s block explorer, completely crashed. “We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Bored Ape’s creators Yuga Labs stated. The Origins Of Otherside Back in March, Yuga Labs raised an Andreessen Horowitz-led funding round of $450M to build Otherside. Ap...