nft
Bulletins

The creator of Bored Apes disrupted Ethereum with a virtual land sale

Yuga Labs' $320 million haul came at a heavy, if temporary, cost to the rest of the crypto market.

A Bored Ape NFT.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator's virtual land NFT launch caused a disruption on the Ethereum blockchain.

Photo: Bored Ape Yacht Club

The creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club disrupted the Ethereum blockchain over the weekend after users rushed to buy its new virtual land NFTs, driving up transaction fees as the huge sales volume swamped the network's capacity.

Yuga Labs began selling virtual land Saturday as part of its upcoming Otherside metaverse project. The company raised about $320 million worth of cryptocurrency in what Yuga Labs said is the “largest NFT mint in history.”

But there was so much demand, it created a serious bottleneck that also caused transaction fees to rise sharply, according to Bloomberg.

“We're sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Yuga Labs said in a tweet.

The company said some users’ transactions failed “due to the incredible demand being forced through Ethereum’s bottleneck.” Yuga Labs said it will be refunding gas fees of affected users.

Referring to the cryptocurrency used for the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, the company also said, “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We'd like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.”

Yuga Labs announced in March that it had raised a conventional $450 million funding round, which it planned to use to expand into gaming and the metaverse. The company said it's building Otherside as a metaverse for gaming.

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

nftsbored ape yacht clubethereumblockchainnft
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