BAYC “Otherside” Metaverse Nets Over $300M In NFT Sales Hours After Going Live

The ‘Otherside’ which is the metaverse for the Bored Ape Yacht Club went live today, marking the start of another exciting journey for the already successful ape-themed crypto community.

“Your key to the Otherside awaits. Mint is live” Yuga labs, the developer community behind Bored Ape Yacht club announced at exactly 9:00 PM ET sparking a lot of enthusiasm from the crypto community as investors scrambled to mint “OtherDeeds ’- the name given to NFT plots in the metaverse.

The mint was set at a flat fee of 305 Apecoin per NFT with 55,000 Otherdeeds being allocated to entities whose wallets had been KYC’d or verified. Buyers would however still have to pay for gas fees in Ethereum. Yuga Labs had also placed a cap on how many NFTs buyers were able to mint in a bid to prevent traffic-related problems.

“In order to ensure as broad a distribution as possible and dramatically soften the potential for massive gas wars, there will be an enforced limit of 2NFTs per wallet at the start of the sale” Yuga had announced adding that “as the mint continues, the number of NFTs that can be minted per wallet will increase.”

Despite attempts to control traffic, minutes into the mint going live, Yuga Labs was forced to “turn off the lights on Ethereum for a while” owing to network congestion which led to failed transactions. 

“It seems abundant that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale” Yuga tweeted two hours into the mint, promising to refund gas fees for affected users. As of writing, all the Otherdeed NFTs allocated to the KYC’d users have been sold out opening up a 21-day claim period for Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club(MAYC)  NFT owners.

Termed as “the largest NFT mint in History by several multiples” such that Etherscan crashed, today’s mint saw Yuga generate well over $100 million in the first forty-five minutes with that figure surpassing $300 million less than three hours later.

With most investors having missed out on the now expensive BAYC and MAYC NFTs mints, collectors consider BAYC plots to be a prime investment just as the saying “the grass is greener on the other side” goes- which perhaps explains today’s record-breaking mint.

That said, despite the BAYC metaverse going live, Apecoin, the native coin for ApeDao has lost over 37% in the past four days, a trend that seems to have worsened today with the coin plunging below $17.