Last weekend, April 30th, 2022, Bored Ape Yacht Club creators, Yuga Labs, opened up their new, NFT-friendly metaverse, to sell plots. This happened on the one year anniversary of the day their BAYC NFT's took off, and sold out. It has been quite a year for Yuga Labs and the Bored Ape Yacht Club community.
Yuga Labs seemed to be on fire. The Ape NFT's, 10,000 of which were sold at .08 Eth, roughly $230 at the time they sold out, took off. Prices reached 5 figures in weeks, and coming into April 2022, the floor price (lowest priced Ape for sale) was well over $300,000. Not a bad return for such a crazy year. The BAYC community had galvanized in their first year, and the Apes approached, and then surged past the floor price of the O.G. NFT's, CryptoPunks.
Along the way, Yuga Labs did another big launch, Mutant Apes, they air dropped NFT dogs to Ape holders, and raised $450 million of good old fiat U.S. dollars in a major funding round. That valued the 10-11 month old business at $4 billion. Not bad considering they weren't even sure the Bored Ape NFT's would sell well at first.
On fire, and seemingly able to do no wrong, Yuga Labs promptly bought out the O.G.'s, Crypto Punks, along with Meebits and some other NFT series. Then they announced they were going to launch their own NFT friendly metaverse, and tossed out this epic trailer as a tease. The Yuga/Ape metaverse would be called The Otherside, and it looked cool, interesting, NFT friendly, gamified, and completely different than all the other metaverses being built, particularly Facebook/Meta's version.
Then they announced and air dropped their metaverse token, Apecoin, to Ape NFT holders. The hype pot was bubbling like the Jacuzzi at a rap star's stripper-filled party mansion party. The Dutch auction plan was dropped at the last minute, and the sale of the "Otherdeeds" to get your plot of Otherside virtual land, commenced.
It seemed Yuga could do no wrong. Until the gas prices took off like a Space X rocket, and the Ethereum blockchain slowed to a crawl. Somewhere between $160 and $181 million in Eth was burned up in the sale. Like poof! Gone. That's what everyone was hoping would not happen. Transactions didn't go through, some people had the special wallet and $6,005 in Apecoin to buy their deed, but couldn't swing the 2-3 Eth ($4,000-$6,000) in gas fees to make their transaction happen.
Basically, The Otherside launch was so massive and popular, it broke Ethereum, or at least ground it to a halt, for a while. A LOT of people were really pissed off, for several different reasons, including people doing non-related transactions on Ethereum at the time. But the sale proceeded, and the Otherside sold out, and Yuga raked in about $230 million in Apecoin, which had doubled in price in the previous couple of weeks. Apecoin started to drop back down just before the sale, and kept dropping, and Yuga's take wound up being around $170 million, or so,for the launch. Not a bad day's work. But they took a beating in reputation with all the issues, unfilled transactions, record gas fees. They came out of the day kind of like a prize fighter, a fist full of cash, but beaten and bruised up from the battle.
It's been five days now, and if you watch this pre-launch video by The Defiant, along with the one above, you get a good take on the whole crazy fiasco, before and after. Yuga is now licking its reputation wounds a bit, but it still sold out of plots in The Otherside metaverse, and there's no sign of demand going down any great amount.
If you are into crypto or NFT's, you know this was a HUGE event, forcing people to look at the limitations of a launch, NFT's, the Ethereum blockchain, gas fees, and blockchains in general. The hype is dying down, and people are trying to get a grasp on all the properties and features in The Otherside. A jar of Koda farts, anyone? What are all these things going to mean? Which features of the plots will be the most valuable? Will Yuga get this NFT filled universe up and running smoothly? Where is this crazy metaverse headed? All those questions remain to be answered.
I'm a broke MFer right now, so I don't own anything in Yuga world, not even a couple of Apecoins, at the moment. But I think they are definitely heading in a really interesting direction, and leading the huge pack of NFT PFP communities. I'm keeping my eye on this rapidly expanding cyber world, and all it entails. Yuga keeps surprising us by putting way more thought and effort into projects than expected. It's probably good that they took some lumps at this point, to show some of the weaknesses and needs in the NFT/metaverse world going forward.
If you are not into crypto and NFT's, you're wondering WTF I'm talking about. Just go watch Netflix, and jump on the bandwagon in 2023 or 24, when the other normies "suddenly discover" the NFT world.
I started a new personal blog in May 2022, check it out:
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