- Disastrous Otherside mint leaves many paying thousands of dollars in gas fees without receiving anything
- Yuga Labs refused to apologise, instead blaming Ethereum and citing the need to create their own blockchain in order to scale
- The whole episode sums up the growing centralisation of wealth in NFTs, with average investor getting priced out
- In a lot of ways, the Yuga ecosystem comes across as the exact opposite of what cypto is intending to be
What a circus this weekend turned into in the NFT world, and I don’t mean the good kind (are there any good kinds of circuses? They have always struck me as a bit cruel).
Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, had its much-anticipated Otherside mint on Saturday night, for the purchase of pieces of land in their upcoming metaverse game. The start-up, who were worth $4 billion before this weekend, had a pretty good weekend by all accounts, raking in approximately $320 million from the mint.
However, the lucrative windfall was the opposite of what transpired for most investors. Due to the colossal demand, Ethereum gas fees spiked into the four-figures, leaving many investors to stump up massive amounts of gas – and still not get land that they wanted.
Predictable Problems
The problem, however, is that everybody knew this was coming. Yuga’s actions were incompetent, and it wasn’t just their egregious failure to optimise the contract. They also abandoned the Dutch auction that had been originally intimidated, amid a total lack of transparency, and announced the mandatory ApeCoin purchase late.
Furthermore, they failed to prevent the mass farming of KYC wallets. Perhaps worst of all, they donated 15k to their investors, again amid a lack of transparency,
