Nearly $200M Gas Burnt in Hours, ApeCoin Crashes 30%

The highly-anticipated virtual land sale related to Yuga Labs’ metaverse project went live hours ago and affected a large portion of the entire crypto market. The massive demand led to ETH fees worth nearly $200 million, while ApeCoin’s price slumped by double digits after the sale.

Ever since Yuga Labs, the creators of popular NFT projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced the metaverse project Otherside, the anticipation for the actual sale was soaring.
This led to a substantial price increase for BAYC’s native coin – ApeCoin – as the organization said it will be used to purchase virtual land. Somewhat expectedly, APE charted an all-time high just a few days before Yuga Labs’ sale went live.
Hours ago, the sale indeed went live and caused massive disruptions for the Ethereum network – the blockchain that it’s built on.
Data from Etherscan shows that users have paid almost 64,000 ETH in fees, equaling over $175 million, in the past 24 hours in relation to Otherside.
Will Papper, the co-founder of Syndicate DAO, said the contract had “nearly zero gas optimizations” and provided a few “tricks” that could have “saved many millions.”

The ERC721Enumerable extension is mostly unnecessary. In the majority of cases, tracking ownership on-chain is not useful.

Why? You can just grab the data off-chain on the front-end and pass it into smart contracts instead! Every front-end is able to handle this easily.

— Will Papper ✺ (@WillPapper) May 1, 2022

Yuga Labs also addressed the event, noting that the mint was “so large that Etherscan crashed” and apologizing for “turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while.”
BAYC’s creators also promised to reimburse gas fees for users who had failed transactions and suggested that ApeCoin should be mitigated to its own blockchain in the future.

We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while. 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 (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022

ApeCoin’s price was also affected after the sale. APE, which was among the best performers in the past week or so, tanked by about 30% in the following hours and is down to $17 now, having traded at $27 just a few days ago. This was somewhat expected, as investors rushed in to buy APE ahead of the sale to participate in the sale.