This past Saturday was the fart fest of gas fees. The blockchain imploded under the weight of The Bored Apes Yacht Club’s debut of its new metaverse where it is selling parcels of land in addition to its insanely priced NFT art.
Think of gas fees as transaction fees, shipping fees, or any other sort of service fee. And like many fees they get higher when there’s more demand (think about high peak train tickets as an example). So you pay more in fees to have your transaction processed on the blockchain when things are busy. And boy were they busy when Bored Ape opened its properties.
Last Saturday evening one user wanted to buy $25 worth of Ethereum. It cost them $3,300 in gas fees. The Club sold 55,000 virtual plots of land in Otherside, its new metaverse, for about $5,800 each. While the transactions were done in ApeCoin, the NFTs were minted on Ethereum block chain. According to the press reports, the virtual land deeds sold out, and buyers paid a total of about $123 million in gas fees to send Yuga Labs (creator of the Bored Ape) about $320 million. “Ouch,” says Shelly Palmer, who ran a nice piece on the episode this week.
Otherside is the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s new metaverse selling parcels of land. Figure credit: Otherside Trailer
