➽NFTs Are Dead!? OpenSea Just Set a New Daily Trading Record of $476Million
🙈The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s metaverse launch helped push OpenSea to a new one-day record, and a strong rebound for the month of April
This weekend’s launch of deeds for virtual land plots on Otherside—a metaverse game from the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club—generated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of NFT sales and racked havoc on the Ethereum network.
Yuga Labs, the web3 company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain as a flood of users rushed to purchase NFTs representing virtual plots of land in its upcoming metaverse project, Otherside.
A total of 55,000 Otherdeeds sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin, or around $5,800 at the time of purchase raising about $320 million in what was considered the “The largest NFT mint in history.”
Drops large volume of transactions during the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees to soar. Some buyers burned anywhere from 2.6 ETH ($6,500) to 5 ETH ($14,000) in gas fees alone — more than the cost of an Otherdeed NFT of $5800 at the time.
By the time the virtual land deeds sold out, buyers paid a total of about $123 million just to execute their transactions on the Ethereum blockchain .
BAYC has also pulled in numerous celebrity owners, provides holders with various benefits (such as free NFTs, including Otherdeeds), and grants owners IP rights to their owned images.
In March, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in funding to build the Otherside, a decentralized metaverse with elements of gamification. While it’s supposed to encompass Yuga Lab’s NFT brands, such as the newly-acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits, the company has goals to extend support to NFTs from other entities. A lot is still unknown about the prospective Otherside, but that clearly hasn’t stopped its enthusiastic community from investing in the project.
It has also since prompted a new daily record for OpenSea, the top NFT marketplace.
OpenSea registered more than $476 million worth of Ethereum NFT trades on Sunday, May 1, following the late Saturday launch of the Otherside project. That’s according to figures culled from public Ethereum blockchain data by analytics platform Dune. The previous single-day record for OpenSea was nearly $323 million, set on August 29, 2021.
Yuga Labs sold 55,000 Otherdeed land plots via Saturday’s mint, offered another 30,000 for free to existing Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFT owners to claim, and kept 15,000 additional plots for use by developers, partners, and ecosystem contributors. Another 100,000 plots will be released in the future, according to the Otherside.
