Last weekend, Yuga Labs, creator of the hugely popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched a sale of virtual land deeds for its yet-to-be released, highly anticipated metaverse project, Otherside. Things got chaotic very quickly.
So chaotic, in fact, that the value of Bored Apes took a hit.
Though Yuga Labs brought in over $320 million selling its “Otherdeed” NFTs during the sale, the Ethereum blockchain became so congested with transactions that it was pretty much unusable for hours. Users were left spending thousands in fees, even if their transactions failed.
Yuga promised it would refund any users impacted, but it came under a lot of criticism, and there was a tangible financial impact.
The minimum price of a Bored Ape NFT sank over 25% within five days of the Otherdeed NFT sale, according to IntoTheBlock’s Friday newsletter.
In anticipation of the sale, demand for Bored Apes and the ecosystem’s cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, was surging. Being an extension of the Bored Ape ecosystem, Otherdeed NFTs were seen as an opportunity to further the project’s value. The sale seemed to have the opposite effect.
In the past 24 hours alone, Bored Ape NFT sales volume is down 37%, according to NFT ranking site CryptoSlam.
On April 29, the Friday before the Otherdeed NFT sale, the price of Bored Ape NFTs had hit a record high, costing a minimum of around $434,000. This was a huge milestone seeing as a year ago, BAYC NFTs launched at a cost of around $200 each.
As of this morning, Bored Apes are selling below $300,000, as IntoTheBlock points out.
Otherdeed, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Mutant Ape Yacht Club still remain in the top five in terms of NFT collection sales volume in the past 30 days, according to CryptoSlam. But whether BAYC remains in the top five isn’t the key question: It’s whether it can recover its previous upward trajectory, which it has in the past.
“Overall, it is hard to overstate the impact Bored Apes has had on Ethereum, and crypto in general, as depicted by on-chain data,” IntoTheBlock wrote. “While its metaverse land sale broke records of all kinds, the community’s reaction to the high fees and drop in BAYC’s floor price raises questions of whether this was the [BAYC] top for now.”