Sale of Bored Apes' Metaverse Land Made Gas Fees Skyrocket Past $3,000

There's a new metaverse project from the creators of the "Bored Apes Yacht Club" NFTs. Last night they held a "virtual land" sale, reports Bloomberg, raising nearly a third of a billion dollars. At about the same time, Mashable noticed something else happening:If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw. For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees. Every transaction on their blockchain incurs a fee (which rises based on the number of concurrent transactions), the article points out. "Ethereum transactions can fail if a user doesn't pay enough in gas fees. When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee." "Ethereum proved unusable for hours due to its inability to distribute the load..." reports CNET. "Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees.... "Over $175 million was spent on gas alone." Mashable adds:An overwhelmed Ethereum Network....caused fees to skyrocket to astronomically high amounts.... One cryptocurrency advocate noticed that from just the Bored Ape's NFT sale, approximately $100 million were wasted during the first hour of the "land" sale in gas fees alone. As mentioned earlier, transactions can often fail when the Ethereum network is facing unusually high traffic. And last night, many people paid thousands in gas fees for transactions that didn't even go through. Yuga Labs says it will refund users those fees, but it's unclear just how the company plans to do that. Also, Yuga Labs will ostensibly only cover the fees from failed transactions directly involving the company. If you're a user who was attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to those thousands in lost fees.... However, there was at least one winner from the Saturday night sale: Yuga Labs. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand raked in $285 million from the NFT sale. Transaction costs just to mint the Otherdeed NFTs after the launch "reached $123 million," reports Bloomberg, "with each Otherdeed requiring about $6,000, or two Ether, in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Etherscan - or more than the price of the deed itself."Yuga Labs apologised on Twitter for "turning off the light on Ethereum", and suggested the possibility of establishing an ApeCoin blockchain.

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