Otherside’s mega mint war rises controversy

Will Yuga Labs use Otherdeeds’ mint war as a pretext to create its own blockchain?

Four days after Yuga Labs’ Otherside land NFTs mint, crypto community is still dwelling on its controversial execution.

Otherdeeds was probably the most hyped, and definitively the largest mint in history of NFTs: users have spent a total of $180M on Ethereum fees only, some setting additional fees of several thousand dollars to try and get their transactions more priority.

The crypto community is used to complain about more or less any big mint, but Otherdeeds has exceeded all the previous ones, and so did the crypto Twitter’s discontent.

Yuga Labs are being accused of letting too many people complete a KYC and thus participate in the drop, of rejecting the Dutch auction format (where NFT price decreases during the course of the sale, thus mitigating the demand), of failing to optimize NFTs’ smart contract (which could have been less gas-hungry), or refusing to use a layer-2…

Even the company’s commitment to reimburse the fees related to the failed transactions was met with resentment, as community increasingly wonders if BAYC and Otherside ecosystem are indeed reserved for the rich insiders.

Others wonder if Yuga Labs could have arranged or used this situation to push forward the idea of its own blockchain, especially after the company tweeted it would encourage ApeDAO to think about migrating ApeCoin to its own chain.

Otherdeeds NFTs have generated over $300M in initial mints, and almost $1Bn including secondary sales so far. If Otherside maintains the same level of public excitement, it could eventually feel cramped on Ethereum… and why offer all this activity to an existing blockchain, when you can create your own?..

It remains to be seen if community is willing to accept Yuga Labs’ ambitions.