Hype and Drama Surrounding Recent Bored Ape Metaverse Land Sale

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The recent NFT lands mint by Bored Ape Yacht Club for their Otherside metaverse game have been surrounded by quite some drama and hype, with effects reaching far beyond the project's ecosystem.

Ahead of the Sunday's mint, the price of native token ApeCoin (APE) surged significantly. Price of the Bored Ape NFT also pumped with people rushing to purchase Apes, because there was a free Otherdeed offered against every APE owned.
And it seems the momentum have slowed down with hype cooling off. ApeCoin is down by 45% from its peak price of $25.97 last week. The floor price of Bored Ape NFTs also plummeted by more than 30%, to below $300,000 lowest price in a month.

Even though the Bored Ape Yacht Club Land mint was an astounding success with more than $1 billion trading volume recorded so far, but the sale also faced some technical glitches and hence the community backlash.

The high demand for the mint pushed the Ethereum gas fees to unprecedented highs, with buyers paying as high as 5ETH fees. And those who failed to mint despite paying such hefty gas cost were naturally not outraged and some even blamed Bored Ape Yacht Club for pulling this as a marketing stunt to move project to new dedicated chain. And even though Bored Ape Yacht Club have promised to pay back the gas fees spent to unsuccessful buyers, the backlash continues.

And remember EIP-1559 upgrade which resulted in burning of a small part of gas fees, so huge amount of Ethereum was also burnt due to NFT land sale event which involved minting 55,000 NFT lands with 2-5 ETH paid for each transaction. 55,817.39 ETH was burnt from gas fees, making Otherdeed NFTs to top the leaderboards of weekly Ethereum burns. This also pushed the total daily Ethereum burns to a record high of 70,000 ETH.

ApeCoin DAO clarified that currently there are no plans under discussion regrading departure to a dedicated chain, so with future mints by the project, the possibility of clogging Ethereum network remains.

Even though the hype have cooled off but that doesn't mean Bored Ape Yacht Club is still immensely valued project on Ethereum. Even with dwindling floor price the total combined value of 10,000 Apes is around $3.0 Billion, larger than any other NFT project.