After fever dream comes rude awakening.
There are many interesting takes on Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds mint spread across Twitter…
But first some numbers.
The mint raised $320 million for Yuga Labs. It had previously raised $450 million from VCs.
The mint resulted in $180 million-worth of ETH spent in gas fees, some of which Yuga will be refunding to users whose mint transactions didn’t complete.
Since the mint 36 hours ago, there’s been over $520 million-worth of Otherside NFT trading, which makes the project #1 for trading volume over the past 30 days, beating out Moonbirds.
Conversely…
The price of ApeCoin has dropped 42% from its all-time high of $26.70.
The floor price for Mutant Apes is down around 33% and Bored Apes by around 20%.
But the floor price of Moonbirds is up 40% and Doodles up 38% to an all-time high as some cycle out of Apes into other PFPs. Doodles might even flip Mutants.
Broadly put, Yuga Labs has gained a lot of tangible assets and lost a lot of goodwill.
My anecdotal view (for what it’s worth) is that most of those who are annoyed are people who for whatever reason — either didn’t have enough ETH to mint or tried to be too clever with gas — couldn’t mint an Otherdeed.
After all, those who did manage to mint successfully can even now sell out at the 4.5 ETH floor price having made money on their weekend activities, and some have made considerably larger sums for little risk.
When it comes to criticism of Yuga Labs’ process, clearly there are things that could have been done better. But fundamentally the fact such a large and competitive mint happened with the only significant issue being gas price should be viewed as a success.
Indeed, this is how Ethereum gas prices are supposed to react to increasing demand; those who pay the most get their transactions minted.
The only other option would have been to attempt to gate such huge demand with an auction process, which would have been more complex and still involved a gas war to get transactions through: the worst of both worlds.
More broadly, basic economics tells us that when overwhelming demand meets fixed supply, the only ways you can deal with the situation is via a lottery or allowing market forces to set prices.
However, the bit I don’t understand is why Yuga Labs allowed so many accounts to be KYC’ed — 40,000 is the number quoted?
Then, given this number of accounts had been KYC’ed, why did Yuga allowed everyone to mint 2 NFTs?
The only thing I can think so of is to spread the expected high gas fees (2 ETH) over two NFTs because Yuga didn’t think the floor price for Otherdeeds could sustain this cost for a one NFT mint.
And it’s at this point, we choose between incompetence, conspiracy or greed.
Funding news
BreederDAO has raised $20 million via the launch of its BREED token, which is an ERC20 running on Ethereum. BreederDAO previously announced a $10 million seed round in January 2022, which was led by a16z and Delphi Digital.
BreederDAO works with guilds to automate the creation of the NFTs they want to play P2E games. It’s also just launched Playcore, a public interface for its market intelligence.
YGG SEA has announced a $500,000 investment and exclusive strategic agreement which was co-led by Solana Venture to provide training and resources for blockchain game development in southeast Asia using the Solana blockchain.
This takes the total funding for this one of YGG’s regional subDAO to $15.5 million. YGG’s Spanish language subDAO OlaGG announced a $8 million seed round last week, while its Indian subDAO IndiGG announced a $6 million seed round in January 2022.
Product news
I’ve been a longterm supporter of Chainmonsters, back from its Kickstarter days and it’s great to see how the relatively small dev team continues to build out its vision, now on the Flow blockchain, with regular and meaningful updates.
Next up is Chainmonsters’ Beta phase 2, which adds the islands each player will own in-game and create various buildings, furniture and other items as they progress. Other additions include environmental factors such as weather and day/night cycles that will impact how Chainmons react in battles.
Kongregate has announced Bitverse, a soon-to-launch collection of web3 games for mobile and web set in a nostalgic 8-bit universe. It will launch with three titles including “Kongregate fan-favorite” RPG Bit Heroes, which was released in 2016 and has racked up 15 million players, battle royale shooter Bit Heroes Arena and Bit Heroes Runner.
Each game will operate as a standalone project but everything will be backed by the Bitverse Pixel token (BPXL) as well as interoperable NFTs including mounts, pets, familiars and gear, with a 10,000 avatar NFT drop planned for Q2 2022. All NFTs will run on the Immutable X blockchain.
The Sandbox news
The Sandbox has partnered up with ambitious Solana space trading/combat game Star Atlas for a creator collab.
The Star Atlas VoxEdit contest opens on 2nd May until 15th May, with artists using The Sandbox’s VoxEdit creation tools to build Star Atlas-themed content based around its three main factions: the ONI, Ustur, and MUD. Another part of the contest will see creators designing an avatar headpiece, which will be judged by DJ BLOND:ISH, who’s active in both games’ communities.
Winners will be announced on 11th June, with the top four splitting 50,000 SAND tokens and a fleet of Star Atlas spaceship NFTs.
Blankos Block Party news
The itch I keep having to scratch … there are now 100 different Blankos characters live, with floor prices ranging from $5 million for the one-off Golden Ticket character to $3 for the just-launched battle pass free mint character Laplaz.
I don’t know the significance of this, but I am trying to think about it!