If you are interested in colossal tech debuts and those who have epic failures, Yuga labs is easily on the top ten list after the bored ape apocalypse they created with the debut of otherside, on April 30th, 2022.
What is Yuga labs, how are bored apes involved?
If you aren’t in the NFT scene, Yuga labs the owners of Bored Ape Yacht club had a new mint for what they call the otherside, which included land for those who aren’t bored apes, allowing more people into their profitable eco-system.
How did things go wrong with The Otherside mint?
Like any gigantic project bringing tons of people in, you need to plan how to do this without driving up the fee for transactions on the ethereum network drastically and how to ensure you don’t crash the network.
Gas hit an all time high of 6000 gwei, if you don’t know what that means it was over 45 thousand dollars for some people to just pay the fee to have the privilege to pay more money to mint. This is basically a tax of using the ethereum network, or at least it is the easiest way to explain it, as our articles are aimed for everyone.
Why did it cost so much Ethereum?
The code for people to buy land was poorly written for lowering cost, this code is commonly known as a smart contract. 3 or 4 tweaks plus using a raffle or wave system to create rounds of people to mint, to avoid spiking the price of gas could’ve saved over 80 million dollars in fees to all the end users, which at the time this tweet thread was written would’ve cut the costs of minting down to 20 million from the then current amount of 100 million. In this scenario safemint wasn’t needed, and erc721enumerable, which is used to track ownership of nfts on chain, wasn’t needed. We never use erc721enumerable, ever.
There are many efficient ways without using the commands above to make a mint safe, and how to track ownership, yet yuga labs instead burned at the point in time when this was written 80 million dollars. Some estimates say by the end of the mint it was 160 million dollars, which could’ve been cut down to only 40 million dollars lost, but if the wave system had been introduced, I hazardly guess 10 million or less would’ve been lost. Of course, if they had also used 721a, far less money would’ve been lost as well despite it being somewhat bloated, it is the best free contract out there.
Why didn’t Yuga labs fix this? They have tons of employees, how could they lack the skills?
That is where things start to get worrisome from a legal standpoint, Yuga labs made an announcement, that basically can be boiled down to “we broke ethereum, we need to create a competitor” when literally less than 2 dozen characters changed would’ve saved up to 140 million dollars. It wasn’t a fault with the network, it was a fault with their code, which created a lot of people asking if this was intentional, did they plan this as a promotion for their own network? If so, this could potentially fall under the UK and US laws against abusing systems, which has jail time and fines.
We don’t write these words lightly, in fact, we wish it wasn’t necessary but after the display and their statement on what happened, it looked like they intentionally destroyed up to 160 million dollars while crashing the Ethereum network, which could lead to legal action if anyone involved decides to take it.
What is happening now?
The rich and careless with their money are blaming others for complaining about the insane mint price, since the land is now worth more than what they minted at. These people don’t even mention that it cut out the people who didn’t have the money for mint, and refuse to keep yuga labs accountable for the loss of their money that wasn’t needed for what occurred to happen.
What are influential people saying about the bored ape metaverse land mint?
Gary Vee is praising them for innovation without directly mentioning them, yet he knows that gas optimization isn’t hard or innovative, it is the rich and careless with their money glossing over the fact that a ton of money was destroyed.
While Gary Vee is on point with much of his commentary, he completely missed the point here.
This will be updated if need-be, but we believe this sums up the chaos of the bored ape mint and the money lost that shouldn’t have been.
Update: Forgot to mention some of the tweaks were raffles and waves