Yuga Has Botched Another NFT Coin: Will the Bored Ape Maker Dump Ethereum?

The saga began on Tuesday, when Yuga announced that players who successfully completed a mission in the Otherside platform’s Legends of the Mara game could now claim on-chain collectibles called ‘Loot’ as a reward.

Players quickly took to minting the NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, but found that the gas fees these transactions entailed were quite expensive – especially considering the ‘loot’ was supposed to be a free perk.

This wasn’t Yuga’s first rodeo with excessive gas costs. In 2022, a crazy series of deeds for virtual plots in Otherside cost users an eye-watering $157 million in transaction costs, encourage widespread frustration with Yuga’s handling of the situation.

Presumably aware of such events, Yuga’s leadership attempted to rectify any bad feelings about this week’s “loot” with a peace offer. On Thursday, Yuga Chief Gaming Officer Spencer Tucker posted on Twitter that the community’s anger over the loot gas fees was justified. To offset the situation, he said, each affected user would be eligible for a free “Catalyst,” another in-game, on-chain benefit.

The community’s reaction was probably not what Yuga was hoping for. Other players have pilloried the concession, arguing that it doesn’t address structural issues with the way Otherside expects users to mint expensive NFTs on Ethereum.

Within hours, Yuga co-founder Greg Solano intervened to announce that the free Catalyst giveaway had been halted after community backlash. Instead, all gas costs incurred by Otherside players trying to earn loot would be fully covered and reimbursed by Yuga.

“Thank you for calling us and being patient with us,” Solano wrote.

But for many Otherside players, this second solution also failed to address the overarching issues with Yuga’s reliance on the expensive Ethereum mainnet for on-chain transactions.

“These two back-to-back decisions raise greater concerns about the state of Otherside as a whole, the Agora marketplace, and who approves these decisions,” said YouTuber JRNY Crypto. wrote on Twitter in response. “These decisions are entry-level mistakes, not mistakes we should be seeing at the largest company in the space developing a metaverse.”

Otherside has not yet publicly committed to shifting chain commerce to a more cost-effective manner Ethereum layer-2 network or other alternative blockchain. Yuga Labs declined to comment Declutter apart from referencing Solano’s tweet statement.

ApeCoin DAO, an independent decentralized autonomous organization that works ApeCoin, a cryptocurrency for the Bored Ape ecosystem, has long advocated the creation of its own blockchain, called ApeChain. The DAO is currently weighing proposals from several layer 2 networks, including Optimism, ArbitrationAnd Polygon to help build ApeChain.

Although Yuga Labs has previously indicated that ApeCoin DAO should explore creating its own blockchain to address Ethereum traffic and fee issues, the company has never publicly committed to using such a network – if it is ever built – to support Otherside to supply power.

But time may be running out. Even Yuga’s own leadership publicly admitted this week that continued dependence on the Ethereum mainnet may not be sustainable.

“Hitting loot at tier-1 makes the item-to-gas ratio poor,” Spencer Tucker, Yuga Chief Gaming Officer wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Edited by Andrew Hayward