ApeCoin falls 30% as Otherside metaverse launches

On Sunday, May 1, the Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection, launched the Otherside metaverse. All Otherdeed tokens sold out in under three hours.

The Otherdeed NFT mint is sold out — we are awestruck at the demand shown tonight. Apes and Mutants, the opening of the 21-day claim period is being delayed until the price of gas drops to reasonable levels. We’ll tweet when the claim opens. https://t.co/iRz64lklbv

— OthersideMeta (@OthersideMeta) May 1, 2022

Yuga Labs noted “unprecedented” demand for the Otherdeeds NFT, which surpassed “the wildest expectations.” The team apologised for the failed Ethereum transactions and pledged to reimburse gas costs.

“Obviously, ApeCoin needs to move to its own chain for proper scaling. We urge the DAO to start thinking in this direction,” said Yuga Labs.

The hope was that those challenges would be assuaged via a rigorous gating mechanism in the form of an on-chain KYC, a max mint of 2 per KYC’d wallet, and a significant clearing price at 305 ApeCoin.

— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022

Against the backdrop of the Otherside launch, the ApeCoin (APE) token tied to the BAYC ecosystem fell 30%. At the time of writing, the asset was trading around $17.

Twelve hours before the Otherside launch, the largest NFT marketplace OpenSea announced ApeCoin would be accepted as a payment method on its platform.

.@opensea just announced ApeCoin will be used to make purchases on its platform!👏🎉🎊 https://t.co/SPJhQG5mq9 pic.twitter.com/p0kbSYY6FD

— ApeCoin (@apecoin) April 30, 2022

Yuga Labs issued 55,000 Otherdeeds NFTs at a price of 305 APE. The project team introduced a mandatory KYC verification for buyers and a cap on the number of tokens available per address — 2 NFTs per address.

Initially, Otherdeeds were planned to be distributed through a Dutch auction, but the team abandoned that method due to its inefficiency.

Earlier in March, Yuga Labs released a video announcing Otherside, in which characters from the BAYC and MAYC collections, as well as CryptoPunks and Meebits, appeared. The rights to the latter were acquired by the project team a few days before the announcement of the metaverse.

In the same month, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in a funding round valuing the company at $4 billion. The financing was also directed towards the creation of Otherside.

In April, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced a casting of NFTs from the BAYC collection to be used in the forthcoming three-part film The Degen Trilogy. The first episode will be shown at the end of June.

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