Degenerate Ape Academy
- ApeCoin dipped 16% Monday following a volatile 24-hour trading session.
- The skid follows a massive NFT sale from BAYC creators Yuga Labs for its metaverse game "Otherside."
- NFT deeds for the virtual parcels of "Otherside" real estate sold for 305 ApeCoins each over the weekend.
ApeCoin, the native cryptocurrency of the APE Ecosystem, slid 16% Monday in a viciously volatile trading session.
Tokens were trading at $14.60 per token at presstime. The crypto is often linked with the popular non-fungible token collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, although it isn't the official crypto of BAYC.
The skid follows BAYC creator Yuga Labs' landmark NFT sale over the weekend for its upcoming metaverse game "Otherside." After opening up for sales on Saturday, the Web3 company sold NFTs that act as deeds to 55,000 plots of virtual land.
The so-called Otherdeeds sold for a flat rate of 305 ApeCoins. The volatility in ApeCoin's price resulted in a wide range of estimates for how much the NFT sales brought in.
For example, at Saturday's price of about $19 per ApeCoin, the 16.8 million tokens that Yuga Labs received were worth about $320 million. But after a rally above $33 per ApeCoin, the proceeds topped $561 million. And at current levels, they are worth about $242.5 million.
Yuga Labs had originally planned to sell Otherdeeds at a Dutch auction so the value of the digital assets could decrease over time and counter congestion on the ethereum network. The company ditched the plan last week and instead opted to limit the amount of deeds purchased per person, or wallet.
But the NFT sale still came with speedbumps. High demand and congestion crashed the ethereum network and drove gas fees soaring. At one point, the gas, or transaction fees association with minting tokens, surpassed the cost of the deeds themselves.
Some transactions didn't go through due to the high demand, and Yuga Labs said on Twitter it would work to refund some gas fees to buyers for failed purchases.