Yuga Labs apologises after sale of virtual land crashes Ethereum

theguardian.com:

A multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency company has apologised to users after its sale of “metaverse land” sparked a frenzy that temporarily brought down the Ethereum cryptocurrency.

Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape NFTs beloved of Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, announced the sale of its latest tokens – representing plots of land in a forthcoming multiplayer game called Otherside – on Sunday. A total of 55,000 plots were sold, at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin (a currency created by Yuga), which is worth about £4,500 at current exchange rates.

Demand for the plots was so high that it overwhelmed the Ethereum blockchain, a layer of infrastructure that all cryptocurrency projects rely on to operate. As users raced to be one of the lucky few able to secure an “Otherdeed”, transaction fees on the network rose higher and higher, until an individual NFT purchase cost more than £2,500 in fees alone. One user, who successfully secured two Otherdeeds, paid a transaction fee of over 5 ETH (£11,000) on top of the £9,000 to buy the land itself. Others lost thousands of pounds failing to secure the tokens at all: if a user runs out money while paying the transaction fees, the transaction fails, but the fees aren’t refunded.

For most of those who secured Yuga’s latest token, the eye-watering fees have paid off, at least in the short term: tokens that sold for £4,500 are already reselling for more than £9,000. But people who were unlucky enough to be trying to carry out other cryptocurrency business at the same time have racked up hefty losses. Molly White, a cryptocurrency expert who runs a site chronicling the sector, tracked multiple examples over the day of NFT sales worth less than £500 being hit with transaction fees of more