Crypto news: Otherside NFT land rush sparks gas war; Solana dips out again; Warren Buffett still hates Bitcoin

The Otherside digital land sale is the largest NFT mint in crypto’s short history, but it also resulted in some of the most wallet-busting gas fees ever seen on the Ethereum network.

That’s just for starters. There’s usually a shedload of news to catch up on after a weekend in the financial market that never stops to scratch itself. In case you missed it, here’s a slice of what’s been headlining in crypto over the past 24 hours or so…

Traders burnt by fees as BAYC’s ‘Otherdeeds’ land sale goes bananas

Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem developer Yuga Labs held its hotly anticipated digital land sale on Saturday evening (Sunday morning AEDT), and to put it mildly, it caused a bit of a stir in the NFT-trading community.

Dubbed “Otherdeeds”, the NFTs represent titles to plots of virtual land in the upcoming 3D space known as Otherside, which is BAYC’s foray into the metaverse.

Keen traders fully aped into a limited supply of 55,000 of the NFTs at about US$5,800 each at the time of sale (according to Cointelegraph) – only available for purchase with ApeCoin (APE), Yuga Labs’ official currency. Ethereum (ETH) for gas fees was also required – which is standard but variable in size according to mint popularity.

The land rush made Yuga Labs more than US$318 million in sales, but also created a transactional bottleneck on the Ethereum network resulting in crazy gas fees of anywhere from around US$450 to a ridiculous 5 ETH (about US$14,000) for some.

At the time of writing, the total fees paid by Otherdeeds NFT buyers amounts to more than US$182.5 million.

I just paid $14k in gas to mint 4 Otherdeeds for Otherside. I’m going to go throw up now. @BoredApeYC

— Hustler (@0xHustler) May 1, 2022

This kind of bottlenecking is a well known issue on the Ethereum network and often occurs during much-hyped NFT mints.

Essentially, when everyone rushes in to buy at the same time, gas fee prices rise across the board, resulting in what’s sometimes called a “gas war”. This then means potential NFT buyers need to raise their gas fees in order to compete for a mint they’re desperate to carry through.

Meanwhile, BAYC co-founder “Garga.eth” struck an apologetic tone in the wake of the mint madness…

Needless to say tonight didn’t go how anyone wanted it to. I want to say sorry to the apes, and to everyone else who eagerly looked to join into the project. It’s especially a sour moment since Otherside has been a passion project for so long.🧵

— Garga.eth (@CryptoGarga) May 1, 2022

… as did Yuga Labs…

“This has been the largest NFT mint in history by several multiples, and yet the gas used during the mint shows that demand far exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations,” read a Yuga Twitter thread. “We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while.”

We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while. It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.

— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022

ApeCoin has dipped hard since the mint, crashing more than 11 per cent in the pas 24 hours to US$15.72 at the time of writing. The “Otherdeed for Otherside” floor price is currently 4.3 ETH (about US$12,000).

Solana dips out… yet again

Meanwhile, another major competing layer 1 blockchain has been experiencing familiar difficulties of its own.

The Solana network, one Ethereum’s main smart-contract platform rivals, has suffered seven hours of offline downtime after its mainnet beta “fell out of consensus”, according to Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs.

PSA: Solana mainnet beta fell out of consensus and the validator network couldn’t recover.

— Austin Federa (@Austin_Federa) May 1, 2022

The outage happened across the weekend and is apparently being attributed to an invasion of NFT minting bots – a large number of transactions simultaneously clogging up the network, similar to the ETH gas war mentioned further above.

The network apparently struggled under the weight of a record-breaking 100 gigabits of data per second, according to official Solana tweets (see below).

Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps. Engineers are still investigating why the network was unable to recover, and validator operators prepare for a restart.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022

Candy Machine, an app designed to mint Solana NFTs, was reportedly the main cause of the bot-traffic-induced network crash, confirmed by the app’s creator Metaplex.

Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. https://t.co/QaAZT3VxXz

— Metaplex (@metaplex) May 1, 2022

This is now at least the seventh time this year that Solana has suffered such a network outage. The network is back up and running smoothly again now, and the price of Solana (SOL) has recovered somewhat since first taking a 7% dip on the news. It’s now down only about 1% in the past 24 hours and trading back up around the US$88 mark.

Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus.

Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours. https://t.co/ezqEYQYKWl

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022

Crypto Twitter is, of course, having its usual fun with it all…

At this point Solana should start posting business hours

— pseudotheos in 🇳🇱 (@pseudotheos) May 1, 2022

Solana devs making sure nothing goes wrong with their blockchain pic.twitter.com/JuW0m5u5YC

— Altcoin Gordon (@AltcoinGordon) May 1, 2022

Warren Buffett wouldn’t buy all the world’s BTC for $25

Famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has sunk his leathery boot into Bitcoin once again.

The 91-year-old multi-billionaire has doubled down on his previous derisive remarks about the no.1 digital asset, having once referred to it as “a delusion” and “rat poison squared”.

As reported by CNBC, Buffett was speaking at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting on the weekend, and said:

“Whether [Bitcoin] goes up or down in the next year, or five or ten years, I don’t know. But the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it doesn’t produce anything,” adding:

“Now, if you told me you own all of the Bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it? I’d have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything.”

Marc Andreessen the CEO of VC investment giant a16z was one of several prominent identities in the crypto space to respond, including Elon Musk as well…