Yuga Labs’ rare Otherside virtual land sells for a whooping $1.5 million
A virtual land in the Otherside metaverse has been sold on an NFT marketplace called X2Y2 for $1.5 million. ‘Otherdeed #59906’, the eighth rarest virtual land piece from Yuga Labs’ Otherside was bought a user that goes the name ‘n0b0dy. eth’ for 625 Ethereum.
It should be noted that the seller that goes “brickandmorty. eth” has booked a profit of over $1.49 million, having minted the NFT a week ago for 305 apecoin (worth around $6,000 at the time). This also means that n0b0dy.eth paid a massive premium for the piece of virtual land.
This comes days after Yuga Labs, creator of the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection launched a sale of virtual land related to its highly anticipated Otherside metaverse project. The demand was so strong that it disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain, spiking the transaction fees and making the transactions on the network extremely slow.
According to data obtained from Etherscan, each plot cost a buyer around $5,800 based on ApeCoin’s price of $19 plus transaction costs in Ether, which skyrocketed after the sale went live as the land grab attracted heavy demand. Transaction costs just to mint Otherdeed NFTs after the launch reached $123 million, with each Otherdeed (virtual land) requiring about $6,000 or 2 Ether in transaction fees to mint and buy the land.
Almost 45,000 Otherdeeds were issued to holders under the Yuga Labs ecosystem with 10,000 claimable BAYC holders, 20,000 for Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) holders, and 15,000 were reserved for Yuga developers and others helping to build Otherside. In total, Yuga Labs released 200,000 Otherdeeds. The remaining 100,000 will be used to reward so-called “Voyagers” who hold Otherdeeds and contribute to the development of Otherside.
Meanwhile, Yuga Labs is also integrating with other game studios to enable this metaverse project. This became clear after blockchain metaverse developer Animoca, famous for The Sandbox metaverse, tweeted that it was entering the BAYC universe: “Animoca Brands is excited to announce that we’ll be adopting @ApeCoin for the secret project we’ve been developing with @BoredApeYC.”
Earlier last month, Yuga Labs announced the acquisition of the NFT collection CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. The company now owns 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits. Bored Apes and CryptoPunks NFT collections are the most sold NFTs. Both the collections hold a combined worth at a minimum of some $3.6 billion at current prices. This acquisition does not mean that the co-founder of CryptoPunks and Meebits are joining Yuga. They’re going to continue running Larva Labs and will keep doing what they are doing.
In other news, Yuga Labs raised funding of $450 million, bringing the company’s valuation to $4 billion. This funding featured major crypto players, led a16z, with participation from Animoca Brands, Coinbase and MoonPay. Chris Lyons, the general partner at a16z, is joining Yuga Labs’ board.
