After the botched launch of virtual land plots as NFTs, dubbed Otherdeeds, Yuga Labs is making amends.  Just as Axie Infinity runs on its own sidechain Ronin, so will ApeCoin be hosted on Ethereum’s largest sidechain, Polygon (MATIC).

As a layer 2 scalability solution that offloads the traffic from Ethereum’s layer 1 highway, Polygon holds $4 billion worth of crypto assets. As such, Polygon’s gas fees are drastically lower compared to Ethereum’s mainchain, often by a factor of 1,500x less.

This is why OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace with over $20 billion in total trading volume, integrated Polygon as a “gas-free NFT marketplace“. If only the Yuga Labs team had the foresight to make this move prior to Otherdeed NFTs launch for their upcoming blockchain game Otherside.

What Happened with Yuga Labs’ Otherside NFT Mint?

Last week, Yuga Labs announced the minting of Otherside NFTs, called Otherdeeds. As their name implies, they are tokenized ownership of virtual lands. This has become common practice for blockchain games in which both playable creatures/characters and in-game assets are tradeable as NFTs.

For instance, last November, one of the rarer land NFTs for Axie Infinity, the Genesis Plot, sold for 550 ETH ($2.5 million at the time). Although Otherside is not yet released, Yuga Labs set the minting cost of their Otherdeeds at 305 APE ($6.7k at the time). This alone caused ApeCoin (APE), the metaverse’s main monetization crypto, to rally by 8%.

As expected, due to the massive hype in anticipation of selling Otherdeeds for potentially enormous profits, the sales went through the roof. As of today, OpenSea recorded 191.7k ETH trading volume ($541.7 million), or $630.4 million total secondary market volume. In the meantime, the average Otherdeed floor price reached 3.757 ETH ($10.6k).

Unfortunately, this historic NFT sale surge was too much for Ethereum, causing Etherscan, Ethereum’s transaction monitor, to temporarily crash.

Of course, anyone who has dealt with Ethereum before knows that the network’s surge in traffic also drastically elevates transaction fees. This is precisely what happened. It was not uncommon to see users pay between 2 – 5 ETH ($5.6k – $14.1k) for the NFT minting fee, which themselves had a 305…