Summary:
- Yuga Labs and the Apecoin DAO board members are reportedly listening to offers on migrating ApeCoin off Ethereum.
- Avalanche and Flow are allegedly negotiating for Apecoin to migrate to their chains.
- Neither Yuga Labs nor the Apecoin DAO has confirmed the potential migration to Avalanche or Flow.
- The Bored Ape Yacht Club Otherdeed NFT mint ‘broke’ Ethereum on April 30th, causing high gas fees and congestion.
The team behind Yuga Labs and the ApeCoin DAO board members are reportedly listening to offers about migrating Apecoin (APE) off Ethereum.
According to a report by CoinDesk, teams from Avalanche and Flow are pitching the idea of having Apecoin migrate to their chains. Each team believes that its chain is best suited to handle an NFT ecosystem and metaverse as popular and active as the one Yuga Labs is creating.
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
A source from the Apecoin Foundation told CoinDesk that the ApeCoin DAO board had not seriously considered migrating the entire project to a new layer one blockchain. However, the May 1st Tweet above by Yuga Labs highlighting the congestion caused by the OtherDeed mint and the possibility of an ApeCoin chain kickstarted discussions about a possible move.
At the time of writing, neither Yuga Labs nor the ApeCoin DAO has confirmed the talks on migrating ApeCoin to a new chain.
Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed NFT Mint Broke Ethereum and Other Records
The Otherdeed NFT mint spearheaded by Yuga Labs kicked off on the 30th of April. The event allowed Yuga Labs to raise roughly $320 million in a few hours by selling plots of digital land in the form of 55,000 NFTs, each selling for 305 Apecoin.
However, the monetary success of the Otherdeed NFT mint was clouded by congestion on the Ethereum network as investors rushed to secure their digital plots of land. Consequently, Ethereum gas fees skyrocketed to 8,000 Gwei, with some participants parting with $7k to mint two Otherdeed NFTs.
By the end of the mint, roughly 64k Ethereum worth $176 million had been spent on transaction fees by the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) community.
The congestion stated above, coupled with the high gas fees on Ethereum during the event, prompted the team at Yuga Labs to suggest that an Apecoin migration to its own was a potential solution to prevent future mint events from undergoing similar hurdles.