Otherdeed mint sold out as Ethereum fees surged

On May 1, 2022, the public sale of 55,000 Otherdeed non-fungible tokens sold out within roughly three hours and drove Ethereum transaction fees to extreme levels. The sale began at 9 p.m. Eastern on April 30—01:00 UTC on May 1—and became both a major commercial launch for Yuga Labs’ planned Otherside virtual world and a visible stress test for Ethereum’s limited block space.

Contemporaneous reporting linked to Etherscan data put the peak gas price near 8,000 gwei during the sale. That figure describes the price of one unit of gas, not the total cost of a transaction; the final charge depended on the gas consumed and the effective gas price when a transaction entered a block. The distinction matters because an NFT mint called a smart contract and required far more gas than a simple ETH transfer.

A sale denominated in ApeCoin, settled on Ethereum

Each public-sale Otherdeed cost 305 ApeCoin, while the Ethereum network fee had to be paid in ETH. Multiplying the fixed mint price by the 55,000 public-sale tokens gives gross consideration of 16,775,000 APE. That is a straightforward token calculation, not a dollar valuation. APE moved during and after the sale, so contemporaneous dollar headlines differed depending on the price snapshot used.

The verified Otherdeed contract records an ERC-721 collection and exposes the public-sale and minting functions behind the distribution. The on-chain structure made the allocation inspectable, but it did not make access cheap. Buyers were competing for inclusion in the same sequence of blocks, and higher bids for block space affected users who had no connection to Otherside.

Contemporaneous estimates illustrate the measurement problem. CoinDesk reported more than $176 million in Ethereum fees over the preceding 24 hours at its May 1 publication time; The Block cited about $172 million associated with the mint. Those are source estimates, not one reconciled ledger calculation. They used changing ETH prices, different snapshots and potentially different rules for attributing network activity. The most defensible event-day conclusion is therefore directional: the mint produced an exceptional fee spike, while any single dollar total carried material methodology and timing limits.

What the congestion did—and did not—show

Ethereum’s EIP-1559 fee mechanism raises the protocol’s base fee when blocks use more gas than the target and burns that base-fee component. Priority fees still compensate miners. A sudden queue of high-gas mint transactions therefore pushed costs upward across the network and burned part of the ETH paid.

The chain record does not support saying Ethereum stopped. Blocks and successful transactions continued. Access became prohibitively expensive for many users, some transactions failed, and Etherscan itself experienced service trouble, but those conditions were congestion and pricing failures rather than a halt in Ethereum consensus. Yuga Labs’ line about “turning off the lights on Ethereum” was company rhetoric, not a technical description of a chain outage.

Yuga Labs said on May 1 that demand had exceeded its expectations, acknowledged failed transactions and said it intended to refund affected users. It also suggested ApeCoin might need its own chain and encouraged the ApeCoin DAO to consider that direction. As of May 1, that was an attributed proposal—not an approved migration, a launched network or a binding DAO decision.

The episode mattered because it compressed several 2022 crypto-market tensions into a few hours: concentrated demand for branded NFTs, a token required for access, costly competition for base-layer capacity and immediate debate over whether applications should remain on Ethereum, move to scaling systems or create dedicated chains. The sale proved strong demand for the product. It also demonstrated that demand alone did not solve distribution design, user-cost or infrastructure constraints.