COMING to you every Sunday, 24/7 Crypto will help you keep track of every single important news story that happened this week in the metaverse.

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Yuga Labs sell $320 million worth of virtual land in Otherside metaverse

Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, launched a virtual land sale on Saturday, April 30.

When the sale closed, 55,000 virtual land NFTs had been sold and the project had raised around $320 million.

Yuga Labs said: “We know that the Otherdeed mint was unprecedented in its size as a high-demand NFT collection, and that would bring with it unique challenges.

“The hope was that those challenges would be assuaged via a rigorous gating mechanism in the form of an on-chain KYC, a max mint of 2 per KYC’d wallet, and a significant clearing price at 305 Apecoin.”

Ethereum fees sky rocketed because of the demand and the gas fees to mint the virtual land cost roughly $166.2 million or 60,234 ETH.

“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,” Yuga Labs said.

“The scale of this mint was so large that Etherscan crashed.”

The BAYC creators added: “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.”

You can read more about Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse virtual land sale HERE

ApeCoin becomes biggest metaverse token – suppressing MANA, SAND and AXS but price drops 40% in 3 days

ApeCoin (APE) – which will be the currency in Otherside – has become the biggest metaverse token by market capitalization this week, overtaking Decentraland’s MANA, The Sandbox’s SAND, and Axie Infinity’s AXS.

ApeCoin’s price reached its second-highest level, on April 28, up more than 2,650 per cent from its mid-March debut.

But traders started unwinding their positions after Yuga Labs revealed the NFT virtual land mint would cost 305 APE (more than $5,000).

This was in contrast to expectations the Bored Ape Yacht Club creators would sell the metaverse land parcels in a dutch auction.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘metaverse’ division lost $3 billion in Q1

Meta’s recently created Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) division posted a first-quarter loss of $2.96 billion.

This division includes all of Meta’s augmented and virtual reality operations.

Meta announced it would break out results for the division to show the performance and investments put into something Mark Zuckerberg considers key to the next generation of online social experiences.

FRL generated revenue of only $695 million in the first quarter, compared to $27.2 billion generated from Meta’s apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In 2021, Facebook reported a loss of $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion for FRL.

Metaverse hotel to open in Decentraland

The first ever metaverse hotel is being opened in Decentraland by Singapore’s Millennium Hotels and Resorts.

The hotel is located near Genesis Plaza and will be called “M Social Decentraland“.

Read more HERE

Petition started against gaming NFTs gets just 72 signatures in one week

Climate Replay, an independent group of game developers, gamers and climatologists, this week started a petition, encouraging those in the industry to sign and make positive moves towards a “sustainable, socially responsible, equitable future for all”.

The petition called out ‘play-to-earn’ games, where users earn cryptocurrencies and NFTs by completing tasks.

The petition reads: “By ignoring key risk factors and glaring issues, adopters of NFTs and other forms of digital ownership that embrace these problematic aspects erode efforts to create an equitable and sustainable existence for all.

“NFTs in gaming do not bring any meaningful value to the players.”

A week after its launch, the petition has just 72 signatures.

Meta will open physical metaverse-themed stores

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, will open a retail store in San Francisco.

Meta said it would be opening a retail store in Burlingame, California on May 9 and provide interactive demonstrations for the company’s hardware products, including virtual reality headsets, video displays and smart glasses.

The store will also include a wall-to-wall curved LED screen which will display what users see using Meta headsets.

Martin Gilliard, the store head, said: “The Meta Store is going to help people make that connection to how our products can be the gateway to the Metaverse in the future.

“We’re not selling the Metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it.”

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