YUGA Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, sold 55,000 NFTs at 305 ApeCoin each (around $5,800) on Saturday night, raking in over $318.7 million.

According to data from CryptoSlam, Otherside ‘Otherdeed’ NFTs have already seen nearly $550 million in total secondary sales as well.

At the time of writing, sales from the initial mint and secondary market add up to nearly $870 million.

Otherdeed NFTs are already the ninth most traded collection off all-time behind Axie Infinity, CryptoPunks, BAYC. MAYC, Art Blocks, NBA Top Shot, CloneX and Azuki.

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Because of the number of NFTs and the amount of demand, the Otherdeed mint, which started at 9pm ET on Saturday night, clogged up the Ethereum mainnet and sent gas prices soaring.

There were reports of some users paying $4,000 for a single transaction.

Otherside metaverse related transactions have already cost around $180 million in gas fees.

Bored Ape co-founder Garga.eth said the Otherdeed mint was a “sour moment” for the NFT community.

He said: “Needless to say tonight didn’t go how anyone wanted it to.

“I want to say sorry to the apes, and to everyone else who eagerly looked to join into the project.”

Will Papper, co-founder of SyndicateDAO, said the Otherdeed smart contract had “nearly zero gas optimizations” and argued that just “modifying a few words would have saved $80 million plus” in gas fees.

But Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he didn’t think “optimizing the contract would help.”

He said: “Regardless of contract details, tx fee goes up until list price + tx fee = market price. If gas usage per purchase decreased 2x, the equilibrium gas price would have just been >12000 gwei instead of 6000.”

Yuga Labs have promised to refund all failed transactions.

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