$317 Million in Three Hours: The Otherside Land Sale, Four Years On
In April 2022 the Bored Ape company sold virtual land for a game that did not exist yet and took in more than any NFT sale before it. Buyers also burned $172 million in fees. Where the money went, and where Otherside is now.
On the night of 30 April 2022, tens of thousands of people sat at their computers waiting to buy land in a game that had no release date. Within three hours, they had spent about $317 million. They also spent roughly $172 million more on Ethereum fees, competing so hard to get their transactions through that some paid more in gas than the land itself cost.
The sale was Otherside, the planned metaverse game from Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club. It is still the biggest NFT mint ever recorded, and one of the cleanest examples of how much money a blockchain game could make before it existed.
The company behind it
Yuga Labs was started by two friends using the pseudonyms Gargamel and Gordon Goner, later named as Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow. Their cartoon apes, launched in 2021, became the most famous NFT collection of the boom, owned by celebrities and traded for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In March 2022, Yuga raised $450 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at about $4 billion. The stated plan was to build Otherside, a game world for ape holders and anyone else who wanted in.
The night of the mint
The numbers from that night, as reported by The Block:
- 55,000 Otherdeeds were sold to more than 27,000 buyers.
- Another 45,000 of the 100,000 deeds were reserved for an airdrop to Bored Ape and Mutant Ape holders.
- The sale raised about 16.7 million ApeCoin, roughly $317 million.
- Gas prices spiked to 8,000 gwei, adding about $172 million in fees; individual buyers paid $4,000 to $10,000 each.
- Buyers had to pass KYC identity checks and pre-approve their wallets.
The fee chaos was so bad that Yuga said it would refund the gas paid on failed transactions, and the event became a case study in why Ethereum needed to scale.
Some buyers did very well, at least at first. In May 2022, a single Otherdeed resold for a record $1.5 million.
Who made the money
The clearest winner was Yuga Labs. The sale turned an idea into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, on top of the $450 million it had raised from investors. Early Bored Ape holders who received free deeds by airdrop also had a windfall at the peak. Ethereum validators and miners, who collected the record fees, did well too.
Buyers who paid full price did less well over time. Like most NFT land, Otherdeed prices fell sharply in the 2022 crash and never returned to their launch-night levels. No verified personal net worth for Yuga's founders has been published by Forbes or Bloomberg.
Where Otherside is now
Yuga held public test events in the years after the sale, and reshaped itself several times. Greg Solano returned as CEO in February 2024, replacing Daniel Alegre, and promised a more crypto-native focus. In April 2026, he moved to chairman, and chief product officer Michael Figge, who joined in 2021, became CEO.
As of that change, Otherside had still not launched. Yuga describes it as a "metaRPG where the players own the world", and Figge said the company would need to grow its user base "a lot" to succeed.
WGC's take
The Otherside sale is the purest example of blockchain-gaming money arriving before the game. It made a fortune for the company and a short-lived windfall for some holders, and it left more than 27,000 buyers owning land in a world that, four and a half years later, they still cannot fully play in. For players, the lesson is simple: a land sale is not a release date.
Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.