Bored Ape Yacht Club's Turbulent Year: How the Otherdeed Mint Became a Breaking Point

Bored Ape Yacht Club has spent the past twelve months growing from a niche NFT project into a sprawling ecosystem and a mainstream symbol of newly minted crypto wealth. The bored, blank-eyed apes have become fixtures of the Twitter timeline, delivering outsized returns to early collectors along the way. A collection that minted for 0.08 ETH — roughly $190 in April 2021 — now has a floor price of around $340,000 per ape.

That trajectory has not sat well with everyone. Many of the early NFT art enthusiasts who championed the project in its infancy now argue that BAYC has been overtaken by careless newcomers and celebrity hangers-on, and that its founding team has drifted away from crypto's core principles. For a number of critics, the controversy around the recent Otherdeeds land mint was the tipping point. In the aftermath, APE, BAYC, and OTHR have all posted steep declines, leaving open the question of whether the brand's momentum can hold.

Timing, hype, and a rivalry with CryptoPunks

Much of BAYC's early traction can be traced to timing: the collection launched just as shitcoin spring was giving way to a broader DeFi downturn, and NFT summer took its place. The apes' visual style and expandable accessories gave holders a sense of identity that earlier NFT projects had largely failed to generate.

The project eventually overtook CryptoPunks entirely. Late last year came the so-called "flippening," when BAYC's floor price climbed past Punks' at roughly 60 ETH. That was followed in March by Yuga Labs' acquisition of Punks creator Larva Labs, for a price that was never disclosed.

A steady stream of controversy

Success has invited plenty of scrutiny, some of it more credible than the rest. The founding team was publicly doxxed; the artwork faced accusations of containing racist imagery; and holders have repeatedly reported their apes being stolen. Between phishing campaigns run through verified Twitter accounts, a bug in the OpenSea interface, a compromised BAYC Discord, and an Instagram account hack that cost holders an estimated $2.4 million, it's clear that most of the NFT community isn't drawn in for the underlying technology. As one commentator put it, the ape economy has been lucrative — but the scammers targeting it have often done even better than the holders themselves.

None of that scandal stopped BAYC from breaking into the mainstream. Snoop Dogg is among the celebrities who have bought in, frequently with help from the agency MoonPay, which sources NFTs for high-profile clients — or perhaps it works the other way around. Celebrity involvement in NFTs tends to split opinion sharply: holders are pleased, while others recoil at the awkward pairing of two attention-hungry brands, and many remain skeptical about how authentic these celebrity appearances really are.

Yuga Labs has kept expanding the brand through spin-off collections like Bored Ape Kennel Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and has even opened a physical burger restaurant. The next logical step, though, was a full monetization play.

ApeCoin and the road to Otherside

ApeCoin, the ecosystem's token, launched and was airdropped to all BAYC holders on March 16th. Its staking design — summarized by one critic as essentially paying holders in ApeCoin to hold ApeCoin — has raised questions about whether providing exit liquidity for insiders is baked into the tokenomics.

Perhaps not: ApeCoin also functions as a currency for buying NFTs on OpenSea, and serves as the native token for Yuga's long-teased metaverse project, Otherside, where users can purchase virtual land parcels called Otherdeeds. The Otherdeeds sale followed shortly after ApeCoin's launch, giving the new token an immediate use case. The sale itself turned out to be a massive commercial success — primarily for Yuga Labs, and considerably less so for everyone else who took part.

Where the Otherdeeds mint went wrong

Problems surfaced before the sale even began. Buyers were required to complete KYC in advance and pay 305 APE (roughly $6,000) per plot, a structure that drove ApeCoin's price above $25 as prospective buyers positioned themselves ahead of time. On the day itself, beyond the inevitable phishing attempts, the mint effectively froze the Ethereum network for about two hours. Gas fees spiked dramatically: users collectively spent 60,234 ETH, worth about $170.8 million, just to mint land NFTs, and a further 1,653 ETH (around $4.7 million) was burned purely on failed transactions.

Yuga Labs later said it would refund every failed transaction — a promise that, predictably, became its own phishing lure. Setting gas costs aside, the sale generated $320 million in mint revenue for Yuga plus roughly $475 million in secondary trading, pushing OpenSea to its highest single-day volume ever.

Every BAYC-linked asset lost value once the dust settled. ApeCoin is currently down more than 40%, and Otherdeeds themselves have fallen over 50%. Yuga's public response to the network congestion — described as "turning off the lights on Ethereum" and pointing to "Ethereum's bottleneck," while floating the idea of moving to a dedicated chain — was widely criticized. Observers noted that the mint contract's lack of gas optimization was directly responsible for burning more than 40,000 ETH in excess, worth over $100 million, that a better-engineered contract would never have wasted.

What comes next for Yuga

Setting aside the recurring stories of holders losing apes to poor personal security, this episode marks the first genuinely damaging PR moment for the BAYC ecosystem as a whole. Yuga Labs continues to be adept at sustaining hype through a constant cadence of new releases, and a move to a proprietary, centralized layer-one chain looks like a plausible next step — one the company has the resources to pursue on its own terms. Yuga has never presented itself as a technology-first company, a point the mint underscored, but its skill in branding and marketing is not in question, and that alone may be enough to carry the ecosystem forward.

At its core, Yuga's business model runs on converting hype into sales — or, in this case, into gas fees — and it has proven remarkably effective so far. Even so, not even the sharpest marketing operation is immune to outside forces, as commentary from figures like Elon Musk demonstrated in the mint's aftermath.