ApeCoin integrates with Polygon amid NFT mint backlash and speculation

Published at: May 3, 2022

ApeCoin (APE) announced its integration with Ethereum (ETH) sidechain Polygon (MATIC) after the recent Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds nonfungible token (NFT) minting incident led to speculation about a new chain for APE.

One of the world's largest Web3 ecosystems, @0xPolygon now supports ApeCoin making it available for 19,000+ dApps and games across the board! https://t.co/vUoGTAfqkl

— ApeCoin (@apecoin) May 2, 2022

On Sunday, Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, opened the minting for Otherdeeds NFT land. The drop gained overwhelming support from its community, with an estimated $300 million in sales. Despite this, the drop encountered a list of issues such as pushing ETH gas fees to unprecedented highs, which meant that users paid around 2 to 5 ETH for gas.

Because of this, users who failed to mint NFTs but still paid ETH gas fees were outraged and expressed their frustration through Twitter — some even tweeted that they are pulling out of their APE-related investments.

While Yuga Labs promised to refund their gas, some users speculated that the failure was a planned marketing stunt, i.e., highlighting a problem, then announcing a new chain for APE. However, an ApeCoin decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) representative denies this.

ApeCoin DAO board member Yat Siu clarified that this was not the case. While Yuga Labs encourages the DAO to think of migrating to a new chain, Siu noted that there was no discussion among the DAO's board members nor with other parties about the possibility of an APE chain.

Despite the clarification, some are not convinced and are still unhappy wiith the results of the event. Twitter user MetaMan said that the facilitators of the event should simply admit that they messed up and that it was a bad idea.

I fail to understand how this provides clarity. Reads like further obfuscation.Why can’t Yuga admit what everyone in the space knows — they messed up, the smart contract wasn’t optimized, the KYC free-for-all was a bad idea, the initial response blaming Ethereum was absurd.

— MetaMan (@metamanog) May 3, 2022

The event also led to the burning of 55,817.39 ETH ($158 million), putting the Otherdeed NFTs at the top of the ETH 7-day burn leaderboard and pushing the Ethereum network's burn to a new all-time high of 70,000 ETH.