Ava Labs has suggested relocating Yuga Labs’ Otherside Metaverse game and ApeCoin to Avalanche (AVAX), a rival to Ethereum (ETH)
The release of virtual land plots for Yuga Labs’ coming up soon Bored Ape Yacht Club Metaverse game Otherside last month was a huge event for the NFT market. From what many people say, it was also a total disaster.
Even though the primary sales of Otherdeeds brought in more than $300 million and helped OpenSea have its best day of secondary trading ever, the mint process was criticized for raising Ethereum gas fees to the touch of $180 million. Famous collectors called it a “nightmare scenario,” and Yuga Labs’ response was called “tone deaf.”
The core group behind Avalanche, a blockchain ecosystem that competes with Ethereum, shared a suggestion with the ApeCoin DAO earlier this week. A DAO is an online community that is all working toward the same goal or taking advantage of the same opportunity. Usually, a coin-based governance model is used. Those who own ApeCoin tokens can vote on how the ecosystem works.
Ava Labs’ plan is for Otherside and the ApeCoin ecosystem to move to Avalanche to take advantage of its faster and cheaper transactions and its “subnets,” which are perfect for games.
Subnets are a unique part of Avalanche that has been getting popular in recent months. In practice, a subnet lets a project have its own space that is protected by the Avalanche blockchain but works like a custom-made chain.
ApeCoin is meant to power a whole ecosystem of games and apps outside of Otherside, which, based on how popular the Bored Ape Yacht Club is, could be a large-scale Metaverse experience.
The proposal from Ava Labs is mostly about Otherside, but if Yuga Labs chooses to run the game on different blockchain or make a scaling decision for Ethereum, that won’t be decided by the DAO’s token-based voting system for governance.
There are more blockchain platforms than just Avalanche that want to join the Bored Ape community. This morning, Immutable X, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, sent its own proposal to the ApeCoin DAO. It suggested that ApeCoin stay in the Ethereum ecosystem in exchange for IMX token grants, technical support, and other benefits.
If the responses to Ava Labs‘ proposal are any indication, some APE backers care a lot about maintaining ApeCoin in the Ethereum world. Even though Ethereum’s mainnet might not be the best place for NFT drops and a Metaverse globe at the moment, the Bored Ape Yacht Club started there, and Ethereum still has by far the most valuable NFT ecosystem.
Flow is another blockchain that is not Ethereum that could be trying to get the attention of the ApeCoin DAO. Mik Naayem, co-founder and chief business officer of Dapper Labs, told CoinDesk earlier this month that the company had talked with the DAO about suggesting a move away from Ethereum. After having trouble with CryptoKitties scaling, Dapper made the Flow blockchain.
In any case, it might be hard for any blockchain network to persuade some “Ethereum maximalists” that a move off-chain is worth it and possible.
