Infura co-founder E.G. Galano believes that the recent NFT minting, gas fee issues are repeats of history.
Last week, Yuga Labs’ massive Otherdeed NFT min, which Yuga Labs uses to create virtual land deeds within the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse realm Otherside, blocked the Ethereum mainnet from transaction demand. According to E.G., this caused a network crisis and gas war that could have been avoided. Galano was the co-founder of Ethereum and the general manager for Infura.
Yuga Labs was able to trade $561,000,000 within 24 hours. However, the mint became the sixth largest source of Ethereum-burned Ethereum. On April 30, collectors burned more than $157million in ETH. Buyers referred to the mint as a ” nightmare”, because thousands failed transactions. Later, Yuga refunded transactions that failed.
Galano says that much of the chaos is just repeating blockchain history.
Galano stated that it was very similar to some early NFT projects, CryptoKitties and some of the ICOs that didn’t have a mechanism to distribute that load over a longer time. There are a variety of mechanisms so it’s not necessary that everyone rushes to get their transaction in the first block after the sale goes live.
Galano believes the blockchain worked as it was intended.
He stated that “for what happened to network itself, that’s only the transaction throughput and the gas price bidding working as intended.” “There is a limit to transaction throughput when dealing with any decentralized Blockchain.”
He believes that the Otherdeed chaos could have been prevented if Yuga Labs had done more to prepare for the huge demand for the mint.
Infura assisted the PROOF team recently with the successful mint Moonbirds TFTs. Galano pointed out that the Moonbirds team’s emphasis on pre-registrations was one of the key factors for how the mint ran so smoothly. Infura was also contacted by the PROOF team before they started to address potential backend problems.
Users continued to mint despite Otherdeed transactions blocking the Ethereum mainnet almost immediately. Many NFT collectors are now wondering if super-high-demand NFT mins like Otherdeed will continue to pose problems for Ethereum.
Galano identifies the current speculative nature NFT PFP collection as part of the problem.
Galano stated that how gas auctions such as this will turn out is heavily affected by the volatile market. There is no floor price or set price for many of these items. These NFTs are being viewed as collectibles by many people, which means that some have a different investment thesis and set their gas fee tolerance much higher than others.
The NFTs could also have been launched on an Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain with higher block gas limits, as Galano suggested.
However, Infura’s exec is so positive about Ethereum that he doesn’t believe any other chains are necessary. He highlighted Ethereum’s merge and move towards proof-of-stake, optimistic rollsups and sharding, as measures that will increase its capacity.
Galano stated, “My controversial view was that Ethereum could have everything from a technical standpoint.” There is nothing outside of Ethereum that can’t be used within Ethereum. You could argue, however, that some things done on Ethereum could have been done on Bitcoin, if people were willing and able to make the necessary changes to the Bitcoin protocol.
