The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization, will no longer be accepting donations in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Ethereum after its community debated the pros and cons of accepting digital asset donations.

Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse project has sold out all of its available 55,000 Otherdeed land non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in three hours. The firm raked in $317 million from what it deemed “the largest NFT mint in history.”

The Solana (SOL) blockchain has suffered a seven-hour outage caused by a rush of bots trying to mint NFTs on its network through a program called Candy Machine. It struggled to handle the traffic bots brought in.

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Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Wikipedia Stops Accepting Crypto Donations
• Otherside Land NFTs Become ‘Largest NFT Mint in History’
• Solana Suffers Seven-Hour Outage
• Crypto Investment Products’ Net Flows
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Wikipedia Stops Accepting Crypto Donations

The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization, will no longer be accepting donations in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Ethereum after its community debated the pros and cons of accepting digital asset donations.

The move came after a poll showed that more than 70% of respondents wanted to discontinue cryptocurrency donations. In an announcement, the foundation wrote:

“The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to discontinue direct acceptance of cryptocurrency as a means of donating ... we are making this decision based on recent feedback from [volunteers and donor] communities.”

The Wikimedia Foundation started accepting Bitcoin donations back in 2014, reasoning that adding the cryptocurrency as an option would help make contributing to the organization “as simple and inclusive as possible.”

According to Wikimedia’s Community Relations Specialist, Julia Brungs, crypto donations made up 0.08% of the foundation’s revenue last year, and the organization never “held cryptocurrency.”

Otherside Land NFTs Become ‘Largest NFT Mint in History’

Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse project has sold out all of its available 55,000 Otherdeed land non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in three hours. The firm raked in $317 million from what it deemed “the largest NFT mint in history.”

The mint price for each land plot was 305 ApeCoin (APE), worth around $5,800 at the time of the sale. The NFT mint brought in 16.7 million APE in total and while the sale was public, buyers had to pass a know-your-customer (KYC) verification process.

The NFTs will give buyers rights to claim land in the Otherside metaverse, a blockchain-based virtual world developed by Yuga Labs, the creator of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT collections.

Out of 100,000 Otherdeed NFTs minted, 55,000 were bought by 27,000 users during the mint. The remaining 45,000 are set to be airdropped to existing BAYC and MAYC NFT holders.

The mint caused gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain to skyrocket to 8,000 GWEI as a result of a gas war, as Ethereum users were outbidding each other to try and get their transactions through to mint NFTs.

Solana Suffers Seven-Hour Outage

The Solana (SOL) blockchain has suffered a seven-hour outage caused by a rush of bots trying to mint NFTs on its network through a program called Candy Machine. It struggled to handle the traffic bots brought in.

The traffic ended up causing Solana’s mainnet to fall out of consensus and crash, as nodes belonging to validators – computers that verify transactions to maintain the blockchain’s integrity - collapsed.

Solana Foundation and Jump Crypto developers said the traffic reached a record-breaking 4 million transaction per second high, which forced developers to complete a cluster restart of the network. It initially operated at a degraded performance as nodes were slowly coming back online.

Candy Machine’s operator Metaplex has said it will deploy a 0.01 SOL penalty on wallets that attempt to complete invalid transactions, which is “typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.”

Solana has experienced other outages in the past. In September 2021, for example, it went offline for 17 hours over a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on an initial decentralized offering.

Crypto Investment Products’ Net Flows

Investors flooded out of cryptocurrency investment products in April, with average weekly outflows of $79.mn. This is the largest average weekly outflow of 2022 so far.

The vast majority of outflows came from Bitcoin and Ethereum products, which experienced outflows of $67.3mn and $19.8mn, respectively.

Find out more on CryptoCompare’s latest Digital Asset Management Review.

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