After declaring the launch of a new NFT project within the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem, Yuga Labs made Sewer Passes available for minting on Wednesday. Within hours of the release, they sold more than 4,000 ETH , over $6 million, and also sells more than $12.8M in first day.
On Wednesday, people who held a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) or Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT could get a free Sewer Pass, which is required to play a skill-based game called Dookey Dash. If you have a Sewer Pass, which can be made or bought on the secondary market, you can play Dookey Dash from January 19 to February 8. Your scores will be part of a broader narrative experience called “Chapter 1,” which will be released at a later date.
What is Sewer Passes about?
The Sewer Passes were divided into four levels based on whether or not the person holding a BAYC or MAYC NFT also had a Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT in their wallet. At the time this article was written, the lowest price for a Tier 1 Sewer Pass on the secondary NFT market OpenSea was 1.3 ETH, which is about $1,970. Tier 4 passes could be bought for up to 420 ETH.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club announced via Twitter that the official Sewer Pass collection is available for secondary sale on OpenSea. The smart contract for the Sewer Passes included a blocklist of certain wallet addresses, which made people discuss about the move on Twitter. Some of the blocked addresses belong to big second-hand markets like LooksRare and NFTX.
Per OpenSea’s developer guide: “OpenSea supports on-chain enforcement of creator fees if you want to enable them for your new project. The way this works is by adding a simple code snippet to NFT contracts that restricts NFT sales of your project to only marketplaces that enforce creator fees.”
Yuga Labs boycotts anti royalties platforms
One of the platforms that seems to have been blocked by the move, LooksRare, decided in October to make royalties optional. X2Y2 and a few other big platforms have also chosen this structure. This is part of a larger tendency among platforms to court sellers who want to get the best deal on their NFT purchase.
Wylie Aronow, also known as Gordon Goner, is a co-founder of Yuga Labs, he has been very outspoken about protecting creator royalties. In November, he said that the company was looking into utilising allowlists coded into smart contracts to figure out which wallet addresses could transfer NFTs. He said that externally owned accounts (EOAs), which are a type of crypto wallet that marketplaces don’t use, make it easier to discern the difference between trades between private users and marketplaces.
