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The Cool Pets NFT drop was plagued by soaring gas prices.
By: Samuel Haig
Demand for NFT avatars is showing no signs of slowing down.
Collectors seeking to mint Cool Pets, the latest drop from the Cool Cats development team Cooltopia, paid extreme fees to secure a token from the project’s public drop yesterday.
In its documentation, Cooltopia said it had “put measures in place to deter a gas war on any Cool Cats-related public mints.” Despite their best efforts, the gas price of high-priority transactions spiked by more than 7,000% as minting went live.
While the mint price for Cool Pets was set at 0.5 ETH, some users paid more than double that in transaction fees. Etherscan data shows that one user paid more than 1.2 Ether in gas on top of the mint price to purchase a single Cool Pet — worth $5,500 worth of ETH at the time.
The drop also came after weeks of delays due to bots and DDoS attackers targeting the Cool Pets contracts.
The Cool Pets series is limited to 19,999 tokens. Each Cool Pets NFT currently depicts cartoon eggs that are identical in appearance, but will later “evolve” into unique cartoon pets representing one of four elements: Grass, Fire, Water, or Air.
NFTs in the collection are described as being “randomly generated” based on their interactions with the Cool Pets website. Users evolve their tokenized pets using the gamified Cooltopia platform, with their final pet taking one of 17M unique combinations of attributes.
Half of the NFTs were allotted to wallets holding Cool Cats NFTs, each of which has been allocated a single token that could be minted from Jan. 31 in exchange for paying gas fees only.
The team allocated 8,500 tokens to an “allow list” that permitted whitelisted users to mint tokens over a 48-hour window from Feb. 7. The allow list included 7,000 tokens that were designated through “collaboration with other projects, while Cooltopia community members had the chance to secure one of the remaining 1,500 slots on the list. The partner projects included popular NFT collections World of Women, Kyber Kongz, and Doodles, among others.
The remaining 1,500 tokens were made available for public minting from Nov. 10, resulting in soaring gas prices as users raced to secure a Cool Pet. The drop had been scheduled for the previous day, however was pushed back after a DDoS attack and subsequent influx of bots targeting its minting contract were identified.
The public drop quickly sold out on the same day it launched. Several Twitter users quickly complained that they had pending transactions at the time that it sold out. “DreemsinM” and “NathanW” each claim to have paid hundreds in gas fees only to miss out on Cool Pets.
Despite a chaotic launch, Cool Pets has been well received by the crypto community. Twitter user “BigBullGashi” described the public sale as “extremely fair,” stating that “everyone had a fair shot” at securing a token. “Cloncast” emphasized the project’s gamification, described minting a Cool Pet NFT as “also minting a video game cartridge.”
Another user argued that the project marks “a step forward” for the play-to-earn sector. However, still another criticized the project’s multi-thousand dollar floor price, asserting that “no one should be paying close to 3 ETH [for] unfinished games.”
In spite of the exorbitant fees, Cool Pet buyers have already made paper gains on their investments. The collection’s floor price has already risen to 2.23 ETH according to leading marketplace OpenSea. The most expensive tokens are listed in excess of 1,000 ETH each.
The collection currently ranks as the week’s fourth-most traded series on OpenSea with 9.550.5 ETH in seven-day volume. Cool Pets also ranks second by 24-hour trade volume 3.278.5 ETH.
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