BAYC’s otherside mint only reminded us of what we already knew when it comes to Ethereum’s technical limitations.

BAYC's metaverse minting drove gas fees to ludacris numbers, effectively reinforcing what so many of us already knew about Ethereum and it's technical limitations. Ethereum simply cannot handle huge events on the blockchain like the BAYC mint. At least not on it's own, I love Ethereum but I think scaling solutions like Polygon or maybe even Arbitrum are incredibly necessary. I am suggesting Polygon mainly because it is already Opensea compatible.

At the time of writing, Etherscan data suggested that people have spent more than 64,700 ETH (more than $183 million) on transaction fees for Otherside NFTs alone. During this event Ethereum was effectively unusable and people were paying around 4-5 thousand dollars in gas fees for a 5$ transaction. As an example of L2s being a solution, If these NFTs were minted on Polygon then bridged to Ethereum all of this could have effectively been avoided. You would have payed gas but you wouldn't be spending a kidney in gas fees to outbid the next guy.

For people putting the blame on the fact that smart contract wasn't optimized, I understand but Vitalik himself has stated in a recent tweet that it wouldn't have made much of a difference. He has also stated on multiple occasions that L2 gas fees will always be cheaper.

I feel like many of these massive projects should be taking the L2 route. Something like Polygon supernets can easily handle the volume. They may mitigate to another L1 if possible but why would you? Ethereum is the best and it's only downfall has scaling solutions built on Ethereum that are making up for it.