Yuga Labs refunds Ethereum gas fees from land sale

Yuga Labs has refunded $265,000 worth of ETH for failed transactions in its sale of digital land in its Otherside metaverse last weekend. In English: People got paid back the fees they wasted in magic space money trying to buy fake property in a place that doesn't exist but might be fun one day, especially for those with computer goggles.

Why it matters: Yesterday afternoon, anyone paying attention would have found that they had a little more money than they had before, because the company paid everyone back all at once. Yuga did it because it had designed an auction that worked badly and frustrated everyone, but the company owned up to it.

• They automated the whole thing. Users didn't have to do anything. It was just there. Poof!

Details: Yuga Labs is the company that created the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the most valuable single NFT set that has come out. Yesterday afternoon, it tweeted that everyone burned by failed transactions last weekend had been refunded:

By the numbers: "Yuga Labs spent a total of 90.57 ETH (around $265,000) on roughly 640 refunds, according to data from Etherscan. The largest individual refund was 2.6 ETH (around $7,500), with the firm spending 0.26 ETH (around $783) in gas fees to send out all the refunds," CoinDesk reported.

Zooming out: Everyone seems to want to build a metaverse, but it's not so surprising the Bored Apes makers do. Exclusivity around its online forums and its parties is part of what gives its jpegs of hipster monkeys so much value.

• If digital worlds become hot, they will want a gated community in there as well.

The bottom line: Because blockchains make all transactions public, it's very easy for companies that screw up to do the right thing. Yuga Labs did.