Crypto users paid thousands in Ethereum gas fees thanks to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Here's what happened.

If you were trying to complete a transaction on the network last night, you might have been taken aback by the high gas fees.

One user purchased a NFT on Saturday. Their total price was $3,325. $3,300 is just in fees.

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What happened?

Gas fees are charged for every transaction on the network. The fees are used to compensate miners. It is a part of how the platform works.

Gas fees are not based on the size of the transaction, but on how many transactions are being made on the network at any given time.

If your transaction is being processed during a busy period, you can find yourself paying hundreds in fees just for the transaction to go through.

Users can pay a higher amount of fees so that their transaction gets bumped to the front of the line.

If a user does not pay enough in gas fees, a transaction can fail. The user is still charged the gas fee even though the transaction doesn't go through.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club brand by Yuga Labs launched a new project called Otherside on Saturday night. 100,000 deeds were offered for virtual land in the form of NFTs. The original Bored Ape NFTs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At least one of the 100,000 NFTs in the latest series was for investors to try and score.

The result was an overwhelmed network that caused fees to shoot up.

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I looked at the fees at 10:30 pm. There is a.ethBlockchain domain name available.

You might have seen a user put in a domain name. They are a way to change the address of your wallet from a string of numbers to something more memorable.

Each.eth domain costs $5 for a one-year registration. Fees can be as much as $50 sometimes. Sometimes a couple hundred bucks.

A single.eth domain registration cost more than $4,666 last night.

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The first hour of the Bored Ape's NFT sale was wasted by $100 million in gas fees alone.

Transactions can fail when the network is facing high traffic. Many people paid thousands of dollars in gas fees for transactions that didn't happen.

Yuga Labs says it will give back those fees, but it is not clear how it will do that. Fees from failed transactions will only be covered by Yuga Labs. If you were attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to the thousands in lost fees.

The debacle of last night is an example of how everything related to the blockchain is not ready for the mainstream.

Yuga Labs won from the Saturday night sale. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand made a lot of money from the sale.