The Solana NFT ecosystem has been facing a number of challenges recently. With the larger-than-life DeGods and Y00ts collections choosing to migrate off the blockchain and the top Solana marketplace Magic Eden finding it hard to appease both collectors and creators at the same time, many of the chain’s devout supporters are asking wondering what the future holds.
But sometimes it only takes one NFT project to act as a catalyst for a major market shift. We’ve seen it happen on the bright side of the spectrum with Bored Apes, Azuki, Checks, and more. All of these helped revive ETH at one time or another with their NFT projects. Now it seems that there is a new innovative collection called Crazy guys is on track to do the same for Solana.
Having built up a significant amount of organic hype and then set a new standard for reducing bots and bad actors during mint, Mad Lads has become the talk of the blockchain. But what makes this Solana profile photo (PFP) collection so special?
What is Mad Lads?
On the surface, Mad Lads seems no different from the myriad of other PFP efforts that have been released over the years. It features 10,000 NFTs. Each NFT within the collection was minted at a price of 6.9 SOL as of April 20, 2023.
In terms of aesthetics, the collection contains a variety of illustrated human (or humanoid) PFPs. The PFPs come with unique clothing, weapons, accessories, and more, including rare biological attributes that depict celestial, robotic, and undead characters.
Aside from quickly stealing the show as a potential new blue-check collection, Mad Lads gained fame for its unique drop and token mechanics (more on that later). And while the project is undeniably a “hot new PFP NFT collection,” its release also marked a historic event for the company that created it.
Who Made Mad Lads?
The NFT project was created by the Solana framework development company Coral, which is led by Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver. When Mad Lads dropped, it happened exclusively through Backpack, an all-in-one wallet app created by Coral. While wallet exclusivity may seem counterintuitive for a brand new collection looking to impress, in hindsight it seems to have been a creative way for Backpack to claim Solana.
This is because Backpack is built around “executable NFTs” (xNFTs). Sometimes referred to as the next generation of NFTs, xNFTs are essentially non-fungible tokens embedded with executable programming scripts. Simply put, this means that xNFTs themselves are platforms for operable Web3 applications.
“Backpack manages your private keys and connects to apps. But unlike anything else, it is asset and protocol agnostic. Everything in the wallet is an xNFT….Most wallets only show your tokens. Some don’t even show your treasured JPEGs. However, backpack is a home for everything. It’s an open, programmable system built for Web3,” the company explains on its website.
Instead of a collector having to connect their wallet to a website to validate and use their NFTs, xNFTs holders can access token-gated content directly through the Backpack wallet without logging into a website or otherwise relying on of third-party software as an intermediary. This cuts an important (and sometimes even unsecured) aspect of NFT usability out of the equation.
And this is just the beginning of the use cases – the Coral blog delves much deeper into the new mechanics of xNFTs.
What Makes Mad Lads Unique?
Aside from the evolving benefits that xNFTs can bring to those within the Solana NFT ecosystem, Mad Lads has already achieved near-iconic status for how the developers handled primary sales. Bots overwhelmed the first drop on April 20, forcing a 24-hour delay. The team expertly rebooted, overcoming reported extortion threats and DDOS attacks and reeling bad actors.
By performing back-to-back updates to the minting app during the April 21 relaunch, Backpack developers created two unique minting portals to separate human users from bots. General users working with legitimate means were directed to the actual minting page, while those attempting to reverse engineer the code were sent to a “honeypot”.
This honeypot was essentially an orchestrated diversion that tricked attackers into spending their coin price on a fake coin, without getting anything in return. All in all, this bogus contract was piling up about $250,000 value of SOL, excluding bad actors from the real public NFT in the process and generating fanfare once legitimate users are looped into the mechanics. Afterwards, the team returned all Honey Pot funds to those affected.
A big boost for Solana?
After the dupe orchestrated by Backpack, word spread quickly. This, in turn, led to an explosion in secondary sales. Rock bottom prices skyrocketed, sparking a frenzy of engagement across the NFT community and as much as $8+ million generated within 24 hours. In addition, even the co-founders of the Solana blockchain Anatoly Yakovenko And Raj Gokal joined as collectors and changed their Twitter photos in support of the nascent project.
From there numerous high-quality Mad Lads Sale and a variety of fellow Solana natives sharing their support for the project on social media led to the sense of community reaching its peak. Soon after, fans and collectors alike took to Twitter to adopt the vernacular of Mad Lads and capture the influential happenings in real time. In just a few days after the collection hit the market, it had already become a major breadwinner for Backpack, xNFTs and the Solana network on which it was built.
Now the collective NFT space seems to be looking to the future in hopes of riding the recently established Mad Lads hype wave into the sunset. And with one puzzling snapshot which took place on April 29, only time will tell what other innovative or groundbreaking mechanics Coral has in store for its new fan base.