What is MadLads? Mad Lads is a new collection of PFP (profile picture) NFTs that may initially seem similar to others released in recent years. The collection consists of 10,000 NFTs that were sold for 6.9 SOL each starting on April 20, 2023.
The collection features a range of illustrated human or humanoid PFPs, each with unique clothing, weapons, accessories, and special biological attributes that depict celestial, robotic, and undead characters. Despite being a new PFP NFT collection, Mad Lads has gained attention for its distinct drop and token mechanics.
Furthermore, Mad Lads has also made history for the company behind it, and it has quickly become a potential new popular collection.
What Makes MadLads Unique? Apart from the potential benefits that xNFTs could bring to the Solana NFT ecosystem, Mad Lads has gained significant attention for the way the project developers handled the primary sale. During the initial April 20 drop, bots overwhelmed the system, resulting in a 24-hour delay. The team relaunched the sale the following day, overcoming extortion threats and DDOS attacks.
To prevent bots from interfering with the sale, Backpack's developers made two separate minting portals during the April 21 re-launch. Legitimate users were directed to the actual minting page, while those attempting to manipulate the code were sent to a "honeypot," which acted as a distraction to trick attackers into spending their mint price on a fake contract that accumulated around $250,000 worth of SOL. This effectively prevented bad actors from accessing the true public NFT and generated excitement among legitimate users.
Once the sale was completed, the team returned all the funds from the honeypot to those who were affected. Overall, the way the Mad Lads team handled the sale has contributed to its near-iconic status within the NFT community.
- Information gathered from Langston Thomas via NFTNow
Who Created Mad Lads?
The NFT project Mad Lads was created by Coral, a development company that uses the Solana framework. Coral is led by Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver. Mad Lads was launched exclusively through Backpack, an all-in-one wallet app created by Coral. While this may seem counterintuitive for a new NFT collection seeking to gain attention, it was a creative way for Backpack to establish itself on Solana.
While working on Solana he created developer platform "Coral".
In 2021, they built Anchor - the most popular smart contract developer framework (on Solana).
Backpack is designed around "executable NFTs" or xNFTs, which are non-fungible tokens embedded with executable programming scripts. This means that xNFTs themselves are platforms for operable Web3 applications. Unlike traditional wallets that only show tokens, Backpack is asset and protocol agnostic. It shows everything in the wallet as an xNFT, making it an open, programmable system built for Web3.
With xNFTs, collectors can access token-gated content directly through the Backpack wallet, without having to log into a website or depend on third-party software as an intermediary. This makes the process more secure and cuts out an unsecured aspect of NFT usability.
This is just the beginning of the use cases for xNFTs. The Coral blog delves deeper into the novel mechanics of xNFTs, showcasing their potential for future development.
