Mad Lads distract bots with $250k fake mint

New NFT collection on the block (chain), The crazy boysrecently outsmarted bots during their project by tricking them into spending over $250,000 in $SOL on fake NFTs. Using this ingenious tactic, the Mad Lads team ensured that authentic participants could access the scarce NFT supply while opportunists seeking quick profits were left empty-handed.

Armani Ferrante, CEO of Coral, the company behind the project, shared how Mad Lads chose to confront bot attacks to protect the NFT drop. The situation escalated during the public mint on Friday 21. April, when billions of bot requests through Backpack the crypto wallet overwhelmed the platform, resulting in a 24-hour delay of the mint. Incidentally, Ferrante was also contacted by an unidentified person who threatened to launch a DDoS attack on the coin unless they were paid.

During a Twitter Spaces session, Ferrante revealed a sequence of internet outages that prevented the public’s ability to access their NFT coin. The outage lasted for an hour and then escalated to a day, causing significant inconvenience. He attributed the problem to high demand causing two RPC nodes to fail, along with the user interface at Cloudflare, which is responsible for preventing DDoS attacks.

The honeypot update threw a spanner in the works

As a startup with limited funding and a promising project at stake, Ferrante and his team recognized the threat posed by robots or automated programs attempting to purchase large quantities of assets for resale. To counter this, they developed a strategy to thwart the impending attack.

The decisive moment came when the attackers resumed their DDoS attempts. During this, Coral implemented a two-part update to the coining app: a legitimate update and a hidden “honeypot” update, accessible only by reverse engineering the code. The honeypot update was designed to trick bots into spending $SOL on fake NFTs, effectively removing them from the legitimate minting process.

When the dust settled, the honey pot had absorbed over $250,000 in SOL. Although some genuine users may have been inadvertently caught in the crossfire, Ferrante believed that most affected parties were attempting to manipulate the coin. As a gesture of goodwill, the project then processed a full refund for those misled by the honey jar.

It remains to be seen whether similar strategies will be used in future NFT releases as the ongoing battle between project developers and bot attackers continues. However, Mad Lads’ unorthodox approach ensured the project’s success and generated significant buzz in the NFT community, leaving a lasting impression on the ever-evolving space.

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