Mad Lad’s NFT Creator Armani

Meet Armani Ferrante, creator of the Mad Lads NFT project and one of the fastest growing names in Web3. Mad Armani, as he is also known, has captured the attention of the NFT space in the past month with the release of his first NFT collection. What do we know about Mad Armani?

Who is Mad Armani?

Mad Armani studied computer science at UC Berkeley. While studying there, he first learned about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It resonated with him immediately, but he didn’t work in Web3 right away.

Instead, Ferrante took a job at the tech giant Apple. At Apple, he worked on some of the most popular iOS apps, including Reminders and Calendar. Employees at Apple turned the young developer on to Ethereum, and after reading through Ethereum’s whitepaper, his mind was blown. Within a short time, Ferrante decided to take the plunge and quit Apple.

Within weeks of quitting, a friend introduced Ferrante to the Alameda Research team. Alameda should be a household name – it was the hedge fund run by Sam Bankman-Fried that was allegedly responsible for losing $10b+ of FTX client funds. Fortunately for Ferrante, he only stayed with the company for 6 months before leaving in 2018 to focus on 0pen source coding for Ethereum.

Ferrante then worked with Counterfactual and Oasis Labs while continuing to focus on open source coding. In the process, he learned about Ethereum’s Sharding problem. As a result, he started looking at other blockchains. In a strange twist, Sam introduced Bankman-Fried Ferrante to the Solana team. Solana quickly recruited Ferrante afterwards, and he began coding for the Layer 1 blockchain in 2020.

Ferrante then created Coral, a platform for Web3 developers. Coral made an immediate impact by developing Anchor in 2021. Anchor is now Solana’s most popular smart contract developer framework.

Not surprisingly, many VC funds wanted to invest in anything related to Ferrante and Coral. In 2022, FTX and Jump Capital led a $20 million investment round in Anchor. This investment gave Coral the funds to develop the xNFT Backpack, an interactive crypto wallet.

This seed round closed just six weeks before FTX collapsed amid massive fraud allegations. This setback cost Ferrante’s team $14.5 million in funding. However, Coral did not stop building.

What are Mad Lads?

Ferrante and Coral developed the Mad Lads NFT project as the first release for the xNFT Backpack platform. There was a ton of hype for the project right away and bots attacked the coin. The coin was initially delayed and the Mad Labs team regrouped.

The team showed off their coding chops by then programming the coin into honeypot bots. Any SOL sent by bots was taken by the team to redistribute to the project’s coffers, and after the dust settled, real people were able to mint. The move caught the attention of the NFT space and Mad Lads became a blue chip project quickly afterwards.

Since then, the owners have enjoyed the project’s vibes and praised its unique artwork. Mad Lads looks to be a project with real staying power, and with Mad Armani at the helm, its management is poised to become one of Web3’s largest ecosystems.