Huge demand for Madlad’s NFT breaks internet, delays Mint
One of the hottest NFT coins in Solana’s recent history is being pushed into Friday after a wave of interest in the Madlads collection broke the internet infrastructure behind it.
The Madlads Collection — a project closely tied to the growing empire of Solana duo Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver — will open to public coiners at 7:00 a.m. EST Friday, an account linked to the supercharged non-fungible token project (NFT ) tweeted late Thursday.
By delaying almost 24 hours, the creators of Madlads can buy time to solve a problem they didn’t think to expect: way too much internet traffic. “Billions” of requests routed through the Backpack crypto wallet (itself a product of Ferrante and Yver) overwhelmed the platform’s capabilities, resulting in an effective DDoS attack.
“This is orders of magnitude more insane than anything we’ve dealt with up to this point,” Ferrante said in a Twitter post with nearly 7,000 listeners, explaining why the coin was delayed by hours and beyond.
The delay came after a day of electric interest in Ferrante and Yver’s custom version of NFTs. Called xNFTs, they’re more than just a JPEG on a blockchain: they also represent “tokenized code that represents ownership rights over its execution,” according to the website of Blue Coral, Inc., the duo’s startup focused on Solana development.
Madlads is supposed to be the first xNFT.
In the Twitter spaces, Ferrante recounted a pervasive series of internet outages that limited the public’s ability to access the coin for first an hour, and then a day. He said high demand knocked out two RPC nodes (access points to the Solana blockchain) and also the user interface on Cloudflare, a security service.
Popular demand for the collection of new JPEGs has likely already led to a sign-up boom for Coral’s wallet app, Backpack. It’s the only Solana wallet where potential owners can build the Madlads collection, and also the only wallet to support it, given market leader Phantom isn’t playing.
The palpable tension among Solana’s developer community manifested itself in unexpected ways as NFT traders searched for any edge that could guarantee them access to the collection.
Some desperate seekers even followed the advice of a Substack post that falsely suggested that buying into custom RPC nodes from the Solana developer project Helius could benefit future coiners.
Signups for Helius’ $19.99 Hacker plan grew so much Thursday that it prompted CEO Mert Mumaz to fend off the ill-informed.
“While I appreciate your thinking of us, it’s important to understand that this RPC won’t actually increase your chances of minting a Madlad that much, if at all,” Mumaz wrote in Helius’ Discord – serve dinner on Thursday.
