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Mad Lad’s Fake Mint Sees NFT Bots Lose $250,000!
Mad Lads has become the hottest NFT project on the market, with the buzz flowing through the roof, but it is also known for leading the fight against bots. The coin project experienced significant drama when robots overwhelmed the mint stage. This led to a 24-hour delay in the process. The Mad Lads team tricked the players by directing bots into a fake coin that demanded payment in SOL, worth over $250,000.
Mad Lads: How To Win The War On NFT Bots
Although the money has now been refunded, this move prevented bot-dominated mints and kept more of the NFT drop supply for real collectors. Some time before the coin date, Coral CEO Armani Ferrante received Telegram messages from an anonymous party attempting to pressure Coral. They threatened to take down the Coral’s Backpack app and botch the fall. Ferrante described it as a “fight for the future of the project”. He believes in building an organic community of collectors who go through the coin.
High-profile NFT coins are usually targets of bot users. These bots flood the coin program with requests to buy an excessive amount of assets. These attacks cause problems, such as taking down the Solana network. The situation gets worse when the coin is bot-dominated because it makes it impossible for real collectors to participate. To prevent bot attacks, Coral implements curated approval lists of authorized wallets, but also introduces inequities in the minting process.
The Mad Lads coin went on schedule Wednesday. But on Thursday, as the public coin for the rest of the NFT supply was about to begin, Ferrante said DDOS attacks began immediately. Coral then suspended the coin several times on Thursday to quell the attacks. Although the Solana network remained online, other problems arose as RPC providers had problems and CoinGecko’s pricing API went down.
Ferrante describes it as a “domino effect” as billions of requests went to the Mad Lads coin and caused chaos. Coral pushed the coin by 24 hours until Friday night, rather than let botters claim an unfair share of the NFTs. Ferrante’s team spent the extra time figuring out how to better protect against botting attacks. This included a new type of strategy.
How to brew a honey jar like a mad boy
When the Friday coin was about to start, the DDOS flood started again. This time, Coral sent two back-to-back updates to the coining app. One legitimate link pointing to the real NFT mint process, and another that could only be found by reverse engineering the code. The other points to a “honeypot”, an isolated distraction designed to trick botters into blowing their SOL on a fake coin and receiving nothing of value in the process. The bogus contract sunk over $250,000 worth of SOL. Also, those users who tried to gain an unfair advantage in the coin were not in the mix when the legitimate public NFT release began moments later.
It is possible that some legitimate users took the bait of the fake coin. Some users on Twitter said they followed the rules and ended up with a useless NFT. But in the pseudonymous Web3 world, it’s difficult to investigate the legitimacy of complaints on social media. Still, Ferrante said he’s sure it was mostly users trying to gamble the coin. The honeypot move was to distract and thwart botters and not steal away funds. And so refunds were processed hours after the coin ended.
Mad Lads’ success has led to buzz around the project as it topped the NFT charts over the weekend. Ferrante believes the surprise tactic helped the Mad Lads reach more of their intended audience. Furthermore, the drama and excitement led to more interest in the project. Whether this type of strategy will work again for future NFT drops is unclear, however, as the cat-and-mouse game between bots and NFT drops continues.
