What you should know about the Reviving Solana project

The Solana NFT ecosystem has faced a few challenges recently. With the larger-than-life DeGods and Y00ts collections choosing to migrate away from the blockchain and top Solana marketplace Magic Eden finding it difficult to please both collectors and creators at the same time, many of the chain’s devout supporters have been wondering what’s next.

But sometimes it’s just a single NFT project that will act as a catalyst for a larger market shift. We’ve seen it happen on the positive end of the spectrum with Bored Apes, Azuki, Checks and more. All of these helped revive ETH at one point or another with their NFT projects. Now it seems that a new innovative collection called Crazy boys is about to do the same for Solana.

After garnering a significant amount of organic hype, and subsequently setting a new standard for reducing bots and bad actors below mint, Mad Lads has become the talk of the blockchain. But what makes this Solana Profile Picture (PFP) collection so special?

What are Mad Lads?

At face value, Mad Lads appears to be no different than the countless other PFP works released in recent years. It has 10,000 NFTs. Each NFT in the collection was minted for a price of 6.9 SOL from and including 20 April 2023.

In terms of aesthetics, the collection features a number of illustrated human (or humanoid) PFPs. The PFPs come with unique clothing, weapons, accessories and more – including rare biological attributes depicting celestial, robotic and undead characters.

Aside from quickly stealing the show as a potential new blue-check collectible, Mad Lads gained notoriety for its unique drop and token mechanics (more on this later). And while the project is unequivocally a “hot new PFP NFT compilation,” its release also marked a historic event for the company that created it.

Who created the Mad Lads?

The NFT project was created by Solana frame development company Coral, which is led by Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver. When Mad Lads dropped, it did so exclusively via Backpack, an all-in-one wallet app created by Coral. While wallet exclusivity may seem counterintuitive for a brand new collection looking to make a mark, in retrospect it appears to have been a creative way for Backpack to bank on Solana.

This is because Backpack is built around “executable NFTs” (xNFTs). Sometimes referred to as the next generation of NFTs, xNFTs are essentially non-fungible tokens embedded with executable programming scripts. Simply put, this means that xNFTs are themselves platforms for operational Web3 applications.

“Backpack manages your private keys and connects to apps. But unlike anything else, it’s asset and protocol agnostic. Everything in the wallet is an xNFT… Most wallets only show your tokens. Some don’t even show your precious JPEGs -s. However, the backpack is a home for everything. It is an open, programmable system built for Web3,” the company explains on its website.

Instead of a collector needing to connect their wallet to a website to validate and spend their NFTs, xNFT holders can directly access token-gated content through the Backpack wallet without having to log into a website or other way be dependent on third-party software as an intermediary. This cuts a significant (and sometimes even unsecured) aspect of NFT usability out of the equation.

And this is just the beginning of the use cases – the Coral blog dives much deeper into the new mechanics of xNFTs.

What makes Mad Lads unique?

Aside from the evolving benefits that xNFTs can bring to those within the Solana NFT ecosystem, Mad Lads has already achieved almost iconic status for how the project developers handled the primary sale. Bots overwhelmed the first drop on April 20, forcing a 24-hour delay. The team expertly relaunched, overcoming reported extortion threats and DDOS attacks while dispatching bad actors.

Making back-to-back updates to the coining app during its April 21st relaunch, Backpack’s developers created two unique coining portals to separate human users from bots. General users operating with legitimate means were pointed to the actual prege site, while those attempting to reverse engineer the code were sent to a “honeypot”.

This honeypot was essentially an orchestrated distraction that tricked attackers into spending the coin price on a fake coin, without getting anything in return. All in all, this fake contract accumulated around $250,000 worth of SOL, excluding bad actors from the true public NFT in the process and generating fanfare when legitimate users were let into the mechanics. The team then returned all Honey Pot funds to those affected.

A big boost for Solana?

After the dupe orchestrated by Backpack, word spread quickly. This in turn led to an explosion in secondary sales. Floor prices skyrocketed, leading to a frenzy of engagement throughout the NFT community and a huge $8+ million generated in less than 24 hours. In addition to even the Solana blockchain co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal joined as collectors, changing their Twitter images in support of the budding project.

From there many high value Mad Lad’s Sale and a number of other Solana natives who shared their support for the project across social strata brought the feeling in the community to its peak. Soon after, fans and collectors alike took to Twitter to adopt the Mad Lads language and record the influential events in real time. Just a few days after the collection hit the market, it had already become a major supporter of Backpack, xNFTs, and the Solana network it was built on.

Now it seems the collective NFT space is looking to the future in hopes of riding the newly established Mad Lads hype wave into the sunset. And with one enigmatic snapshot which took place on April 29th, only time will tell what other innovative or groundbreaking mechanics Coral may have in store for its newfound fanbase.