New NFT collection Mad Lads brings rebirth for Solana: Decrypt

Since minting last week, a Solana-based profile picture (PFP) NFT collection Mad Lads has generated over $15 million in trading volume. This is a great success for Solana after two prominent NFT projects – DeGods and Y00ts – migrated to Ethereum and Polygon.

Related: DeGods and Y00ts leave Solana

Mad Lads is a success not only for Solana, but for the entire NFT community. According to CryptoSlam, the Mad Lads collection sits at the 3rd place with a sales volume of $1,111,250 in the last 24 hours.

Armani Ferrante, co-founder and CEO of Mad Lads, told Decrypt that the Solana community was in a dark place after the collapse of FTX, and that Mad Lads successfully filled the void after the departure of DeGods and Y00ts because “NFTs are super important for the network.”

Ferrante additionally pointed out that the success of Mad Lads is also due to the long-built reputation that the two creators of NFTs, he and co-creator Tristan Yver, enjoy:

I think a lot of folks looked at us—and I’m just speculating here—as a credible team that can execute and that are good people, fundamentally, that care a lot about the ecosystem

Ferrante and Yver are also co-founders of Coral, a popular development framework for the Solana blockchain, which simultaneously released Backpack, an all-in-one wallet app that’s built around Solana xNFT (eXecutable NFTs). The Mad Lads mint was the first big launch for Backpack. Coral developed an in-app gamified experience for token holders.

Ferrante said about xNFTs:

You don’t have to worry about creating new websites for your user experience. You just use the NFT, and this is an incredible opportunity for creators to build new stories and create a new meta where the artwork is no longer just a piece of artwork.

So WTF are xNFTS? pic.twitter.com/LGjvHh2JFx

— Mad Armani (@armaniferrante) June 20, 2022

Ferrante hinted that there will be a series of planned upgrades for Backpack that will include Mad Lads-related content and experiences. In the long term, Coral wants to expand the platform’s reach by making it multi-chain. Currently, Ethereum is supported by Wormhole cross-chain. Ferrante hopes developers from the community will assist in incorporating more protocols such as Bitcoin and Ordinals.