The MadLads NFT public mint was delayed for over a day due to a massive surge in interest in the project, and later launched after setting up a honeypot trap for bots.
The overwhelming demand for the MadLads NFTs led to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that flooded the crypto wallet Backpack with billions of requests, exceeding the platform’s capabilities and impacting other aspects of the Solana ecosystem. MadLads co-creators Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver announced the delay in order to address the issue and ensure the infrastructure could handle the influx of users seeking to mint the MadLads NFTs.
MadLads NFT collection has become one of the most popular NFT mints in Solana’s recent history, with the xNFTs representing a new type of NFT that signifies ownership rights over the tokenized code’s execution. Armani Ferrante, one of MadLads’ co-creators, explained the magnitude of the situation during a Twitter Spaces conversation, stating that the demand was “orders of magnitude more insane than anything we’ve dealt with up until this point.” The excitement within the Solana community led some NFT traders to seek any possible advantage to gain access to the MadLads collection.
The MadLads NFT collection was able to successfully launch after the delay, although the team’s approach to setting up a honeypot trap to catch automated mints was met with controversy. The team assured users that all funds were returned, but there are reports of some users not receiving their $SOL funds back. The MadLads collection is significant as it aims to be the first xNFT and has generated a lot of buzz within the Solana community, becoming one of the most popular NFT mints in the platform’s recent history.
