Armani Ferrante with tech support at Breakpoint 2023 (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)
One of the hottest NFT mints in Solanaās recent history is getting pushed into Friday after a groundswell of interest in the Madlads collection broke the internet infrastructure behind it.
The Madlads collection ā a project closely tied to the growing realm of Solana duo Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver ā will open to public minters at 7 p.m. ET (23:00 UTC) Friday, an account tied to the supercharged non-fungible token (NFT) project tweeted late Thursday.
Delaying nearly 24 hours could buy Madladsā creators time to solve a problem they didnāt think to expect: way too much internet traffic. āBillionsā of requests routed through the crypto wallet Backpack (itself a production from Ferrante and Yver) outpaced the platformās abilities, effectively resulting in aDDoS attack.
āThis is orders of magnitude more insane than anything we've dealt with up until this point,ā Ferrante said on a Twitter spaces with about 9,500 listeners, explaining why the mint was being pushed back.
The delay came after a day of electric interest in Ferranteās and Yverās custom take on NFTs. Theyāre called xNFTs, and theyāre more than just a JPEG on a blockchain: They also represent ātokenized code representing ownership rights over its execution,ā according to the website of Blue Coral Inc., the duoās startup that focuses on Solana development.
Madlads is meant to be the first xNFT.
On the Twitter spaces, Ferrante recounted a cascading series of internet outages that restricted the publicās chance to access the mint, first for an hour, then a day. He said heavy demand knocked out two RPC nodes (access points to the Solana blockchain) and also the user interface on Cloudflare, which, among other things, tries to prevent DDoS attacks.
Popular demand for the collection of novel JPEGs has already likely spelled a signup boom for Coralās wallet app, Backpack. Thatās the only Solana wallet where would-be owners can mint the Madlads collection, and also the only wallet that supports it, given market leader Phantom isnāt playing.
The palpable excitement among Solanaās developer community manifested in unexpected ways as NFT traders searched for any edge that might guarantee them access to the collection.
Some desperate seekers even followed the advice of a Substack post that implied, erroneously, that buying into custom RPC nodes from Solana developer project Helius could benefit would-be minters.
The signups to Heliusā $19.99 āHacker planā grew so much Thursday that it prompted CEO Mert Mumtaz to ward off the ill-informed.
āWhile I appreciate you thinking of us, it's important to understand that this RPC won't actually increase your chances of minting a Madlad all that much, if at all,ā Mumtaz posted in Heliusā Discord server midday Thursday.
https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/04/21/heavy-demand-for-madlads-nft-breaks-internet-delays-mint/