“This is orders of magnitude more insane than anything we've dealt with up until this point,” Ferrante said on a Twitter spaces with nearly 7,000 listeners, explaining why the mint was being delayed by hours, and longer.
The delay came after a day of electric interest in Ferrante’s and Yver’s custom take on NFTs. They’re called xNFTs, and they’re more than just a JPEG on a blockchain: they also represent “tokenized code representing ownership rights over its execution,” according to the website of Blue Coral, Inc., the duo’s 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 public’s chance to access the mint first an hour, and 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, a security service.
Popular demand for the collection of novel JPEGs has already likely spelled a signup boom for Coral’s wallet app, Backpack. That’s 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 isn’t playing.
The palpable excitement among Solana’s 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 Helius’ $19.99 “Hacker plan” grew so much Thursday that it prompted CEO Mert Mumaz to ward off the ill-informed.
“While 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,” Mumaz posted in Helius’ Discord server midday Thursday.
coindesk.com
