Don’t let the lighting fool you, because there’s nothing sinister about this week’s Metaversal Badge. You’d be a mad lad (or lass) if you didn’t claim one. So take a peek, and do it sharpish, because you’ve only got a week before they’re gone forever.

Tristan Yver and Armani Ferrante are the co-founders of Coral, a company that makes, among other things, the popular Solana smart contract service Anchor. Coral is also the driving force behind Backpack, a new(ish) wallet service that supports a new type of non-fungible token, the xNFT (or Executable NFT).

To showcase the potential of xNFTs, Coral created a profile picture project (PFP) called Mad Lads, which dominated headlines in late April and provided an object lesson in how to deal with bots while ensuring a pleasant minting experience for true fans.

Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson, sat down with one-half of the dynamic duo — Tristan Yver — to talk about xNFTs, Mad Lads, and how to launch a sellout project when everyone's buying memecoins not NFTs.

Craig Wilson: When FTX collapsed, you lost three-quarters of your funding. How do you come back from that, reorientate so quickly, and then go on to launch a project as successful as Mad Lads?

Tristan Yver: I think for me, the main driving force was seeing that, even though I had lost a lot of my personal wealth and we had lost a lot of Backpack's treasury, there were other people in much worse situations. So there was no time to feel like a victim. And there was only time to keep moving forward, especially because others had been so negatively affected.

That was a big motivating factor. I won't lie I had a grieving period. I was sort of out of it for a bit. But the new year is really when I had that turning point, and it’s when I realized this is an amazing opportunity that we have right here. We have an incredible team that depends on us. We had a big ball of momentum going — which fell apart once FTX collapsed — but it was time to start it going again and put our heads down.

CW: Where did you get the idea for xNFTs and what they could offer that regular NFTs don't?

TY: Early last year, Armani [Ferrante] invited me to co-found this company [Coral] with him. And initially, we went through many different iterations of ideas. At first, we were thinking around systems that would incentivize people to do more on-chain behaviors because we thought the problem was that there were too many people who had never done anything on-chain, even if they held crypto.

Then we realized it'd be really hard to get distribution, and we would always be at the behest of others. And so we went back to the drawing board, and we realized, well, the base distribution platforms of NFTs and crypto are non-custodial wallets. That's what everyone needs who wants to do on-chain behavior.

That took us down the path of looking at the issues with non-custodial wallets. Most of it was around phishing and scammers and fake links and all these things where people end up getting their wallets drained. And so we wanted to create a smart wallet of sorts where you would essentially have withdrawal limits, decentralized 2FA, and other systems that would make it impossible for these wallets to get drained completely by a malicious protocol or actor of any kind.

Halfway into that thought process, we realized, well, since we're starting on Solana, it's going to be really hard to fit all these instructions into each transaction because of sizing limitations. And so we had to take a step back again. But when we took that step back, we took the step back with the baseline of the wallet.

Then the next phase of iteration was based on WeChat. WeChat's done this incredible thing where they have a base application and they've created a third-party developer ecosystem to allow third-party teams and engineers to come and build experiences for the users of that base application.

So we went to this whole idea of, how come there are no mini apps, no actual native applications within any of the Web3 wallets at the moment? How come it's only a dApp browser into the mobile web UI? How come there isn't that native touch and feel? What is the reason for it?”

At first, we were thinking, what if we have to host all of these apps? Will we have legal trouble? What if somebody builds a gambling app? Will we have the legal liability of posting that application if we're offering it to the users of our wallet? And during this conversation, there was just an “aha” moment, which was this NFT can be the host of that bundle of code, or can be the owner of the bundle of code. So that there isn't this worry of having a single entity hosting, it's actually hosted by the NFT, which means it's decentralized because NFT is on the blockchain.

Then we realized that we can position the wallet as an operating system that can run this bundle of code that the NFT owns and essentially render that for the user, depending on what that experience was that was built into the bundle of code.

To maybe simplify that a little bit, all we did in the xNFT protocol, this idea that we came up with for this new form of decentralized application was to look at the existing metadata structures. On Ethereum, that's ERC-721. On Solana, it's the Metaplex metadata program. And rather than doing something where we had to replace the existing structures, we just enriched the existing structures.

Right now, how it works is you have different metadata lines. One of those lines has a URL that points at a JPEG that lives on Arweave, IPFS, S3, or wherever it is, and denotes ownership over that stored file. So, much in the same manner, we just added a new line, a new URL that points at the bundle of code that lives on our Arweave, IPFS, or S3, or wherever it's hosted.

That allowed us to create two different verticals or models. One vertical is what you see at xnft.gg, which is analogous to the idea I was sharing on the WeChat front, which is third party builders can come and can build decentralized applications, which tend to be a new front-end to access their smart contracts that exist on-chain, or a game, or even things that are back-ended by web 2.0 APIs, for example, but users can use them natively within Backpack.

The big difference with the second model I’m going to speak to is that the NFT there only exists for the creator of the app.

So, say I'm OpenSea and I build an xNFT, and when I go through the publishing flow of xnft.gg, I mint that app, which is the app I then go and update if I want to update the application experience. So, that's for the creator. From my user perspective, if I go to xnft.gg and I add that app or that xNFT to my wallet, I am just getting a delegated permission to execute the bundle of code associated with that NFT. That's model one.

Then there’s model two, which was where the idea for Mad Lads came into being. We realized we needed to have a showcase for this. We couldn't just build the protocol and expect the world to adopt it, so we needed to show the xNFT collectibles aspect, where you are only able to access the application — the thing that was built into that bundle of code — if you own the NFT itself.

Right now, if you own a Mad Lad and you click on it, it'll take you into this little experience we recently did where we Rick Rolled our community. It’s an open platform that can be used for all sorts of things, but the point is, you can only access that experience if you hold the NFT.

So, all of a sudden token, gating moves away from the current world in which you need several different programs and different chat messaging and applications to one where all you need is Backpack and the NFT. You can be one click away from the holders’ chat or one click away from whatever experience the creator wants to offer you.

That was the thought process on the xNFT collectible side. And the other reason that we did Mad Lads wasn't just as a showcase of technology, but because we realized that the largest things lacking in crypto right now are demand, distribution, and actual users doing things. And we think that Mad Lads can be the spearhead that will be able to reach a mass consumer audience and that will be relatable to a mass consumer audience.

Then, over time, as we create and craft unique experiences within Backpack for that audience, they will go further down the funnel into Backpack.

Why did you choose Solana?

There are a few reasons. One is just that it's been home base for Armani and me for a long time, in the sense that we've been building in this ecosystem since mid-2020. So we've seen the entire growth of it, we've gotten to get a really good feel for it, and we’re really close with a lot of the best builders, the Solana team, and so on and so forth.

So, we thought it pertinent to use Solana as a home base. Even though we are a multichain wallet and we already support Ethereum — and, when we integrate wormhole, we will go to many other chains. But Solana was the best place for us to get our initial user base, which we could then bring with us wherever we went and wanted to build.

We also thought it was a much more compelling argument when we showed up on Ethereum or Arbitrum or any of these other chains to the builders there to have them come build with us if they saw that we had a good mass of users already. That seemed like a thing that could be done on Solana and that we couldn't do on other chains initially.

Another component is we are just generally super optimistic about Solana. We think it's an incredibly powerful technology. We think it is probably one of the only experiences right now that has the possibility of really onboarding a bunch of new people into the space.

Sort of a data point in that direction has been that NFT folks in Solana, their first touch point with crypto at all were these NFTs. So their first experience in which they actually use on-chain applications was coming into the Solana NFT space.

The market’s been tough lately, and much of the oxygen in the room has been sucked up with memecoins. Despite that, the Mad Lads mint was still super oversubscribed. How did you go about building that much hype for an as-yet-unproven product? How did you build that faith so aggressively?

I think it’s the sum of many, many, many different components, but perhaps some of the largest ones were that we had been building in the open for about a year already. So folks knew who we were, they saw we were doing everything open source, they saw that we were public, that we were doxxed, that we were friends with the Solana team, that we had good rapport with all the builders.

Armani had built Anchor, which is a development framework that pretty much every single protocol on Solana uses for their smart contracts. And a lot of that gave us the initial trust that we could turn into energy… into momentum… into excitement. And that was done through community building, essentially.

Very early on when I started our Twitter, we did a lot of memetics. We played the meme game very well. And we cultivated and crafted our core community, handpicking, one by one, the people who we initially allowed in the Discord when it was private.

Thanks to that core community — which took me several months to put together — we were generating enormous engagement on Twitter, because everyone wanted to be in the Discord. There was this blue ball meme, which was huge for a while, which originated from me just serendipitously using a GIF of an anime show of a young girl throwing a blue dodgeball at somebody else.

After I used it a couple of times, I realized, “Oh, this is the perfect selecting signal to let people know they are going to be allowed into the Discord.” So, if I replied to somebody with it, they knew they were going to get that invitation.

I was able to make those invitations desirable. So, for example, if somebody made an amazing piece of content or a hilarious meme or put a lot of effort into a thread or a video, I would reward them with this invitation. And it was a signal to others in the direction that they had to take the things that they were doing to try and get into the community.

That resulted in great engagement. Because people were making incredible memes, which everyone enjoyed, but also creating this strong backbone for the community, which was important once we started opening up things more to the public, and once we started being more open about what we were building. That core group held the community together as it grew.

I think we have 30-something thousand people in the Discord. But this backbone of 600 to 800 people is what has kept the culture of the community strong. And I think those things — as well as the art being truly phenomenal and people really appreciating all the sneak peeks that we did — plus, you know, the huge bot attack that we had on the Thursday we were supposed to mint, and the Twitter Space that grew to 6,600 people listening, and the Coindesk article that came out afterwards, it all rolled up into a huge ball of energy and excitement for the mint when it eventually happened on the Friday.

Who created the art, and what was the inspiration behind the Peaky Blinders-esque tie-in?

I was the principal creative director and I worked with this amazing artist who's a friend of mine named Yann Penno. I directed what the style would be, and it was this amalgamation of several things. On one side, I've watched thousands of hours of anime, and anime resonates tremendously with me.

When I was 11, I was watching anime. I was the dweeb and the nerd, and everyone thought I was out of my mind. But now it seems that anime is sort of like this mainstream thing. I think it's just continually growing, and so I thought there's a really strong base foundation for the characters from an anime perspective.

Then we took inspiration from things like the Mad Men show or, as you said, Peaky Blinders, mostly on the clothing component. We've seen a lot of NFTs that are hyper-casual or fantastical and have these crazy, wild attributes, but I haven't seen many in which it's elegant and the quality shines through.

I was thinking about the class of the early nineteen to mid-1900s, in which everyone truly cared about how they dressed, and style was paramount. I really wanted to reflect that through the artwork in the collection. Those things — plus all the feedback that Armani and Gonzalo [Gutierrez] from my team gave me as I showed them things — helped turn it into the collection that it's become now.

Really it was just infinite hours poured into it. Almost every attribute and name and detail has a thought process behind it.

With the collection taking off in the way that it obviously has, do you have to divvy up your time or split your resources between Mad Lads and the attendant community on the one hand, and Backpack on the other? Or do you see them as inherently interwoven and complementary, so they both benefit from your attention somehow simultaneously?

Yeah, that's a great question. The second thing that you said is the right thing. They are interwoven and they are synergistic and they are symbiotic. But my focus right now is almost principally on Mad Lads.

Because we've had some good initial success, but it's very much the starting line. It's just a little data point on the large scheme of where we want to build to. And I think, if we're able to actually take MadLads to become even a small mainstream consumer brand, that jump starts or fast forwards our backpack work by so much that it's just the principal thing I need to be focusing on right now.

Can you talk a bit about the future potential you see for xNFTs? What are some of the use cases on the roadmap that could help onboard the oft-talked-about, vaunted, and maybe mythical, next billion users?

Yeah, so I won't give any direct spoilers. But I will say that the way we're thinking of it is as a way to take our holders on a journey. And what I mean by that is that we have some large endpoints. We have a midterm goal that we're going for. We have this end-term goal that we're going for. There are these things that we have in the works that will take a while that are huge.

We want to reverse engineer a pathway to those points so that people get to feel this delightful journey along the way to these large, impactful moments. And the way we're thinking of xNFTs, more so than necessarily coming up with a killer app that lives within the Mad Lads xNFT, it's as a way to allow our community to feel something… to feel like they're part of something greater than themselves. And that's a large way through which we're framing it.

Then, taking a step from our collection specifically, an insanely awesome use case that I can think of for xNFTs is something like this: Imagine Chris Rock wants to release an NFT, but he doesn’t want to deal with a Discord or having to manage a community. What if he could issue an NFT and the only thing he had to do was once a week do a skit in front of his camera, and fans could only watch that skit if they clicked on his NFT at that time of the week.

I think [xNFTs] are a really interesting medium for content creators to actually get distribution through NFTs that they haven't really been able to do before. Again, this isa hyper-focused thing that I'm talking about. The design space is completely open so people can actually build whatever they want.

But I think this is a really interesting one. Because there's a lot of friction for people who already have powerful audiences to enter the NFT space in a way that's not gimmicky or in a way that doesn't end up being a soft rug over time because the upkeep is just too high and it's not worth their time.

Sure. And on the flip side, keeping people’s attention with PFPs is hard. It’s clear Mad Lads is much more than just a PFP. Do you think there's a real future for PFPs as a category generally? Or do you think they’ll need to take users on a journey if they're gonna endure and survive?

I think there will always be a market for PFPs. I think, if anything, it's only going to grow as we become more and more digital. People will need digital identities, and people will need social identifiers that demark them within this digital realm. In that sense, I think PFPs will only continue to grow.

That's one component of it. Although I think a big friction point is that, right now, you need a lot of context to go from the PFP to the community that exists behind that PFP. You need to know the Twitter, you need to know the Discord, you need to know the founder, you need to know all these different components.

If you can abstract that away to a single click to be in the holders’ chat that’s already an enormous upgrade because, yes, the PFP is the social identifier. Yes, it has the status that it gives within your digital community, but also a lot of the value that exists is the community that is behind this group of PFPs. So it's a shame if people only get to experience the object-level JPEG and not all the human energy that lives behind that collection.

Right, you want to build for holders and community creators, not flippers treating them as commodities and looking for a quick exit.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, our preference is that all the holders of our NFT are people who are engaged and going through this journey with us and in the community and in the chats and amplifying the things that we do and spreading the message out into the world.

But, that being said, there will always be those art collectors who, you know, have the Van Goghs and the Picassos and all these incredible pieces just stored away in their high-security locker rooms, right? Even if they're not showcased anywhere. That's just the way of the world. I think that will continue to happen, although we will try and optimize for active holders.

You did a great job not only defending the mint from bots but actually tricking some of them into sending money to a honeypot. Was that a greatly satisfying moment? And what advice do you have for other projects when it comes to fending off malicious actors?

Yeah, it's really hard because anything that's on-chain is public. So the moment the mint code is deployed on-chain, people can scrape it and try and figure out how they can mint without using the interface you want to send them through.

That's a lot of what was happening. They were DDOSing because they wanted to go through the deployment and see where they had to hit to be able to mint. And we were trying to redeploy a new one and a new one and a new one to keep confusing them and send them the wrong way, essentially.

We did celebrate. We had a moment of, like, “Oh my god, we got them.” And then we also decided very quickly to just refund it all, because of a combination of things. First, I think some real people may have gotten swept into it.

But the other thing is some of these botting services offer it as a service to individuals. So it wasn't necessarily one bot that was just hitting it all themselves, it was a service that they were providing to individuals. And so those individuals started showing up. And even if they had maybe been using a bot or were trying to use a bot, they were saying, “No, no, we're a real person, we're a real person!” So we just said, “You know what, we will just refund this all and go through with it.”

As far as advice, it's really hard, but it is worthwhile not to allow bots to get the entirety of the mint — or large percentages of the mint — because that can kill a project from its inception.

Kudos to our engineering team. One of the beautiful things about Armani having built so much powerful open-source software is that incredibly good engineers want to work with us. So that's been a blessing.

Now that you’ve built this amazing community, what would you like to see from them?

Yeah, there's this one thing Armani said on a stream the other day, which I think is going to be very pertinent to us, in particular, as builders. We need holders to start transitioning from a mindset of days and weeks, to one of quarters and years, because this is a multi-year project.

We will continue to build incredible things, and some of these things will take time. So we will need the community to get rid of those that don't understand that and embrace those that do.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson, compiled this week’s edition.

Patrick Lawler designed this week’s maddeningly brilliant Badge.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse.

Don’t let the lighting fool you, because there’s nothing sinister about this week’s Metaversal Badge. You’d be a mad lad (or lass) if you didn’t claim one. So take a peek, and do it sharpish, because you’ve only got a week before they’re gone forever.