Mad News #31 🔐 The Safest Place In Crypto
Noto Peninsula earthquake relief fundraising, expanded Collection Locking, new Backpack Exchange trading competition and Mad Lads holders receive numerous airdrops during memecoin season.
Welcome back to the Mad News! 🗞️
Noto Peninsula earthquake fundraising efforts
Collection locking secures more NFT projects
Mad Lads and Backpack change their name
Happy New Lad trading competition on Backpack Exchange
Lads clean house with memecoin airdrops
Mad Lads claim 25% of all “new money” sales
…and much more!
Check out our alternate language channels in Vietnamese, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Hindi and Tagalog (ARABIC COMING SOON!)
Subscribe now and be the first to receive newsletters, exclusive interviews and other other behind the scenes looks.
Collecting donations for Noto Peninsula Earthquake fund ⛰️
Homes and businesses rattled throughout Central Japan as a violent earthquake hit the Noto Peninsula leaving a path of devastation in its wake.
The Backpack Earthquake Aid fund is rallying crypto users to donate for the cause.
2p6FY2frHSMX6TUYoLq6tFfAh1Q2ESn9HDzWDKFUQwDi
-all SPL tokens are accepted (SOL, USDC, BONK, etc.)
More than $14,000 USD has been raised so far.
Slowly and then all at once, collection locking sees first big expansion 🔐
Collection locking is one of the Backpack Wallet’s most significant security features and one reason why Solana (and ETH) users are adopting it as their wallet of choice.
With so many wallet drains recently, this feature is a game changer
Locking was exclusive to Mad Lads holders starting in October but began to include more Solana bluechip collections in December.
Are you wondering how to check if your NFTs can be locked?
Open your NFTs in the Backpack wallet and look for the “Lock Mad Lads collection” toggle.
Locking your NFTs means that any transaction request concerning the asset is automatically rejected.
New name, same game 🎭
Backpack and Mad Lads emerge from their Twitter cocoons as sleek butterflies on 𝕏 as account usernames shed “xNFT” and “NFT” respectively.
There was an all out sprint by the Backpack team to convert all official links to the new usernames after 𝕏 swapped them on the sly overnight.
Happy New Lad competition offers major reward for prolific traders 📊
The Backpack Exchange returns with a brand new promotion for the New Year.
One lucky user with the highest taker volume will land themselves a shiny new Mad Lad from the ‘scholarship’ fund (a collection of ~300 Lads that were held by the team).
The competition began on January 1st and will continue until January 14th at 12:30PM (JST).
Backpack developers have shippooors DNA in their blood 🧬
Backpack developers have released an improvement or new feature every single week since the unveiling of the Exchange in October.
The latest development: on-chart order modification.
Users can now modify and replace their orders using the trading view charts.
Backpack Exchange now deals in $HNT 🪙
Spot trading went live for the Helium Network’s token ($HNT) on January 2nd and is available for all traders on the Exchange.
HNT serves the needs of the two primary parties in the Helium Ecosystem
Hotspot Hosts and Operators. Hosts are rewarded in network tokens like IOT or MOBILE while deploying and maintaining network coverage. These network tokens are redeemable for HNT.
Enterprises and Developers use the Helium Network to connect devices and build IoT applications. Data Credits, which are a $USD-pegged utility token derived from HNT, are used to pay transaction fees for wireless data transmissions on the Network.
LAD OF THE WEEK: Locar ❤️
The reply guy that reply guys aim to be.
The constant support which Mad Lads have become famous for.
Locar is our LAD OF THE WEEK!
Locar is a longtime supporter of the Mad Lads and joined the community long before the collection minted.
You might recognize Locar’s PFP for one simple reason: he appears in the comments of every single Mad Lads post.
Locar and a dozen more Lads went the extra mile last week and ended up securing a position for the Mad Lads in a Museum of Modern Art postcard collection.
The project ended up winning fourth place in the competition and forever inscribes the Mad Lads into an IRL museum memory.
We can all take a leaf out of Locars book: consistently showing up each day to showcase our conviction about the things we believe in.
Make sure to give Locar a follow!
Lads the receiving end of Solana memecoin airdrops 🛩️
Mad Lads NFTs have no utility outside of their value as an art collection.
That being said, holders have been blessed with nearly a dozen memecoins during the recent airdrop season including:
Gray
FOCK
NOBLE
WAO, ARMANI SEXY LASS
Drako
What’s interesting is that almost all of those airdrops were not done with any effort by me or the Backpack team.
It was all done because the community earned it.
Dymension airdrop the most hyped since Pythia staking event 🥩
Dymension represents the other side of the token airdrop meta that has been rewarding Mad Lads holders.
Platforms like Pyth and Dymension are reputable builders in the space who are now recognizing the most impactful communities in the crypto space.
All eyes are on the Mad Lads in NFT-land 👀
Data doesn’t lie and the charts look good for the Mad Lads.
More than 130,000 new wallets bought their first NFT during the month of December and 25% of “new money” NFT sales volume is attributed to the Mad Lads collection.
Toly gives truncated New Years speech 🎙️
I opened up Google and searched “despotism” after reading Anatoly Yakovenko’s New Years manifesto:
As we enter the new year, I am more convinced than ever of our industry's overall mission.
A state of the people and by the people, despite all its flaws, is unequivocally good. A state by the despot for the despot, no matter how charitable, is irredeemably evil.
Open, permissionless money is a tool for the people against despotism.
-Toly
Solana has experienced a surge in new users as SOL approaches all time highs and the technology behind the blockchain matures.
Solana “flips” Ethereum in monthly NFT sales volume for first time ever 📈
Solana: $366,608,851 (USD)
Ethereum: $353,245,282 (USD)
Those were the final sales volume for NFTs on the Solana and Ethereum blockchains as December made way to the New Year.
This comes right before a 24hour period on January 2nd that saw more than $35 million Ethereum tokens were bridged to Solana.
Token-2022 seeks it’s final form ⚙️
The name “Token-2022” has been the butt of many jokes in the Solana developer community, namely because it is one the least imaginative names ever conceived.
Token Extensions is the rename of Token-2022, and we're rapidly approaching launch alongside 1.17 adoption on mainnet.
Superteam Meetups taking over the globe in January 🗺️
From Islamabad to Mumbai and Turkey to Norway, 2024 is off to a roaring start as Superteam plans dozens of IRL meetups in all corners of the world.
Superteam also has a mechanism to help setup smaller events for community members in areas of the world that don’t have meetups.
Don’t see your city? Apply to host a meetup, invite your smartest friends and introduce them to Solana!
Superteam Brazil releases hype video heading into first supermeet 🏖️
Superteam Brazil is the single biggest *official* Solana regional community and they are hosting their first supermeet in Critiba, Brazil.
Speedrun gamejam results are in 🎮
The second Speedrun Game Jam ended with more than 300 individual registrants with 35 completed games submitted by the end of the competition.
There were ten winners in the main categories including one that is available to play as an xNFT, Rebirth Rumble.
You can download the game in the xNFT Library (although it was buggy at the time of writing).
Solana Crash Course offers free workshops for new developers 💻
The Solana Crash Course is spread out over the month of January and consists of two daily sessions (one hour apiece).
Participants will learn the finer side of building on Solana, the course is suited for developers of all experience levels.
More than 100 developers have signed up already but you can still register here.
Podcast Corner! 🎤
Validated
In a recent collaboration with Worldpay, Visa expanded its USDC settlement to the Solana blockchain.
Austin and Nabil chat about the current landscape of card payments and what the integration of blockchain unlocks for large financial institutions.
Chopping Block
Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder discusses the ins and outs of maximum extractable value (MEV) and how the Jito airdrop rejuvenated Solana.
Unchained
In this episode of Unchained, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, Nick White, COO at Celestia, and Chris Burniske, partner at VC firm Placeholder discuss the differences between modular and monolithic, or integrated, blockchains, with Solana epitomizing the monolithic approach and Celestia the modular one.
Lightspeed
Ansem and Joe McCann join us to discuss their top crypto market predictions for 2024. Ansem and Joe are prolific crypto investors who nailed this year's Solana trade, and they're here to discuss what's next.