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Most NFT PFP projects have come and gone. The euphoric period of 2021–2022, with its lofty expectations, roadmaps and promises, is mainly in the rear-view mirror.
But one project, Mad Lads, has emerged from the rubble of the bear market and solidified itself as a leading PFP project community on Solana.
What is Mad Lads?
The “Lads” minted on April 21, 2023, following a highly curated allowlist process that began 12 months earlier, spearheaded by co-founder Tristan Yver. Minting at 6.9 SOL, about $144 at the time, the Lads were a galvanizing force for good in the Solana ecosystem after the infamous FTX downfall had many questioning the long-term viability of the blockchain.
Riding the wave of Solana’s price and interest run-up in Q4 2023, the Mad Lads collection hit an all-time high floor price of 218 SOL in early December 2023, putting it in the top five biggest PFP projects across all chains at the time. Currently, the floor price sits at 70 SOL ($11,060).
Yver tells Magazine that trauma bonding through the tumultuous period in crypto in 2022 was a contributing factor to making the community strong.
“I think a lot of the community bonded through mutual suffering. All these people came in when times were still pretty good. Then Luna was just starting to happen, and a lot of people got f**cked by that. They bonded through that inside the community. And then FTX happened, and a bunch more people had a really bad time. Then the market just kept crashing,” says Yver.
“Basically, it was this mutual trauma. It’s what’s called trauma bonding. There was this really strong trauma bonding throughout the community that made these people irreplaceable, essentially. That made these people connected in a way that I don’t think you would have been able to formulate in any other environment.”
Yver added that Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko had credited the Lads with breathing life back into the ecosystem.
“I actually had Anatoly tell me that Mad Lads was the reigniting spark when the Mad Lads mint occurred on Solana.”
“I think it was because these people were so connected. It was a real community. It wasn’t people there necessarily for monetary gain anymore, it was just people who really enjoyed being with each other. They brought the energy back into the Solana ecosystem,” he says.
Tristan Yver’s backstory
Yver’s origin story includes a stint at the now-defunct FTX, where he worked his way up from a customer support role to spearheading The FTX Podcast as host. Prior to breaking into the exchange, Yver had a whole raft of different jobs, not afraid to get his hands dirty to gain experience.
“I did every job you can imagine. I put myself through college. I did landscaping, serving at restaurants, commercial fishing, was an apprentice and an electrician. I did a whole bunch of different things, then went to college, and then got a customer support job at FTX. I clawed my way out of the support trenches into more fulfilling roles. More experience gave me more opportunities,” Yver says.
Yver credits his wife with pushing him into hosting The FTX Podcast. While looking for other opportunities outside of support, he created a research paper called “FTX Digest,” to which external parties could contribute.
“It gave me a little bit of leeway to propose more content-type initiatives in the company, and then I said I’d love to do a podcast,” he says. “I got to do the podcast. The energy at that time of the company was if people want to do stuff, just try, let’s see what happens. It ended up working out and was probably one of the more fulfilling parts of my career so far.”
In February 2022, Armani Ferrante invited Yver to co-found crypto wallet and exchange Backpack.
“Once Armani invited me to co-found Backpack with him, I started transitioning my time over. By May 2022, I was 90%–95% doing Backpack stuff. I was still running The FTX Podcast, which was the last responsibility that I had, and I was still doing that up until the collapse of FTX.”
“Obviously, after the collapse, everything just went to absolute shit.”
Mad Lads is part of a “triple threat” of products by Yver and co-founder Ferrante under the Backpack umbrella.
It’s quite unique at this moment in crypto history, with the company possessing the Backpack wallet, Mad Lads NFT collection and Backpack exchange. It has been mutually advantageous for Lads holders, who have been sprinkled with surprises, and the Backpack company, which has an avid user base that can test products as well as provide feedback and distribution.
“They all evolved very naturally and ended up being very complementary. They each cover a different and very important sector of crypto. The Lads are distribution. The Lads are this megaphone that can take anything that is happening and throw it out into the world,” Yver says.
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“The Backpack wallet covers the onchain side of crypto usage, and then the exchange covers the offchain side of crypto usage. So, all three of them cover the majority of the bandwidth of what you would do within the crypto world anyway. It’s really nice to be able to focus on three of them. It’s obviously a lot of work, but they all complement each other and work well together.”
The Backpack team now calls Japan home as it pursues not only the goal of being a powerhouse international exchange but also being as legally compliant as possible across multiple jurisdictions.
Yver describes the sequencing of its three product pillars and how it happened organically rather than as an initial intention to launch three products simultaneously.
“The sequencing was wallet, Mad Lads, then the exchange. The wallet was first. At the very beginning, we were thinking of doing this smart wallet, essentially, which would make it harder for people to get rugged. That was the initial idea, but we realized that we would run into issues with Solana transaction sizing if we sent proxy instructions. Instead, we said, okay, maybe that’s not going to work,” Yver says.
“The idea of xNFTs came up. We got really excited about it because there’s so much context required to do everything in crypto that if you could have a decentralized manner through which people could access everything they wanted to do from one interface, à la WeChat, we thought that was pretty exciting.”
Taking inspiration from Bitcoin and Satoshi
Yver recalls a conversation with his co-founder, in which they drew on Bitcoin and its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as inspiration to invest in the community that had curated, bringing life to the eventual Mad Lads collection.
“I think the realization that drove us to go from having the initial beta launch of the wallet plus the community into the NFT project was this discussion I was having with Armani. It sounds cheesy, but we were talking about Satoshi and Bitcoin, and it was this realization that it wasn’t just the technology that allowed Bitcoin and crypto to get to where they are. It wasn’t just that Satoshi solved the double-spend problem.”
“It was that Satoshi published that and out into the wild. These cypherpunks and libertarians saw that, and for them, it was incredibly exciting. They were the cultural component, and they were the evangelists who went out into the world and spread the gospel. It was this intersection between the technology that had been built and then the culture element, which was these initial evangelists.”
“We realized that we had the technology component. We had the wallet, we had this whole protocol around decentralized applications that could live in the wallet. We had the community, but we hadn’t had a way to really shape them into a group of people who shared the same culture, so to say.”
Where the name came from and the “Fock It” ethos
Mad Lads has a distinct style to not only its art but to its ethos as a community, bonded by a number of community catch cries, such as “Fock It,” “Lads On Top” and “WAO,” or “We Are One.”
Yver notes that the name Mad Lads is not because the community is actually angry but due to its passion: “I describe the Mad Lads as a community of people who are mad enough to think that they can change the world. The idea wasn’t mad as in angry — it’s mad as in madness in passion. As in this ability to go beyond the fold.”
“The name was brought about from the energy we were feeling from the community and how energized and motivated all of these people were. By how much they cared about what they were doing and how much they cared about the community. It was a huge unlock to have that name because it gave everything else a much stronger sense of purpose and direction.”
Yver added that the “Fock It” slogan is deep-seated in a carefree attitude about other people’s opinions and somewhat of a play on Nike’s famous “Just Do It.”
“I think it was a brainstorming session, and we were thinking about the ethos of Mad Lads and this identity that I was describing of these people who are crazy enough to change the world. And you think about, what is the mentality that allows you to do that?”
“The mentality is really Fock It. Just Fock It. Who cares what other people think? Who cares about the limitations? Who cares about any of these constructs? I’m just going to go and Fock It and do it.”
“It was almost like a spin on the Just Do It mantra. It hit off really well, and it resonated really strongly with the community. It went much further than us. We put it out there, we made some shirts, but the people really were the ones who took the tagline and took it out into the world.”
Decentralized marketing vehicle
To date, the Lads have shown how valuable a community can be in crypto, where distribution and marketing can be tough to cut through in an overly noisy and fast-paced environment.
With Solana emerging as a third major ecosystem behind Bitcoin and Ethereum this cycle, Lads holders have benefited from a number of airdrops, including Wormhole. Acting as somewhat of a decentralized marketing vehicle, projects on Solana and Ethereum have engaged with the Lads community, knowing they can access the part of crypto that isn’t always easy to attain — distribution.
“The beautiful thing is that it’s just completely taken on a life of its own, and the Lads are their own autonomous thing to a huge degree now. It’s like a group of people that truly just want to be part of the community with each other. They love the art, which is the utmost goal for us,” Yver says.
“They’re just so active on socials, and they’ve formed such a powerful community that projects just come to them directly. For projects considering how to win over the Solana ecosystem, it’s sort of a default to give an allocation to the Mad Lads. It just keeps happening over and over again, which the Mad Lads realize because of their work. They’re so active, and it makes them more active. It’s a really positive self-reflective cycle, essentially.”
Despite the Lads getting showered with airdrop goodies, Yver and the team set the tone from the beginning with their mantra, “No utility, this is a rug, send it to zero.” It was a tongue-in-cheek mantra, but after years of unfulfilled promises and lofty expectations from the last cycle’s wave of NFT projects, it was a stroke of brilliance and ran counterintuitive to what NFT holders were used to.
“If it’s all about utility and expectations, it curates for a very specific type of person. We wanted a self-selection for people who just genuinely wanted to be there. They loved the art, they loved the other people in the community. Obviously, the secondary effects of projects coming in and giving things to them are also awesome.”
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“When the Lads started getting these large drops, like Wormhole and others, a bunch of people bought in because they thought it was all about the drops, but they’ve also just filtered out as well. It’s come back to this core group of people who are really there for community and for the art, which is what we love to see. It’s really impressive.”
Rapid-fire Q&A with NFT Collector Tristan Yver
Where do you see the Lads and Backpack in three years?
“I think I’d be disappointed if Backpack wasn’t a tier-one exchange and a tier-one wallet, and Mad Labs weren’t a top two to three collection in the world by that point.”
What do you say to someone who says NFTs are dead, as there is a fair bit of that sentiment on the timeline right now?
“I think what I would say to that is just go look at the strength of these communities on socials and how they’re stronger than the vast majority of token projects in the space. It’s hard to say that they’re dead because as long as those communities keep being that active, I think that’s what matters, and that’s what also will be able to bring liquidity back over time.”
Favorite NFT in your wallet?
“I think it’s between my PFP and the skull that I have as well from the Mad Lads collection with the same classic which I really like a lot.”
Favorite NFT artist? You don’t necessarily need to own their work.
“I think Yann Penno, who did the Mad Lads Collection. He’s absolutely phenomenal. He has a really wide scope of work. You kind of only see him in the NFT stuff here in crypto, but outside of it, he’s just really talented.”
Favorite 1-of-1 art piece?
“I have a good friend of mine, Lucas Leon. He did the ‘What are we?’ piece. He’s a phenomenal artist, and I bought his very first NFT that he launched on Ethereum in 2020. I have it printed as well, and I have a portrait of it. It’s amazing.”
What’s your advice for other NFT founders?
“Just that there’s no shortcuts. There literally are no shortcuts. You just need to take the time. You need to make incredibly high-quality art at this point, and you need to spend infinite time curating community.”
What advice would you give to someone on how to survive crypto in the long run?
“Don’t use leverage. And survive, basically survive. As long as you survive, I think you’ll be okay.”
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Greg Oakford
Greg Oakford is the Head of Growth & Partnerships for Upside DAO, a leading Australian crypto & web3 co-working hub and investment fund. He is an avid NFT collector and the co-founder of NFT Fest Australia. Prior to crypto, Greg was a marketing and sponsorship specialist in the sports industry working on professional events.