Record // CONSUMER PLAYABLE TEARDOWN
BEARPROOF BASTION
When the bear market was coldest, some people kept shipping. Mad Lads and Backpack are the proof.
▶ Play this teardown — operate the mechanism yourself →What happened
On April 21, 2023, the team behind the Backpack wallet minted Mad Lads, a 10,000-piece NFT collection claimable only through Backpack. Mad Lads was the first high-profile xNFT — an 'executable' NFT whose code runs inside the wallet itself. Demand was so extreme it caused a denial-of-service-like load that knocked out two Solana RPC nodes and the project's UI, forcing a one-day delay. It became a defining bear-market product moment for Backpack, which later grew into a wallet and exchange.
Why Solana remembers it
Mad Lads showed a polished product and a novel primitive could capture mainstream attention even in a deep bear market, and it stress-tested Solana's RPC infrastructure under genuine load.
On the map
A fortified keep that drew so many pilgrims at once its walls briefly buckled.