Mad Lads Flip BAYC, Solana Resilience & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week we’ve got these titbits for you:

• Crypto Onboarding: NFTs have the potential to bring in new users.

• Solana Resilience: The Mad Lads mint had no impact on the network.

• NFT Credit Scoring: Credit scores comes to collateralised NFT loans.

The Solana ecosystem remains unbothered, moisturised, happy, in its lane, focused, and flourishing — people seem to notice 👀

Let’s get this show on the road!

Click on any underlined heading / hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

NFTs & User Onboarding

The global cryptocurrency market capitalisation is ~ $1.2 trillion.

Let's compare that with the market cap of other industry verticals:

• global arts: $0.60 trillion

• global real estate: $3.7 trillion

• global financials: $9 trillion

• global information technology: $12 trillion

Crypto might be in its infancy, but the industry isn't small by any means. However, the global financial industry is one of the core benchmarks for crypto. Bearing that in mind, the growth potential of crypto becomes apparent.

In order to grow, we need frictionless and delightful onboarding rails.

Having said that, attracting new users — particularly in crypto — is difficult for a variety of reasons:

• Trust: Users are normally hesitant to do business with a new company or one they have not previously interacted with. Building trust with potential users can take time and effort.

• Preference: When it comes to products and services — especially in the financial industry — users often rely on long-term and trusted relationships. Changing these preferences can be a tall order.

• Complexity: In order to fully understand the benefits of a technical product or service, potential users may need to have a certain level of specialised knowledge or expertise. This can make it challenging to reach a broader audience.

On the face of it, things might look somewhat bleak when it comes to onboarding more users to crypto — if it wasn't for NFTs.

That’s because NFTs can be bought and sold on various marketplaces with relatively low barriers to entry. This means that new users can start interacting with blockchains and experience self custody without the need to understand the underlying technology. For the general public NFTs are a gimmick, but in the context of onboarding new users to crypto they are pivotal.

This is why the launch of Mad Lads is so significant.

The NFT collection started trading on Saturday and even registered a higher sales volume than BAYC for a period of time.

What is more significant, however, is the fact that Mad Lads has more buyers than any other NFT collection in the Top 10.

This highlights the vast distribution of the NFT collection and its potential to bring in new users to Solana and beyond.

What is more, Mad Lads NFTs function as xNFTs — basically applications — in Backpack, the crypto wallet behind the Mad Lads collection.

xNFTs have the ability to create rich, immersive experiences that are able to bring crypto-native use cases and self custody to a mass audience.

Granted, it has only been 4 days since the launch of Mad Lads.

However, if the Backpack team can execute its xNFT vision and the Mad Lads community can keep on growing organically, attracting new users such as Admiral Kirk to Solana and beyond becomes a little less difficult.

Regardless, we still have a lot of work to do.

Let's get to it 🫡

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

Solana Resilience: While the Mad Lads mint brought conventional services such as Cloudflare to their knees, the Solana network a) didn't miss a step, b) held transaction costs low, and c) kept wash trading to a bare minimum.

The New Orca: Orca is set to launch a brand new trading experience in a couple of weeks. The overhaul comes with a host of improvements, such as:

• a UI & UX revamp optimised for making Orca the homepage for trading, especially for incoming new retail users

• a more reliable swap (e.g. low failure rate) and more efficient swap routes that allow for even better prices

• a swap comparison against Jupiter’s prices and the ability to trade on the platform if prices there are even better

Watch the clip, scan the QR code, sign up for the email list, and stand a chance to win early access to the new Orca!

Mainnet Outage: Solana released a report describing the root cause of the mainnet beta outage on the 25th of February. The report also highlights the subsequent improvements that have been made.

Climate Change: Solana now allows for the real-time tracking of the network’s emissions. The emission tracker was made possible by a new data portal created with TryCarbonara.

NFT Credit Scoring: Famous Fox Federation and Atadia teamed up to bring credit scoring to collateralised NFT loans.

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

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Talk soon!

J264G