How five Africans made the strongest NFT Ponzi on Solana - Part 1

The Mint

31 December 2021

The crypto and NFT market was at peak euphoria. Solana’s price was $169 and the number 1 project on Solana was the Boryoku Dragonz, with a floor of 170 SOL. It was quite obvious where the inspiration for their $BOKU system came from, the Cyberkongz and Kaiju Kingz. The “hodl to earn” meta had already faded on ETH but was only just starting to bloom in the SOL space. 

Our core team: Ivan, Carl, Alfred, Jurgens and Sigmundo. South Africans. All close friends since High School. We had always dreamt of one day starting some fun business together. Finally the stars - including the most important star, Solana - had aligned.

We had spent a few months slowly perfecting the art. The first versions didn’t have beards, pipes or hats/minds, but eventually we had something we thought was pfp worthy.

Our expectations were low but our north star was to have the best art and the highest floor price. We figured there were two main factors to influence that, low supply and diamond hands. Low supply was easy to control, 777, magic numbers LFG! Getting only diamond hands to mint was tricky. These had to be users who would hold a 1 SOL mint to 200 without flinching. 

Stealth mints were popular at the time. We didn’t want to spend much effort gatekeeping so we decided to just share a limited use Discord invite with a few diamond handed communities. We had some friends drop some limited join invites to some exclusive communities and pretty quickly we had 200 new members and what seemed to be the entire Boogle community chatting in #general.

The target was 500 users in the Discord and we’d be ready to mint, but fomo was peaking and we figured if the mint slows down, we’d just mint the remainder and see how it goes in the market.

Going off on a small tangent - a few days before the drop we had fired up the candy machine for the first time to mint the first 70 NFTs that we kept aside for the team and 7 we kept aside to be auctioned off as 1/1 Elders. That’s when we realised that people had bots that scan for any active mints on the blockchain and it seemed that some bot had managed to mint 11 tokens before we had even tried to sell anything to anyone. The market for NFTs was so hot that people were willing to blindly mint basically anything.

Finally we felt ready and decided to go live with the mint at a price of 1 SOL. It sold out in minutes without any fuss. To combat the bots, Alfred had come up with a simple but elegant reverse captcha popup that prevented bots from minting large amounts. Our job for the day was done and our year ended on a high note. Listing on ME went live an hour later and the floor quickly settled around 4 SOL for the first day.

The fully remote team celebrated with a quick group call and then went back to enjoying the last day of 2021. Little did we know of the runaway train we had just embarked on.

The ponzi had just begun.