How five Africans made the strongest NFT Ponzi on Solana - Part 3

Eating glass and staring into the abyss

February

Floor price: High of 289 SOL - Low of 149 SOL
Wood price: High of $5.78 - Low of $2.82

February started off with a bang. Many Cabins were now reaching completion, and our rental system finally went live.

We quickly realised that what we thought would impress our community had instead done the opposite. A rental price war was upon us. Initially there was a shortage of available rooms to rent but as more and more cabins were built, rent prices dropped further and further. Cabin owners quickly banded together and decided they would boot any tenants trying to lowball their rent. We had created a little world of our own with its own micro economy, and as the guys in charge we were basically the government. Very quickly we applied some drastic rental controls which balanced it out.

February was also the month in which the Ariusuha/Ballonsville rugger drama occurred. This took up a lot of our time and had the team up at 3AM dealing with a psychotic teenager thinking he’s the Batman of NFTs. More in that in a future post.

On the 12th of Feb we experienced one last pump to a 289 floor, barely missing our ATH. This pump was actually fuelled by all the attention the Ariusuha incident had brought to our collection.

Following on from the exposure we received, we decided to become more vocal on Twitter. Our podcast, The Good Wood Show, was born. Ivan, our in-house gigachad marketing bro had his radio voice ready and quickly lined up project owners and other celebrities in the space to be featured.

A new derivative had appeared, called Eunoia. This team had told CT they had a team of 30 developers and were building something huge. Nothing ever came from that and months later their dev team got cold feet.

Elder auctions were popping off and ended in a bang with our last one fetching more than 600SOL.

Taking over from the Elders, “Mythical Community Cabins” had started being auctioned off. On the 21st, we auctioned our second one - Folk Affairs. This was a legendary cabin that would earn the holder a portion of the WOOD spent on users renaming their cabins.

Other Mythical Cabins would be “The Joinery” and “The Houseboat”.

Finishing off February, everything was still great. The community, was excited and more notable people were getting involved. The only small problem, that would snowball into becoming a huge problem, was the price of WOOD. It was already trending down and would essentially never recover again.

March

Floor price: High of 185 SOL - Low of 55 SOL
Wood price: High of $3.44 - Low of $0.83

This is where our death spiral begins.

Solstice was one of our most influential holders and had fully exited by the 2nd of March, after which he started shit-talking us in private Discords. We were such a small collection, with only 5 to 10 listed Founders at any point in time, that this had quite a dramatic effect on our floor.

With Cabins now fully loaded, the WOOD problem had become clear to everyone. Tons of it was flowing, and all of it converted straight into USDC, decimating the price. At this point some users had also started manipulating the order-books for their own gain, adding even more fuel to the fire.

By the 23rd of March we had to introduce our own banking system, where we implemented withdrawal limits, coining it “Reforestation”. A run on the WOOD was being treated just like we treat a run on the banks in real life.

We also introduced the “Kingdom Fair” which featured a raffle system where users could purchase raffle tickets with WOOD to be spent on raffles for other NFTs or whitelist spots for other mints. Inspiration for this came from Famous Foxes and DeGods that were seeing quite a bit of hype around their own raffle platforms.

Towards the middle of March Boats were announced. This was our next sub-collection that featured a multiplayer voyage system. Building began, taking up enough time for our dev team to have the system functional as soon as building completes.

Other notable events of March included hosting Frank from DeGods on Good Wood Show #5. At this point DeGods had a floor of 55SOL.

April

Floor price: High of 140 SOL - Low of 54 SOL
Wood price: High of $6.45 - Low of $1.55

During April the price of WOOD recovered quite a bit. Our draconian bank laws had delayed the collapse by a bit, and now that voyages started happening we thought we had finally plugged the hole in our system.

We started working on the Pirate mint. Initially it would be a collection exclusive to Opensea, but after an underwhelming Solana NFT launch we opted to return to ME.

The drop was a major success, but due to the low supply of 666 NFTs we had to push the price for a juicy 6.6 SOL. It sold out rapidly, and all the hype around it had given us quite a bit of exposure which caused WOOD to have a brief pump. The floor price on Founders also saw a brief recovery.

Pretty quickly we would start seeing the division in the community occur as Pirates didn’t have the same kind of payouts on voyages as Founders. Pirates were seen as lower class citizens and boy were the pirates pissed. By the end of April their patience ran out.

Voyages were the last Hail Mairy from the team to make the old Mindfolk work. The idea was to create a system where users could unlock value from earning and selling NFTs, instead of selling their WOOD. The problem was that the system was complex, going on voyages was hard. You had to either own a boat yourself or befriend a boat owner to catch a ride, so most holders just opted for selling their WOOD instead. The spores they earned from their voyages also didn’t get offloaded to the market to attract new entrants into the community, instead they just caused existing members to bag-hold even more NFTs.

The end of April also saw the Okaybear mint happen which was such a wildly successful event that it drained the liquidity from the entire Solana NFT space.

May

Floor price: High of 69 SOL - Low of 16 SOL
Wood price: High of $2.15 - Low of $0.32

The enlightenment. By this point it is now obvious to us that ponzinomics system is severely flawed and the entire Solana space has made up their mind about us.

We start doing research to gather data and publish it in our new roadmap https://mindfolk.art/roadmap

We realise our marketing sucks. We weren’t focusing on engaging users on twitter and our community was just too small to get any attention outside of major mint events like the hype we had gotten from the Pirates mint. Scrolling back through our historical tweets it’s actually frightening how little engagement we received even during hyped periods.

Pirate pillages begin, but the Pirates are pissed as their rewards aren’t as great as Founders. The community becomes more and more divided, despite many holders holding both Founders and Pirates. Pirates FP drops quickly. We now have 5 different collections on ME, dividing our liquidity and confusing outsiders. What we had built had become one huge confusing monstrosity that was slowly bleeding out day by day as users dumped their $WOOD.

We already knew where we had gone wrong, but at this point didn’t have a clue on how to fix it and the community could sense it.Our tone during Townhalls had become pretty somber as the situation took its town on all the team members.

We were trying our best to shake the ponzi brand, but the ponzi label was sticky and the downward momentum was strong.

By looking at our roadmap now it’s crystal clear that we really hadn’t realized what the actual problem was. Our solution to any problem was to keep adding more complexity. More tokens, more systems, more tricks. We had not yet been able to let go of what Mindfolk was, and not yet had the vision of what we needed to become.

Despite the tough times we experienced we still pushed hard to provide value to our holders. Our alpha chat had become the main place for all bagholders to hangout and try to find the next big project. The Okaybears pump had changed Solana NFTs forever and everyone was now looking for what might be the next Okaybears. Our Kingdom fair had become a cool system to raffle off whitelist spots in exchange for some $WOOD earned through voyaging.

June

Floor price: High of 44 SOL - Low of 11 SOL
Wood price: High of $0.33 - Low of $0.086

In early June we had added some features to our voyage system that had streamlined it a lot for users, such as Auto-sail. This allowed boat owners to set up a voyage and not need to click start again once the boat was full. It seemed like a small feature but had a big impact on the user experience.

Morale amongst the team and community was at an all time low. We were working really hard to build all the complex new features laid out in our roadmap, but with every new feature drop just came with more frustration from the users. Mindlings were earning $STONE, Pirates earning $IRON and users were still doing their passive income calculations, now just in a more convoluted way. 

Towards the end of the month the first big shot from a notable influencer was fired.

July

Floor price: High of 21.5 SOL - Low of 7.2 SOL
Wood price: High of $0.085 - Low of $0.02

Another month of chewing glass, but this time two of the most respected members of the Solana community had filed their autopsy reports. The first one was from one of our own members and Elder holder, Jords. He posted a very detailed report titled “Trending to Zero” on his substack, specifically calling us out. 

Everything he said was true, we had known about our $WOOD problem since May already, but reading about it coming from him was still a shock to the team. We had built up a friendship with Jords over the months before, sharing most of our plans with him in detail. Despite him blaming the system and not the team, the feeling after reading the article was that he had finally given up on us.

Only ten days later our final big blow from CryptoTwitter would come. SolBigbrain. 

It was the very first time he had ever mentioned us. For months since the beginning of our journey we had been trying to get in touch with him, not only to get his public backing but mostly to ask for his advice and form some kind of friendship as he was the one guy we respected the most in the space. 

This was our “Elon not getting love from Neil Armstrong” moment. 

Despite the bearishness of his post, we took the opportunity to reply to him publicly stating we’re busy fixing the problem. He even responded to us when we DMed him to ask for a meeting, but ended up being too busy to hear us out. One of our members, Bad Religion, also stood up for us in a big way with a thread response to Bigbrain that ended up getting quite a bit of traction. 

It’s funny that if you look at the charts, we actually experienced quite a notable pump on this day purely from the exposure that it got us. By now it was really really obvious to us that reach and engagement on Twitter is such an important factor, something that Frank from DeGods seemed to have figured out much faster than we had. Kudos to you Frank.

Lower tiered influencers also hopped in, indulging in the opportunity to farm some engagement. 

(JK Alex, we know you #1 <3)

After this the team was completely emotionally spent. We decided we had to take a break from it all. The core team all took some time off. Some to surf in Bali, some to visit family in South Africa. We needed some space from it all. To calm down, and think deeply about how we were going to handle this.

The time off actually had a good impact on us, as this was the period when our idea for State of One was born. This was finally our first proper letting go of the ponzi.

August

Floor price: High of 15.99 SOL - Low of 4.55 SOL
Wood price: High of $0.054 - Low of $0.0075

As a team we were still a bit lost during this period. Ideas for what is now The Renaissance were still busy percolating.

CryptoTwitter was focused on the announcement of the Y00ts, it was pretty hyped. Many artists were submitting design concepts for them so we had Jurgens design a Mindfolk concept. 

We posted this, but despite Frank retweeting almost all of these concepts, we received no love in return. This was funny to us, because we had actually been quite chatty with Frank since we hosted him on the Good Wood show. We were getting ghosted by our friends.

29 August marked our all time low of 4.55 SOL. It was grim.

This marks the end of our 3 part series. From inception, to the top, and all the way to the bottom. We are stubborn MFers though, so we are still here, still working just as hard, but finally in a direction that we feel is right. Our north star has been found, and things are looking up.