TL;DR

• About a week before the launch of his NFT project, Coral CEO Armani Ferrante (hell of a name!) was contacted by a hacker threatening to attack the release.

• Come release day, the hacker held true to their word and attacked the mint.

• But the Coral team noticed something...the attackers were essentially trying to reverse engineer Coral's code, to predict how they might attempt to stop the bots.

• So Coral create a second (fake) NFT project, that can only be found if you're actively trying to reverse engineer the Coral code...

• The result? As the general public bought up the real NFTs, the bots poured a quarter of a million dollars into the fakes.

• Armani Ferrante then took to Twitter to rub the hacker's face in it (by outlining what had just happened) and take the moral high ground (vowing to return all their funds).

Full Story

This might just be our favorite 'Web3 success story' of 2023, so far.

Like with all great success stories - the tale of Web3 development studio, Coral, comes with a heavy peppering of adversity. Starting here:

• In 2022, they raised ~$20M in funding (hoooray!).

• ...which they then lost in the FTX collapse (oooft!).

But then! Things started to turn around...

• Coral had one of the most hyped upcoming NFT releases of the 2023 (hoooray!).

• ...though unfortunately, when release day came, it was attacked by scammers (oooft!).

Today we're talking about the latter story, specifically:

How Coral managed to 'scam the scammers' that were trying to tank its 'Mad Lads' NFT release.

So about a week before launch, Coral CEO Armani Ferrante (hell of a name!) was contacted by a hacker threatening to attack the release.

Basically, they'd set up bots to send billions of purchase requests to the Mad Lads NFT release - enough to easily crash the service.

The message was clear: "pay up, or we'll brick your launch."

To which Ferrante essentially responded "that's cute, but we don't have any money to spend - we lost it in FTX."

So what happens next? Well...

• The mint happens (hoooray!)

• As does the bot attack (oooft!).

But the Coral team notices something...

The attackers are essentially trying to reverse engineer Coral's code.

What does that mean? No idea.

But apparently they're doing so in order to predict how Coral might attempt to stop the bots.

And with this, the team hatches a plan:

They create a second NFT project, leaving them with a real one - and a fake one.

The fake project can only be found if you're actively trying to reverse engineer the Coral code...

Again, no idea how that works - but the basic gist is:

The hackers see the creation of the second project, and the attempts to hide it → they assume it's the real one → and focus their bots on it.

The result?

As the general public bought up the real NFTs, the bots poured a quarter of a million dollars into the fakes.

The final death blow?

Armani Ferrante took to the Mad Lads Twitter to:

1. Rub the hacker's face in it, by outlining what had just happened.

2. Take the moral high ground, by vowing to return all their funds.

Bravo, Armani. Bravo.