Meet Armani Ferrante, the creator of the Mad Lads NFT project and one of the fastest-rising names in Web3. Mad Armani, as he’s also known, has caught the attention of the NFT space over the last month with the release of his first NFT collection. What do we know about Mad Armani?

Mad Armani is one of the fastest-rising names in Web3 Image Credit: Mad Lads Who is Mad Armani?

Mad Armani studied computer science at UC Berkeley. While studying there, he first learned about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It resonated with him immediately, however he didn’t work in Web3 right away.

Instead, Ferrante took a job at tech giant Apple. At Apple, he worked on some of the most popular iOS apps, including Reminders and Calendar. Co-workers at Apple turned the young developer onto Ethereum, and after reading through the Ethereum whitepaper, his mind was blown. Within a short period, Ferrante decided to take the plunge and quit Apple.

Within weeks of quitting, a friend introduced Ferrante to the Alameda Research team. Alameda should be a familiar name– it was the hedge fund run by Sam Bankman-Fried that was allegedly responsible for losing $10b+ of FTX customer funds.  Luckily for Ferrante, he only stayed with the firm for 6 months before leaving in 2018 to focus on 0pen-source coding for Ethereum.

Ferrante then worked with Counterfactual and Oasis Labs while continuing to focus on open-source coding. In the process, he learned about Ethereum’s Sharding problem. As a result, he began looking into other blockchains. In a weird turn of events, Sam Bankman-Fried introduced Ferrante to the Solana team. Solana quickly recruited Ferrante afterward and he began coding for the Layer 1 blockchain in 2020.

Next, Ferrante created Coral, a platform for Web3 developers. Coral made an immediate impact by developing Anchor in 2021. Anchor is now Solana’s most popular smart contract developer framework.

Not surprisingly, many VC funds wanted to invest in anything associated with Ferrante and Coral. In 2022, FTX and Jump Capital led a $20m investment round in Anchor. This investment gave Coral the funding to develop xNFT Backpack, an interactive crypto wallet.

This seed round closed just six weeks before FTX collapsed amidst massive fraud accusations. This setback cost Ferrante’s team $14.5m in funding. Coral did not stop building, however.

What is Mad Lads?

Ferrante and Coral developed the Mad Lads NFT project as the first release for the xNFT Backpack platform. There was a ton of hype for the project right away and bots attacked the mint. The mint was delayed at first and the Mad Labs team regrouped.

The team showed off its coding chops by then programming its mint to honeypot bots. Any SOL sent by bots was taken by the team to redistribute to the project’s treasury, and after the dust settled, real people were able to mint. The move caught the attention of the NFT space and Mad Lads became a blue chip project quickly after.

Mad Lads pulled off a legendary move by honeypotting bots during its mint Image Credit: @MadLadsNFT

Since then, holders have enjoyed the project’s vibes and commended its unique artwork. Mad Lads seems to be a project with real staying power, and with Mad Armani at the helm, have the leadership to become one of Web3’s biggest ecosystems.

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