Solana NFTs Come to Portfolio App Floor Amid Mad Lads Boom

Floor, a mobile NFT portfolio tracking app, has expanded beyond the Ethereum ecosystem to include support for Solana NFTs starting today. And the timing may prove fortuitous for Floor, coming just days following the mint for Mad Lads, Solana’s buzziest NFT drop in months.

Solana is the second layer-1 blockchain platform supported by Floor, which means that projects like Claynosaurz, Solana Monkey Business, and Okay Bears can now be tracked within the mobile app on iOS and Android.

The Solana Foundation aided with Floor’s expansion into the space, according to Floor CEO and co-founder Chris Maddern. He told Decrypt that the Foundation helped the startup grasp the technology and potential partners in the space, and teased future collaborations ahead.

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“We’re also excited about some upcoming public good projects that we’re embarking on with the Solana Foundation to make NFT data more accessible and understandable for developers and users alike,” Maddern added.

Maddern said that Solana support had been widely requested by Floor users, and added that he believes that it’s “clearly positioned to support at-scale adoption of NFTs in key use cases like gaming and credentialing.”

“Solana is one of few blockchains we expect to be meaningfully a part of onboarding large numbers of users to new use cases for NFTs,” he added, “and are excited to partner with them on making the entire Solana NFT ecosystem simple, understandable, and accessible with Floor.”

Fock it. Mad Lad #7245 sold for 1000.00 SOL

? $21,210.00 USD
 MadLadsNFT
? https://t.co/UQvo5l1Dzv pic.twitter.com/zWUGSMT4E5

— Mad Lads Sales Bot (@MadLads_Sales) April 23, 2023

The Solana NFT market gained fresh life late last week with the launch of Mad Lads, a 10,000-piece profile picture (PFP) project that quickly sold out and then generated over $10 million dollars’ worth of secondary trading volume, overtaking all Ethereum projects in 24-hour trading volume on Saturday (per CryptoSlam).

Mad Lads is the first NFT project launched within Backpack, an all-in-one wallet that enables token-gated experiences, playable games, and more within the app. It’s built around what developer Coral calls xNFTs, or executable NFTs.

The initially planned Thursday mint was postponed to Friday after being bombarded with activity, including what Coral CEO Armani Ferrante tweeted were “billions of requests” from automated bots trying to dominate the mint. On Friday, Coral briefly directed bots towards a fake mint and yielded some $250,000 worth of SOL in what it described in a tweet as a “honeypot.” Coral ultimately refunded all users.

Thanks for playing.

We’ll be returning all SOL in the honeypot by the end of the day. https://t.co/Xj4NBRYnrd pic.twitter.com/H1GO1pMZaC

— Mad Lads (@MadLadsNFT) April 22, 2023

Floor’s move to Solana had been in the works for some time before the Mad Lads mint, but the timing worked out so that Floor is launching on an upswing for the Solana NFT space. Mad Lads is the first significant mint in months on Solana, which recently saw two of its most popular projects—DeGods and y00ts—bridge away to other blockchain networks.

Floor raised $8 million in seed funding last year, which was announced in June 2022 when former Robinhood Crypto COO Christine Hall was revealed as COO and co-founder. This past January, Floor acquired and integrated WGMI.io, an NFT analytics platform.

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Maddern told Decrypt that the number of unique monthly active wallets connected to Floor has soared in recent months to over 50,000. In January, the service reported over 22,000 total unique wallets connected by that point. The startup also recently launched social features, letting users claim a tokenized Floor username.

He pointed to VC firm Andreessen Horowitz’s recent “State of Crypto” report, which showed a significant decline in use of mobile crypto wallets, and believes mobile apps and platforms can play a different kind of role in the NFT ecosystem going forward.

“We’re increasingly convinced that a mobile use case in Web3 isn’t necessarily centered in transactions,” Maddern said, “but in exploration and discovery.”

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