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About a week before the launch of his NFT project, Armani Ferrante (a great name!) of Coral, CEO of Coral, was contacted by a hacker threatening to attack the release.
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On the day of the release, the hacker kept their word and attacked the coin.
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But the Coral team noticed something…the attackers were essentially trying to reverse engineer Coral’s code, to predict how they would try to stop the bots.
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So Coral creates a second (fake) NFT project, which can only be found if you actively try to reverse engineer the Coral code…
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The result? When the general public Real NFTs, the bots poured in a quarter of a million dollars in the fakes.
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Armani Ferrante then increased Twitter to rub the hacker’s face in it (by outlining what just happened) and take the moral high (promise to return all their money).
Full story
This might be our favorite ‘Web3 Success Story’ of 2023 so far.
As with all great success stories – the story of Web3 development studio, Coral, comes with a heavy cross section of adversity. Starting here:
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In 2022, they raised ~$20 million in funding (hurray!).
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…which they then lost in the FTX collapse (oooft!).
But then! Things started to turn…
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Coral had one of the most hyped upcoming NFT releases of 2023 (hurray!).
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…although unfortunately, when release day came, it was attacked by scammers (oooft!).
Today we are talking about the last story, specifically:
How Coral managed to “swindle the scammers” who tried to stop the NFT release of ‘Mad Lads’.
So about a week before launch, Coral CEO Armani Ferrante (great name!) was contacted by a hacker threatening to attack the release.
Basically, they had bots set up to send billions from purchase requests to the Mad Lads NFT release – enough to easily crash the service.
The message was clear: “pay or we’ll block your launch.”
To which Ferrante essentially replied “that’s cute, but we don’t have money to spend – we lost it in FTX.”
So what happens next? Good…
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 do that to predict how Coral might try to stop the bots.
And with this, the team comes up with a plan:
They create a second NFT project, making them one real – and a fake.
The fake project can only be found if you actively try to reverse engineer the Coral code…
Again, no idea how that works – but the gist is:
The hackers see the creation of the second project and the attempts to hide it → they assume it is the real thing → and target their bots at it.
The result?
When the general public Real NFTs, the bots poured in a quarter of a million dollars in the fakes.
The final death knell?
Armani Ferrante went to the Mad Lad’s Twitter Unpleasant:
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Rub the hacker’s face in by outlining what just happened.
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Take the moral high ground by promising to return all their money.
Bravo, Armani. Bravo.