ufuk@ufukdogancrypto
We Were Never His Community. We Were His Fundraise. | Full Long Story
Let's start with something most people get wrong. @armaniferrante didn't build Mad Lads alone. @tristan co-founded Coral with him, co-founded Backpack with him, and was the person who spent over a year curating the community before the mint even happened. The allowlist process, the culture, the "WAO — We Are One" identity — that was Tristan's work. Him and @monkdoesnt. They made Mad Lads a name that commanded genuine respect across the entire Solana ecosystem.
There's something worth noting. FTX collapsed in November 2022. The Mad Lads mint happened in April 2023, months later, as Solana was still trying to find its footing. Looking back, that mint wasn't just a community launch. It was a lifeline. A way to rebuild and fund the exchange Armani actually wanted to build all along. We were the funding round. We just didn't know it at the time.
After Tristan and Monkey left, everything that came after is Armani's legacy alone. The community started hollowing out slowly. The Mad Lads Twitter went quiet. Discord went cold. New Backpack employees had zero respect for Lads holders, some distanced themselves publicly, some talked openly about not caring. But Armani kept saying the right things. Community matters. Loyalty matters. So we stayed.
Then the Backpack Exchange announcement dropped and we lost our minds, in the best way. We bought more Lads immediately. At that point Mad Lads was genuinely bigger than Backpack as a brand. The name carried more weight, more trust, more recognition. We thought: this is it. We are the face of something that could become the next Binance. Our patience is about to pay off.
Then came the Seasons. Trading points, volume based rewards, the promise of a $BP airdrop. Mad Lads holders are not traders, we never were. We are believers, holders, community people. But we didn't want to be left behind. So we tried. We generated volume. Lost real money. And told ourselves: it's fine, TGE is coming, he won't forget us.
Season 2. Season 3. Still no utility for Lads. Still no mention of Lads. The only thing we ever received was a fee reduction on the exchange, a benefit built for traders, given to a community of people who aren't traders. By that point, I don't think they thought about us much at all.
The signals were everywhere. Mad Lads Twitter stopped posting. Armani became active on Backpack Discord and went silent on Lads Discord. His language shifted from "our community" to "Mad Lads are not our product." When KOLs posted hit pieces on Backpack, who was in the replies defending him every single time? Lads holders. Always.
Someone slid into my DMs, an ex-Backpack employee. Said simply: "Lads will not get an airdrop." I dismissed it. We all did. We thought Armani was filtering out farmers. The real ones would be taken care of. He values loyalty, right? We chose to believe that.
When people close to the team started posting about "all the airdrops Lads already received," we read between the lines. The message underneath was obvious: you already ate, stop asking. But we held on. When Armani posted "NFTs might be dead but Lads are just getting started" we took it as confirmation. He still sees us.
He didn't.
Then the snapshot. The tokenomics. The number that made the whole community go silent.
One percent.
Not for bots. Not for farmers. For the people who had been there from the beginning. Who defended him publicly. Who absorbed trading losses to generate volume for his exchange. One percent for the backbone.
The response when the community asked why? Simple. Cold. You already ate.
Then came yesterday, one day after the TGE. As community managers have now confirmed, newly traded Mad Lads will no longer receive VIP status on Backpack. If you held before, you are grandfathered in. But anyone buying today gets nothing. No utility. No benefit. No connection to the exchange we spent years supporting.
He waited until after the airdrop to quietly close the door. No announcement. No explanation. Just policy.
That is not an oversight. That is housekeeping. The community served its purpose, the token launched, and the last remaining thread was cut the very next day.
Here is what I believe now. Armani got lucky. He got lucky that Tristan was brilliant at building community culture from the ground up. He inherited loyalty that most founders spend years trying to manufacture. And instead of stewarding it, he extracted it. Quietly, gradually, until there was nothing left to take.
Mad Lads was never the goal. Backpack was always the goal. Mad Lads was the vehicle that got him there. Once it served its purpose, it got parked.
And the tragic part? It didn't even work. The TGE underperformed. The trader community is fractured. Chinese holders are rising up over witch-hunt accusations. He distanced himself from the community that loved him unconditionally and couldn't hold the one he replaced us with.
Mad Lads gave Armani everything. Capital, credibility, cover, and community. We were there when nobody else was. We made Backpack look legitimate before Backpack had earned that on its own.
WAO. We Are One.
We meant it.
He never did.
