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Terribly captioned clip art by yours truly<br />
According to Raj, the estimated number of users that got onboarded to Solana as a direct result of the Degenerate Ape<br />
Academy mint was around 250,000. Yeah, you read that correctly, that’s a quarter of a million users for exactly one project,<br />
a completely unprecedented level of user interest for Solana at the time. This is predominantly why the DAA mint<br />
and the era that followed it was so incredible for Solana; Solana had finally been able to acquire tons of user interest and<br />
an insane level of transaction volume as a result of the DAA mint.<br />
Raj Gokal speaking on the BanklessHQ podcast about the significance of DAA and Metaplex<br />
So, to save the DAA mint and ensure Solana’s newly acquired users would be satisfied, Jordan and Bartosz needed to create<br />
a minting solution on virtually no sleep, and it had to be done within 12 hours to ensure user retention and interest<br />
in both the project and the Solana ecosystem. Eventually they came up with what would come to be known as the first<br />
version of Candy Machine, a fully off-chain minting solution that would get the job done. With only 12 hours to execute<br />
the mint, they had to resort to using this method as opposed to a more reliable and traditional on-chain smart contract.<br />
Jordan Prince talking about the first version of Candy Machine which he often refers to as “Candy Machine V.0”<br />
Thanks to the efforts of Jordan, Bartosz, and Metaplex, the DAA mint was successful, and it completed within 8 minutes<br />
after launch on August 14th, 2021. This was a monumental breakthrough for Solana; a fast mint for a 10k drop with extremely<br />
low fees and no chain slowdown was an impressive start compared to known smart contract platform competitor<br />
Ethereum which tends to suffer from extremely high gas fees and major slowdown during desirable mints. It proved the<br />
viability of Solana as a smart contracts platform in the eyes of the average onlooker as well as institutions who were on<br />
the fence about the relatively new layer 1 blockchain, and almost immediately there were hundreds of thousands more<br />
users piling into Solana. It was no surprise what happened next to the price of Solana as well as transaction volume:
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