On August 13, 2021 at 8pm Degen Ape Academy went live for minting. At least, it was supposed to. Many of us waited anxiously as the countdown timer reached the final moment, and then… nothing. In Discord, one of the mods for the project, Monoliff, announced that they had “NOT CRASHED”, but just deployed and would be live in 5 minutes.
We pressed the refresh button when prompted and the Apeintosh interface appeared to move further along. This time though, there was an error in the final steps. Mods again placated folks in the chat, stating “no SOL has been received”. Again, folks in the chat began mashing their refresh buttons. Some though, kept trying to mint in the UI, and when another deploy was performed by the team, at long last some apes were minted! They even appeared in our Phantom wallets (in some cases with missing images). Meanwhile folks who had been refreshing were just seeing an error on the Degen Academy website. While the contract was successfully deployed, not all users were able to participate in the launch. It all depended on whether you refreshed or not.
At this point Monoliff announced that a few requests to mint had gotten through, but the site couldn’t handle the requests, and they had taken it down to ensure no extras could be minted. The website went offline for the rest of the day and part of the next.
The team shared that they were going to start over, minting a whole new set of 10,000 with a new smart contract…
“What this means is the 500 or so apes that were minted will not be part of this smart contract and will therefore be null.“
It was later reported that “a few” was roughly 500, which later became 758, and then later, 886. There was a promise that owners of the null apes would be refunded. Oh and, the dev team responsible for the initial drop was to be replaced with an entirely new team. The new drop was scheduled to be “within 2-3 days”.
3 hours later, new announcement: Owners of the null apes would both be refunded AND be a part of the academy. You would be able to hold on to your null ape. The null apes would be unique from those generated in the new drop, and they would still be counted as legitimate. They might even give them their own special class like “expelled apes” or “detention apes” and they would “have some fun with it”.
The following day, a tweet began circulating that the initial launch contained an exploit, but when they took their API offline, it became non-functional.
A couple hours later: another complete change to the plan. The relaunch was happening in 2 hours (yup, 2 hours notice). If you had a null ape, you now have 7 days to send it back if you want a refund (so much for keeping your ape and getting a refund). The refund amount was increased to 8 SOL (ok?). Apes with no metadata would still be fixed.
The second launch came an hour and 52 minutes after announcement, but for many, the site showed only a password requirement. 8 minutes later they were sold out, but SOL continued to be withdrawn from users who attempted to mint an ape. Now, they wait to be refunded.
What will come next for the Exiled Apes? Stay tuned…