Gabriel Leydon Chimes in on the Success of The DigiDaigaku Super Bowl Ad

DigiDaigaku launched the first NFT related Super Bowl ad yesterday and the mint went off without a hitch.

Some called it a waste of 7 million dollars, especially for a free mint. Others mocked the redirect to Gabriel Leydon’s twitter account. So what happened behind the scenes and how did this Super Bowl ad actually pan out? Gabriel himself joined the DigiCult twitter space last night to discuss what went on behind the scenes. 

First, he noted that site sniffers were clearly out and about because 20k people were pinging the website before the commercial had even aired. But these site sniffers found a site that collected their emails and nothing else. When the mint went live, everything was gone instantly. 200k people had reached the mint page and they began redirecting hits to the founder’s twitter page. At one point Gabriel said his twitter account wouldn’t even load, it was just locked up. Despite some salty comments, Gabriel just successfully introduced NFTs to a huge audience.

As of 10:25 pm PST they were still getting 100k scans of the ad an hour according to Gabriel. One listener pointed out that CT was complaining about the ad being just an engagement farm. Gabrielle responded back with “hey, what was I supposed to do. We spent 7 million dollars and after 4k minted I’m supposed to say thanks for stopping bye, no I’m going to use that money for engagement.” Seems NFT flippers were possibly just mad they didn’t mint. Gabriel noted that he ran a super bowl ad with a previous project and they got 40k scans an hour. If they would have redirected that traffic to the app store it would have been huge for the company. He learned his lesson and this time around he was ready to redirect once the mint was gone. 

“We basically teleported $700 dollars through a television commercial in real time to 4k people,” Gabriel said. “It’s crazy, there has never been anything like that before and we did it on ETH.” DigiDaigaku did a live mint on the Superbowl, and gas never went over 15 Gwei. Gabriel noted that there is clearly incompetence happening in these gas wars. “It’s not Ethereum, its incompetent developers causing these gas wars,” he said. Limit Break, the development team behind DigiDaigaku, proved everyone wrong. You can scale Ethereum. If everyone builds correctly, according to Gabriel, ETH can be run as fast as wanted. 

Limit Break just tested Ethereum with the most extreme scenario possible and it worked fine. Gabriel said there have been projects that caused 9 figures in gas fees for no reason. He also said, “when they do it again, it will be even cheaper and faster,” hinting at a future mint. To the naysayers, Gabriel said, “I don’t know what they were expecting but Digi did exactly what we said it was going to do.”

From a marketing perspective, that was the craziest marketing he’s ever seen in his life. “Going into it I was asking everyone, am I insane, is this too crazy, too over the top,” he said. Gabriel had his concerns. They tried to find partners for games and other aspects, they even went to all the exchanges. None of them could even do what they wanted to pull off. They partnered with Moonpay for some of the project but hosted the entire mint themselves. Limit Break had to build the entire backend. The redirects, Cloudflare, hosting, benchmarking, and security, was all completed in three weeks. Limit break killed it according to Gabriel.

“If someone tries to copy this, they’re not gonna be able to do it,” Gabriel said.  Even AWS wasn’t able to help them. Google captcha just barely upgraded them to 1 million captcha per second only 15 minutes before the commercial aired. They had been begging them for weeks.  The only thing that went wrong was Gabriel’s twitter broke for a couple minutes.

The mint went fast, with no bots, the whole thing was flawless according to Gabriel. The airdrop went out within minutes of the live commercial. Gabrielle is extremely proud of the team and the crazy technical feat they just pulled off. They managed to invent a new advertising process, a virtual asset through a mass scale TV ad. The chances of doing something wrong was really high, but nothing went wrong.

He noticed twitter wanted to see a game or something and he saw all the chatter, but he did exactly what he set out to do and his mood was stoked on the twitter space. He couldn’t say enough good things about the Limit Break team and he went even further to say they will be doing more for the NFT space soon. 

Everyone is wrong about on-chain royalties according to Gabriel. What everyone misses about royalties is they are talking about securities. Those who did or claimed to do royalties in the past, are getting funds from Opensea, that is sent to a wallet, and then that wallet distributes royalties to who is supposed to get them. That makes it a security according to Gabriel. 

You can’t put a legally binding terms of service (TOS) inside of an NFT on-chain. If a person buys that NFT, and they don’t look at the TOS, they can’t opt into the TOS because they don’t see it. That is why there are no enforceable terms of service. 

The Limit Break system is done through staking, and you have to go to the website to do it. It makes a point of contact to activate the royalty. There they can convey the royalty rights to the Staker which is huge. The holder gets the TOS saying this NFT is yours and so are the royalties. According to Gabriel, Limit Break is getting ready to prove everyone wrong again. 

Those contracts are going into final audit in the next two weeks. Gabriel said “It will change the whole nature of NFTs. People want them now, but they will want them more after this.” 

“What people should be excited about is the fact that we launched an optimized contract on Ethereum that shows how the ecosystem could be and should be running,” Gabriel said. Salty CT might just be sad that they didn’t get the free mint of this limit breaking launch.