Alongside the XVMC token, the 2021 macncheese.finance project launched a small NFT collection called CryptoMacaronis. It sold out fast, traded lively for a while, and then faded quietly like most NFT projects of that year. This page walks through what the collection was, what it promised, and what it can teach today.
What the collection actually was
CryptoMacaronis was a set of a few thousand ERC-721-style NFTs on BNB Smart Chain, each with a cartoon macaroni character in different colours, hats, and expressions. The metadata lived on IPFS. The mint price was low — a fraction of BNB per NFT — and mint proceeds were split between the project treasury and the deployer wallet.
The visual style tied into the site's cheese-and-pasta branding. Owners got a profile-picture-ready image, a spot in the CryptoMacaronis discord role, and the promise of future utility tied to the XVMC pools.
How the mint and secondary market played out
The mint sold out inside a day, at a pace typical for well-marketed BSC NFTs of the time. Prices on the small BSC-focused marketplaces briefly climbed to several times the mint. That peak lasted weeks.
| Phase | What happened | Approximate floor price |
|---|---|---|
| Mint day | Rapid sell-out, high volume | Mint price (illustrative) |
| First month | Speculative trading, celebrity retweets | 2–5x mint (illustrative) |
| Months 3–6 | XVMC price fell; interest cooled | Below mint (illustrative) |
| Long tail | Almost no volume; NFTs still on-chain | Near zero (illustrative) |
Every number is approximate and from historical archives. The general shape is what matters: a fast peak, a long decline, and a quiet residue of holders still sitting on the collection today.
What the promised utility was supposed to be
The launch marketing talked about a few utilities that would tie NFTs to the XVMC ecosystem:
- Boosted staking rewards for wallets holding CryptoMacaronis.
- Access to special cheese dip pools with higher emissions.
- Voting weight in governance proposals.
- Future collaborations with other BSC NFT projects.
Some of these shipped in a small form. Boosted pools existed at one point but attracted little use. Governance voting was hooked up but rarely used. Cross-project collaborations mostly stayed on the roadmap. See XVMC's claimed features vs what actually worked for the parallel story on the token side, and cheese dip pools for how boosted rewards actually behaved.
What holders can do today
If you still own a CryptoMacaronis NFT, three practical thoughts:
- Verify the collection on the block explorer — the collection contract address is fixed and unique.
- Do not accept a random offer through a DM or unsolicited market bid; scam bids on old collections are common and often paired with drainer signatures.
- If you want to exit, list on the largest BSC-focused NFT marketplace and expect very low prices. Some collectors of forgotten collections buy for nostalgia.
The IPFS art itself should remain viewable as long as at least one pinning service holds the metadata. If not, the on-chain contract still records ownership even without the picture.
What the story can teach about NFT projects today
The CryptoMacaronis arc is the standard shape for small NFT collections tied to a single DeFi project. The lessons transfer:
- An NFT's long-term value depends on the ecosystem around it, not the picture itself.
- Roadmaps that promise vague future utility are easy to publish and hard to ship.
- Secondary market prices for small collections tend to zero once mint enthusiasm cools.
- Real communities can keep a small collection alive for years; missing communities can end it in months.
Reading a modern NFT project against this pattern is a fair sanity check. If the collection is asking for a lot at mint and promising utility tied to a token that has not proven itself, the base case is a CryptoMacaronis-style arc.
A small piece of the old project, remembered
CryptoMacaronis was the friendlier face of the XVMC era. The art still exists, the community remembers the mint fondly, and the on-chain history remains readable by anyone with a block explorer. That is the honest legacy — not the promised utility that mostly never shipped, but the small artefact of a specific moment in DeFi that people can still point at. For the wider project story, see what happened to Mac n Cheese Finance and XVMC?.