McLaren's MCL/COLLECT Drop: What the Onchain Data Shows

McLaren Racing launched MCL/COLLECT on Hedera, a series of free digital collectibles tied to the 2026 F1 season. Four sets of six collectibles, released at race weekends throughout the year, free to claim with no gas fees. Fans who complete sets get entered into prize draws for McLaren Technology Centre tours and signed merchandise.

At Hgraph, we build and operate data infrastructure, indexing transactions, tokens, accounts, and smart contract events, served through GraphQL, REST, JSON-RPC, and SQL. The data in this post was pulled using our MCP Server, which connects directly to that indexed dataset and is what we used to investigate the McLaren drop as it happened onchain.

Here's what we found.

The Token

MCL/COLLECT is an ERC-721 collection on Hedera, 6,364 tokens minted across 4,795 unique wallets. The contract deployed on March 5, 2026, with the first mint 19 seconds later. The claim window stayed open for 27 days through April 1, covering the first three race weekends of the season. (Click here to learn more about ERC Token Data)

March 7: Australian GP Weekend

The 2026 F1 season opened in Melbourne, and MCL/COLLECT's first drop went live. Here's what the Hedera network looked like that day:

• 38,915 new accounts created
• 451,146 total transactions
• 14,759 active smart contracts
• 25,983.86 HBAR in network fees

For context, Hedera averaged about 1,327 new accounts per day in February 2026. The single-day max that month was 3,535. March 7 hit 29x the February daily average.

It is worth noting that Hedera's new account metric counts all creation methods, including auto-provisioned wallets from Web2 social sign-on. The 38,915 number includes fans who signed up through familiar login flows, not all crypto-native users. The collectibles required no gas fees and no prior token association, so the barrier to entry was effectively zero.

The Pattern Held Across Race Weekends

The Australian GP wasn't a one-off. The next two race weekends showed the same pattern:

• March 13 (Chinese GP weekend): 10,778 new accounts, 8x the February baseline
• March 26 (Japanese GP weekend): 9,530 new accounts, 7x the February baseline

The numbers tapered but stayed well above normal network activity across all three drops.

What the Data Shows

A single brand partnership brought tens of thousands of new wallets onto Hedera in a matter of weeks. Most of them likely came through Web2 login flows, people who wanted a McLaren collectible.

This is what adoption looks like when a mainstream brand removes the friction from onboarding.

It's also worth noting that McLaren Racing joined the Hedera Governing Council on March 25, 2026, after the Australian and Chinese GP drops had already happened. The onchain activity came first, and the formal council membership followed.

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All data pulled from Hedera mainnet via the Hgraph MCP Server. If you want to dive a little deeper, here's a query to get you started on our playground, app.hgraph.com:

query McLarenDropDayMetrics {
  new_accounts: ecosystem_metric(
    where: {
      name: { _eq: "new_accounts" }
      period: { _eq: "day" }
      end_date: { _eq: "2026-03-07T00:00:00" }
    }
  ) {
    total
    end_date
  }
  transactions: ecosystem_metric(
    where: {
      name: { _eq: "new_transactions" }
      period: { _eq: "day" }
      end_date: { _eq: "2026-03-07T00:00:00" }
    }
  ) {
    total
    end_date
  }
}