When Backpack backstabs the community

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

On March 23, Backpack officially launched its native token $BP and opened the channel for airdrop rewards. This event, originally seen as a landmark in the Solana ecosystem and carrying the hopes of countless users, unexpectedly triggered a strong backlash from the community, falling into a whirlpool of public opinion.

The core issue lies in the distribution of airdrop tokens. Well-known KOLs such as Ice Frog, He Bi, Australian Lion Brother, Professor Feng Wuxiang, Meta Ape, and anymose all stated that their accounts, as well as those of their studios, were judged by the platform as "witches," resulting in airdrop earnings far below expectations and significant losses.

"Countless small retail investors and I came to brush Backpack with dreams and expectations. We believed you were a breath of fresh air, that it would be different. But sorry, we were wrong; the human knife is the fish meat. This time, I am really sad," said Little Bear Biscuit.

Historically, many projects have been criticized for anti-airdrop measures, but never has a project been so severely condemned for anti-airdrop actions, with so many KOLs participating in the denunciation.

KOL He Bi even added a description in his personal profile: "Warning: Backpack is a fraudulent exchange, a scam group, do not use it, beware of being deceived."

I. Successful KOL Marketing Case

The rise of Backpack was once regarded as a textbook marketing case. Founded by former FTX executives and backed by the strong endorsement of the Mad Lads NFT community, along with its claims of "compliance" and "high performance," Backpack was already shining when it launched.

According to RootData, Backpack raised $37 million within two years of its establishment, with investors including Placeholder, Jump Crypto, Robot Ventures, Wintermute, Multicoin Capital, Hashed, Delphi Digital, and other star institutions.

In early 2024, during the announcement of the first phase of the Pre-Season event, Backpack adopted the logic of "trading volume equals points." At that time, market sentiment was extremely high, and the KOL network greatly propelled Backpack's expansion.

In the following year or two, numerous crypto KOLs released "nanny-level tutorials" around Backpack, covering how to register and complete KYC, how to trade to increase points, how to use multiple accounts to enhance profit expectations, how to use referral links to reduce costs, and more.

Many KOLs embedded exclusive invitation links in their content, achieving profits through commission rebates and traffic sharing. This model had been validated in several previous projects and gradually evolved into a "semi-industrialized" traffic arbitrage path. In this envisioned scenario, the higher the user's trading volume and corresponding fees, the more points they would earn, and the more airdrop tokens they would receive.

Under the enthusiastic promotion of KOLs, countless investors and studios paid high fees to engage in wash trading for the sake of high airdrops. In this dissemination structure, Backpack's user growth showed a clear characteristic: users did not enter purely based on product value but were driven primarily by "airdrop expectations."

II. Backstabbing the "Community"?

However, with the release of the link to check airdrop quantities, the expectations of all the users were suddenly shattered.

From the results, Backpack adopted a strict "one person, one account" determination strategy. If a single device or IP operated multiple accounts, all those accounts would be considered "witch" accounts, ultimately leading to almost all users receiving nothing, especially in the Chinese community.

For example, anymose and its team, which contributed over $4 billion in trading volume to Backpack by participating in multiple points activities and actively bringing in new users, found all their accounts judged as "witches."

0x Yu Xi commented that this situation could be likened to the Eight-Nation Alliance invading China in crypto; the Chinese contribution was not the least but certainly among the top, yet they were almost exclusively labeled as "witches." No one fears losing money from anti-airdrop measures, but this pure provocation is something no one can tolerate.

"Backpack is the project where I have spent the most time, energy, and money in the crypto space. What should have been a celebration for supporters turned into an absurd farce, and I have been continuously refreshing my understanding of the lower limits. From what I have learned through communication, the witch hunt mainly targets Chinese users, and the score is likely not just 60 million; many large accounts were wrongly killed. I cannot understand Backpack's choice to backstab the Chinese community," KOL Linshan Lynn expressed his extreme dissatisfaction.

Meta Ape posted on X to explain his multi-account operations, stating that it was mainly for the needs of arbitrage trading, as the capital efficiency of multiple accounts is higher and can avoid hitting the trading volume limits that restrict commission ratios. He disdainfully refused to "play this cat-and-mouse game" with the project team, and thus did not isolate his accounts, even proactively mentioning his multi-account operations to the project team.

But the final result still left him extremely disappointed. "I won't blame the project for price discrepancies; after all, I've invested in many trash projects, and one more doesn't matter, willing to gamble and accept losses," Meta Ape said. "But the problem is, according to the rules of the industry, since you can't create any economic value, at least take care of the emotional value? Yet their choice is: not caring, not respecting. That makes me feel like a clown."

In response to the overwhelming dissatisfaction and criticism, Claire, the head of the Chinese region for Backpack, posted on the 24th stating that the strict witch determination policy was due to the compliance team's obsession with rules in Europe and America. An appeal channel will be opened next, and users who operated 3 or fewer accounts on a single device and were judged as witches will have their cases manually verified and will receive more than 50% of their points back; at the same time, the team will initiate a secondary market targeted token buyback in the coming days to specifically compensate eligible users.

However, the external impression of Backpack's "malicious" behavior has already spread, with its token BP price dropping below $0.20 since its issuance, with a single-day decline of over 33%, and an FDV of only $200 million, far below previous market expectations.

Once trust experiences a fundamental fracture, the cost Backpack must pay to repair it is likely far more expensive than the profits previously "harvested" through transaction fees.