Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

On March 23, Backpack officially launched its native token $BP and opened the airdrop channel for points. This event, which was originally seen as a landmark occurrence in the Solana ecosystem and carried the hopes of countless speculative investors, unexpectedly triggered a strong backlash in the community, plunging it into a swirl of public opinion.

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

“Countless small retail investors and I, we all came to Backpack with dreams and expectations, believing you are the clean stream and that it would be different. But sorry, we were wrong; the people make the knife, and I am the fish meat. I am really hurt this time,” said Little Bear Biscuit.

Historically, many projects have been criticized for counteracting speculation, but never has a project been condemned so severely for doing so, with so many KOLs participating in the outcry.

KOL He Bi even added a statement in his personal description: “Note: Backpack is a scam exchange, a fraudulent group, do not use it, be careful of being deceived.”

1. Successful KOL Marketing Case

The rise of Backpack was once regarded as a textbook-level marketing case. Founded by former FTX executives and backed by the powerful support of the Mad Lads NFT community, along with its claim of “compliance” and “high performance,” Backpack was enveloped in a halo right from its launch.

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

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

In the following year or two, numerous crypto KOLs released “nanny-level tutorials” surrounding Backpack, covering topics such as how to register and complete KYC, how to trade to increase points, how to use multiple accounts to enhance profit expectations, and how to lower costs using referral links.

Many KOLs embedded exclusive referral links in their content, earning through transaction fee rebates, traffic sharing, and other means. This model has been validated in several previous projects and gradually evolved into a “semi-industrialized” traffic arbitrage pathway. In this scenario, the higher the trading volume and corresponding transaction fees a user achieves, the more points they earn, and therefore the more airdrop tokens they receive.

Under the enthusiastic endorsement of KOLs, countless investors and studios paid high transaction fees to compete for substantial airdrops. Under this communication structure, the user growth of Backpack clearly demonstrated a characteristic: users did not enter solely based on product value, but rather with “airdrop expectations” as the core driving force.

2. Betraying the “Community”?

However, with the release of the link for checking the number of airdrops from Backpack, the expectations of all speculative groups were suddenly shattered.

According to the results, Backpack implemented a strict “one account per person” determination strategy. If a single device or IP operated multiple accounts, all those accounts would be deemed as “witch” accounts, ultimately leading to almost all speculative groups receiving nothing, especially in the Chinese community.

For instance, anymose and its team, who participated in multiple points activities and actively recruited new users, contributed over $4 billion in transaction volume to Backpack, but all accounts were judged as “witches.”

The user 0x Yu Xi commented that this situation can be likened to a coalition invading China in the crypto space. The contributions from the Chinese are not only significant but likely among the top two. However, the almost exclusively labeled "witches" are the Chinese; nobody fears losing money from counter-speculation, but in the face of this blatant provocation, no one can endure.

“Backpack is the project I have invested the most time, effort, and money in the crypto space, and the celebration that should have belonged to supporters turned into an absurd farce yesterday. I have also been constantly refreshing my understanding of the limits. From my communications, it seems that the witch policy mainly targets Chinese users, and the threshold is likely above 60 million points, with many big holders being wrongfully killed. I cannot understand Backpack's choice to betray the Chinese community in this way,” said KOL Lin Shan Lynn, who is extremely dissatisfied.

Meta Ape explained in a post on X regarding his multiple accounts that this was mainly due to the need for arbitrage trading, where the efficiency of using multiple accounts is higher, and it avoids hitting the upper limit of transaction volume subject to commission ratio restrictions. He disdainfully stated that he did not want to play this cat-and-mouse game with the project party, hence did not isolate accounts and even actively mentioned his multi-account operation to the project team.

But the final outcome still disappointed him greatly. “For price differences, I won’t blame the project party at all, as I have encountered many garbage projects, one more doesn’t matter, and I can accept the gamble,” said Meta Ape. “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? Instead, their choice was: no care, no concern, no respect. That left me feeling like a clown.”

In response to the overwhelming dissatisfaction and criticism, Claire, the head of the Chinese division of Backpack, published a statement on the 24th, saying that the strict “witch determination policy” was due to the compliance team's obsession with rules in Europe and the United States. An appeal channel will be opened, and all users operating 3 accounts or fewer on a single device who were judged as witches will, after manual verification, have 50% or more points returned; at the same time, the team will initiate a directional token buyback in the secondary market in the coming days for the special compensation of eligible users.

However, the impression of Backpack's “malicious” behavior has already spread, and its token BP price has fallen below $0.20 since its issuance, with a single-day decline exceeding 33%. The FDV is only $200 million, far lower than previous market expectations.

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