Join the Backpack Backstab Community

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

On March 23, Backpack (also known as “Backpack”) officially launched its native token $BP and opened the points airdrop claiming portal. What was originally seen as a flagship Solana ecosystem event—carrying the hopes of countless hair-pulling-for-airdrop folks—unexpectedly triggered a strong shockwave in the community and plunged it into a swirl of public opinion.

The core reason still comes down to problems with token distribution for the airdrop. Ice Frog, He Bi, the elder brother from down under, Professor Feng Wu Xiang Suo, Meta Ape, anymose, and other well-known KOLs all said that both their own accounts and their studio accounts were judged by the platform as “sybils,” causing their airdrop returns to fall far short of expectations, with severe losses.

“Countless small retail users and I—we all came to farm Backpack with dreams and anticipation. We believe you are the clear stream, and we believe it will be different. But sorry, we were wrong. You make the rules and I am the fish on the chopping block. I’m genuinely heartbroken this time.” So said Xiao Xiong Biscuit.

In history, there have been many projects that tried to prevent farming and were criticized, but never has a project been cursed so fiercely for anti-farming—nor has there been such a large number of KOLs joining the outcry.

KOL He Bi even directly added the following description to his personal bio: “Note: Backpack is a scam exchange, a scam syndicate. Definitely do not use it—be careful not to get scammed.”

1. Successful KOL marketing examples

Backpack’s rise was once viewed as a textbook-level marketing case. Founded by a former FTX executive, with strong backing from the Mad Lads NFT community, plus its branding of “compliance” and “high performance,” Backpack entered the market at launch already wearing layers of halo.

According to RootData, within two years of its founding, Backpack had already raised $37 million in financing. Investors included Placeholder, Jump Crypto, Robot Ventures, Robot Ventures, Wintermute, Multicoin Capital, Hashed, Delphi Digital, and other star institutions.

In early 2024, when it announced the launch of its first-stage Pre-Season campaign, Backpack immediately adopted a logic of “trading volume equals points.” At that time, market sentiment was extremely high, and the KOL network greatly pushed Backpack’s expansion.

In the following one or two years, a large number of crypto KOLs published “babysitter-level tutorials” around Backpack. The content included how to register and complete KYC, how to conduct trades to boost points, how to increase expected returns by using multiple accounts, how to use referral/commission links to lower costs, and more.

Many KOLs embedded exclusive invitation links in their content, realizing earnings through mechanisms such as fee rebates and traffic splits. This model had been validated as effective in multiple prior projects, and gradually evolved into a “semi-industrialized” traffic-arbitrage path. Under this premise, the higher a user’s trading volume and the corresponding fees, the more points they earn, and the more token airdrops they receive.

Under the enthusiastic promotion of the KOLs, countless investors and studios, just to chase high-value airdrops, were willing to pay high fees to farm. Under this kind of dissemination structure, Backpack’s user growth shows a clear characteristic: users are not entering purely based on product value, but with “airdrops expectation” as the core driving force.

2. Stabbing the “community”?

However, once Backpack published the links for checking the airdrop, all the farming groups’ expectations were instantly shattered.

From the results, Backpack adopted a strict “one person, one account” determination strategy. If a single device or IP was used to operate multiple accounts, all those accounts would be treated as “sybil” accounts. Ultimately, this led to nearly all farming groups getting nothing—especially in the Chinese community.

For example, anymose and his team participated in multiple points campaigns and actively recruited new users, contributing more than $4 billion in trading volume to Backpack; yet in the end, all accounts were judged as “sybils.”

0x Yu Xi commented that this could be described as the “Eight-Nation Alliance invading China” in the crypto world. As for who contributed the most, the Chinese may not be number one, but it’s probably second; however, for nearly all the “sybil” Chinese that were so conveniently labeled, nobody feared losing money from anti-farming. But this kind of pure provocation is something nobody can tolerate.

“Backpack is the biggest project I’ve spent my time, energy, and money on in the crypto world. Yesterday, what was supposed to be a celebration for supporters turned into an absurd farce. I’ve kept refreshing my understanding of the lowest line. From what I’ve learned after communicating, sybils mainly target Chinese users, and the odds are that it’s not only 60 million points—so many big holders were wrongly swept up. As for this path of Backpack choosing to stab the Chinese community in the back, I can’t understand it.” KOL Neighbor Mountain Lynn also expressed extreme dissatisfaction.

Meta Ape posted on X explaining that his operation with multiple accounts is mainly for the needs of arbitrage trading. The capital utilization efficiency is higher across multiple accounts, and it also helps avoid triggering transaction volume limits related to referral/commission ratios. He looks down on “playing cat-and-mouse games” with the project team, so he did not isolate accounts at all; he even proactively mentioned his multi-account operating method to the project’s team.

But in the end, the result still left him extremely disappointed. “When it comes to things like price differences, I won’t blame the project at all. After all, I’ve invested in all kinds of trash already—what’s one more? It’s a gamble, you lose, you pay the price.” Meta Ape said, “But the issue is, according to the rules of the martial arts world—if you can’t create even a bit of economic value, then at least take care of the emotional value, right? And its choice is: it doesn’t care, it doesn’t respect, it doesn’t pay attention. Then it makes me feel like a complete clown.”

In response to the overwhelming dissatisfaction and criticism, Claire, the head of the Chinese region for Backpack, wrote a post on the 24th. He said that the harsh sybil-detection policy is due to the obsession with rules by the compliance teams in Europe and the United States. Next, an appeal channel will be opened. For users who operated 3 accounts or fewer on a single device and were judged as sybils, after manual verification, they will receive back more than 50% of their points. At the same time, the team will launch targeted token buybacks in the secondary market within the coming days, to use for special compensation for eligible users.

However, the outside world’s impression of Backpack’s “malicious” behavior has already spread. Since the token was issued, the BP price has kept falling to below $0.2, with a daily decline of more than 33%. FDV is only $200 million, far below earlier market expectations.

Once trust has a fundamental crack, the cost Backpack must pay to repair it will likely be far more expensive than the returns it previously “harvested” through fees.