How Backpack Can Succeed After Major Investor FTX Fell

By Jacquelyn Melinek

Compiled by: Xiaobai Navigation coderworld

Founder of BackpackUnder constructionCryptocurrency exchanges and wallets, has experienced strong growth since its launch in 2022. But the road has not been smooth.

FTX co-led Backpack’sUS$20 million strategic investment roundLess than two months later, in November 2022,FTX is closed.

“We lost 80% of operating capital on FTX. We spent so much time building this protocol and this is like a physical knockout that we need to resurrect,” Armani Ferrante, co-founder of Backpack and NFT series Mad Lads, told TechCrunch.

Not only did they lose investment funds and key partners, but the collapse of FTX also brought down thecryptocurrencyBear market.

Backpack's success is largely due to its supporters.Community“It was a combination of community, social goodwill and timing that attracted an incredible group of talent,” Ferrante said. “And it’s taken on a life of its own ever since.”

Monday, "Preseason Phase 1", i.e.exchangeThe testing phase ended after a month and a few days.On XAccording to the post, during this period, its total trading volume exceeded $27.5 billion and completed 259 million orders at a rate of about 5,000 per minute. It also added 252,000 KYC users, bringing its total number of users to 560,000.

根据 CoinGecko 的数据，该交易所的交易量周日达到峰值 36.6 亿美元，24 小时交易量约为 28 亿美元。

“我们以一种奇怪的方式抓住了瓶子里的闪电，人们刚刚开始谈论 Backpack 作为一个新的新兴交易所，并看到下一代交易所的承诺，它可以从很多之前的交易所失败中吸取经验，”Ferrante 说。

Ferrante said there are many lessons to be learned from FTX, adding that one of Backpack’s fundamental design goals is to address the issues exposed by FTX.

Unlike FTX, Backpack designed its exchange system to ensure that balances are controlled by independent entities or nodes that can collectively verify each other in order to check every order, cancellation, deposit, withdrawal, etc. This is done in the hope that there is no single point of failure and Backpack cryptocurrencyThe operations of an exchange could be split across multiple entities. “The industry is being forced to mature and become better,” Ferrante said.

“The FTX collapse was horrible, but in another way it’s like a phoenix rising from the ashes, and we have to ramp up to solve the hard problems that haven’t been solved yet,” Ferrante said. “We are taking the product in our own direction,” he added, and that it goes beyond exchanges and into other products as well.

Backpack is also building out its encryptionwalletand xNFT platform, which is Solana BlockchainNewTokenStandard, similar to NFT, but also a platform for Web3 applications. This goes back to the origin of the name Backpack.Xiaobai NavigationThe inspiration comes from MMO games such as World of Warcraft or RuneScape, which provide users with backpacks to store items.wallet中，你可以放卡、一些现金和硬币，但背包可以放一切东西，而不仅仅是钱，所以我们认为这是一个更加动态的钱包版本，”Ferrante 说。

Mad Lads 是 Backpack 创建的最大的 Solana NFT 系列之一，也是一种 xNFT，在发布时其交易底价约为 172 SOL，即 34,400 美元。 “对我们来说，我们很幸运，我们的社区与我们的业务是互补的，” Ferrante 说， “我们希望为他们打造一款产品，让他们在加密领域的生活变得更好。”

But Mad Lads isn’t the only xNFT, Ferrante said. For example, the NFT series Solana Monkey Business has an xNFT with a newsletter called Banana Split, which is updated regularly, so when someone owns the NFT on Backpack, they can access the newsletter directly in their wallet.

As for replacing FTX as an investor, that’s also going well. At the end of February, Backpack raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Placeholder VC at a valuation of $120 million. Backpack recently expanded to the UK and has operations in 11 US states, Dubai, and throughout the Asia-Pacific region. But this is just the beginning, and the team’s new funds will be used for global expansion as Backpack hopes to reach 95% of global GDP by the end of 2024, “to serve customers in compliance.”

Going forward, Backpack’s focus is on execution in many different aspects. But product distribution is top of mind for the exchange as it looks to enter every country around the world.

“It’s a crazy, winner-take-all market,” Ferrante said. “We want to seize the moment, and given everything we’ve talked about, the opportunity is there this year, so we’re going to take advantage of it.”

The article comes from the Internet:How Backpack Can Succeed After Major Investor FTX Fell

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