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.

According to CoinGecko data, theexchangeTrading volume peaked at $3.66 billion on Sunday, with 24-hour trading volume at around $2.8 billion.

“We caught lightning in a bottle in a weird way, and people just started talking about backpacks as a new emergingexchange, and see the promise of a next-generation exchange that can learn from the failures of many previous exchanges,” Ferrante said.

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.walletIn the backpack, you can put cards, some cash and coins, but the backpack can hold everything, not just money, so we think this is a more dynamicwalletversion,” Ferrante said.

Mad Lads is one of the largest Solana NFT collections created by Backpack, and is also an xNFT that is trading at a floor price of approximately 172 SOL, or $34,400, at the time of publication. “For us, we are very lucky that ourCommunity“We want to build a product for them that makes their lives better in crypto.”

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

Related recommendations: Bitcoin NFT sold at Sotheby's for $254,000, but it's not the most expensive

Why are NFTs engraved on the Bitcoin network so expensive? Written by: Mu Mu When a digital artwork by crypto artist Beeple was sold at Christie's for a sky-high price of $69.34 million, NFTs became popular around the world overnight. This new carrier of digital art has emerged from Web3 and entered the mainstream art collection market. But as the crypto market enters a bear market, it is unusual…