Original source: Shenchao TechFlow
The bull market is full of restlessness, and the FTX and Solana ecosystems have once again attracted public attention.
Recently, according toThe Wall Street Journal reports, some former FTX executives, including former FTX general counsel Can Sun, are jointly creating a new cryptocurrency exchange, Backpack Exchange, which plans to adopt new technologies to protect user funds.
With the re-emergence of the Solana ecology, Backpack Exchange is rumored to be launching a new staking activity, which has received a lot of attention from the community. People who care about hair are taking action after hearing the news. Some big money players said that they already have hundreds of KYC accounts and are ready to go. What kind of trading platform is this?
The past and present life of Backpack Exchange
In May of this year, Deep Trend TechFlow once wrote an article xNFT: The weapon behind the Mad Lads fire, NFT that can run code. Simply put, xNFT is a decentralized application that can run in NFT, and It’s not a static image or video, the development team behind it is the Solana ecological wallet Backpack.
In September 2022, Coral, the development company behind Backpack, announced the completion of US$20 million in financing, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, with participation from Multicoin Capital, Anagram, K 5 Global and other strategic investors.
Whether led by FTX Ventures or Jump Crypto, Multicoin Capital was once the most orthodox crypto VC in the Solana ecosystem.
However, the good times did not last long, FTX was hit hard, and the entire Solana ecosystem was depressed and silent for a time. What is even more tragic is that most of the Backpack teams funds were trapped in FTX.
Backpack founder Armani Ferrante said on The Scoop podcast that the company was unable to withdraw its funds in FTX, which is approximately $14.5 million.
In times of crisis, the company had to enter cockroach mode and cut various expenditures to maintain operations. The Backpack team survived tenaciously.
In April this year, Backpack released Mad Lads, the first xNFT series on Solana, which was a great success. The total transaction volume once ranked first in the entire network, even surpassing established Ethereum blue-chip NFTs such as BAYC.
After surviving the most difficult moment, Backpack began to look for a new direction - exchanges.
In October 2023, Backpack announced that it would launch a regulated trading platform called Backpack Exchange, and announced that it had obtained a VASP license issued by the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority. It would start testing in November and plans to launch it on the first day of 2024. Launched to the public quarterly.
Former FTX employees collectively start a business
The launch of Backpack Exchange also united FTX’s former general counsel Can Sun. Armani Ferrante and Can Sun jointly established a new company Trek Labs in Dubai to operate the exchange. Currently, the company plans to invest in the exchange with a valuation of more than $100 million. The investor sells 10% of the shares.
Ferrantes wife, Claire Zhang, is also a former legal assistant at Sun and an executive board member of Trek Labs.
Can Sun, FTXs former general counsel and one of the key witnesses in the criminal trial that led to SBF, told jurors that he never approved FTX lending client funds to Alameda Research.
According to CoindeskFerrante, founder of Backpack, was also a software development engineer at Alameda Research before. Tristan Yver, another co-founder of Backpack, had previously worked at FTX for more than 2 years.
Currently, Sun also said that he and Ferrante have hired other former FTX legal and compliance employees to join the exchange.
Therefore, Backpack can be called the collective re-employment of former FTX employees.
Ferrante said that the move to start his own exchange was also inspired by the huge disaster caused by the collapse of FTX.
“It’s time to end the era of opaque cryptocurrency exchanges, which represent everything our industry stands against,” he said in a statement, “using exchanges with single points of failure, no proof of reserves, or no auditability. It shouldn’t be normal.”
Therefore, the main features of Backpack Exchange are security and transparency.
The platform integrates multi-party computation (MPC) technology to ensure the security of funds, allowing users to self-custody their funds, meaning that no one but the user themselves can access their crypto wallet.
Affected by the Backpack exchange, the NFT series Mad Lads previously launched by Backpack has soared 460% in the past 30 days, and the current floor price is 96 SOL.
On November 18, the exchange is expected to launch its first new campaign. Rumors in the Twitter community say that it will be staking SOL (about 5) and then receiving airdrops.
This rumor also attracted a large number of airdrop hunters to participate. According to community participants, due to the need for KYC certification, the relevant single KYC information skyrocketed from US$3 to US$15 overnight.
Attached: Registration steps
Official website:https://backpack.exchange/
Log in and verify with your email, then select your personal identity for KYC verification and fill in your nationality and ID card information.
Then upload your ID card or passport and other information.
Finally, face recognition is performed and authentication is completed.
