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Backpack hit $27.5B in total trading volume during its beta phase
Backpack ’s founders , who are buildinga crypto commutation and wallet , have experience hard growth since launch in 2022 . But the route was n’t easygoing .
FTX co - conduce Backpack’s$20 million strategic investment roundin September 2022 . Less than two months later , in November 2022,FTX collapsed .
“ We lose 80 % of the go capital on FTX . We spent all this meter building this protocol and it was like an on - the - ground knockout and [ we ] call for to be resuscitated back to life , ” Armani Ferrante , co - founder of Backpack and the NFT collection Mad Lads , told TechCrunch .
Not only did they lose their investment money and a major partner , but also the FTX flop show in a crypto bear grocery that has only lately begun to bounce back .
Backpack made it through mostly thanks to its supporters . “ It ’s a combination of ware , community , social good will and timing that brought in an incredible group of people , ” Ferrante said . “ Since then it ’s taken on a life story of its own . ”
On Monday , its “ Pre Season Phase 1 , ” aka the exchange ’s beta stage , end after a calendar month and a few days . During that time shape , it deal over $ 27.5 billion in total volume and fill 259 million ordering at about 5,000 per minute , according to the company’sposts on X. It also added 252,000 KYC’d drug user , bringing its total to 560,000 drug user .
The exchange ’s trading bulk peaked on Sunday at $ 3.66 billion and has a 24 - 60 minutes volume of about $ 2.8 billion , according toCoinGecko data .
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“ We have caught lightning in a bottle in a weird way , where people just commence let the cat out of the bag about Backpack as this new up - and - coming commutation and run across the promise of a next - genesis exchange that can check from a lot of the lessons and mistakes that were made of previous exchanges , ” Ferrante said .
There are a bunch of lessons to learn from FTX , Ferrante said . One of the foundational design goal for Backpack was to solve the problem divulge by FTX , he added
Unlike FTX , Backpack plan its exchange ’s organization to ensure that balance are control by independent entities , or nodes , that can collectively validate each other so that every order , cancellation , deposition , detachment and so on are check . This is done in hope that there ’s no single breaker point of failure and that the surgery of the Backpack crypto exchange can be split up across multiple entity . “ The industry has been force to suppurate , for the better , ” Ferrante tell .
“ The collapse of FTX was horrible , but face glass one-half full , it ’s like a capital of Arizona come up from the ash tree and we have to step up our secret plan to lick the hard problems that were n’t being solved , ” Ferrante said . “ We ’re taking the product in our own direction , ” he added , and it ’s go beyond an interchange and into other products too .
Backpack is also make out its crypto wallet and chopine forxNFTs , which are a new nominal standard on the Solana blockchain that are similar to NFTs but are also a program for web3 applications . This indicate back to the origin of the name Backpack , which was inspired by MMO game like World of Warcraft or RuneScape that supply users with knapsack to hold in stocktaking . “ In a [ normal ] notecase you have carte du jour , some hard cash and coins , but a knapsack can have everything , not just money , so we see this as a much more active version of a notecase , ” Ferrante said .
Mad Lads , one of the bragging Solana NFT collections out there produce by Backpack , is also an xNFT , with a trading story terms of about 172 SOL , or $ 34,400 , at the time of publication . “ For us , we ’re golden where our community of interests is completing to our byplay , ” Ferrante said . “ We want to build a mathematical product for them and make their life in crypto well . ”
As for replacing FTX as an investor , that ’s gone well , too . At the end of February , Backpack raised $ 17 million at a $ 120 million evaluation in a Series A round led by Placeholder VC . Backpack late expand into the United Kingdom and has a presence in11 U.S. states , Dubai and across the Asia - Pacific part . But this is just the commencement , Ferrante said . The team ’s unused capital will be used toward planetary expansion as Backpack want to reach 95 % of the universe ’s GDP by the end of 2024 “ to compliantly serve up client . ”
Going forward , it ’s all about execution for Backpack on many unlike fronts . But ware distribution is top of intellect for the exchange , as it hop to get into every country around the world .
“ It ’s one of those crazy things where it ’s a achiever take all food market , ” Ferrante said . “ We want to seize the moment and yield everything we talked about , that chance live this class so we ’re make the most out of everything . ”
