Here comes the full text of @Backpack_CN CEO @armaniferrante's fireside chat at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW2024), welcome everyone to read
#backpack空投 #JUP多 #drift
After each answer, I summarized the speech of the Armani boss. You can directly read the summary
1. Host: What is Backpack?
Arimani replied: If you look at the collection of wallets and exchanges. Like Coinbase, they are kind of like the Facebook of exchanges, everyone knows them, respects them, loves them. They are a role model for a lot of aspiring social media companies.
But if you look at Backpack, we're less like Facebook and more like Tiktok, we're kind of like the new kid on the block.
There are actually three parts to the Backpack business: they complement each other to form a fairly unique and endearing community and product ecosystem.
On the one hand, we launched the international cryptocurrency exchange half a year ago. So far: our transaction volume has exceeded 60 billion US dollars.
On the other hand, we have wallets, a self-hosted key management system, a bit like Metamask
We also have the Madlads, which is our incredibly real NFT community who love to create buzz all over the internet and are a passionate group of crypto natives around the world.
😀Summary: Backpack is a new star in the crypto industry, and it is the Tiktok of the crypto industry. Backpack is not a product, but a collection of businesses. We have a cryptocurrency exchange with a transaction volume of more than 60 billion, a self-hosted wallet, and a craze for NFTs. — Madlads
2. Host: Can you tell us more about your journey into the crypto space and the Solana community?
Arimani replied: My journey into crypto was not much different than many others. I started my career in Silicon Valley as a software engineer at Apple. In 2017 I saw a few people trading Bitcoin during the bull cycle in the office. The price just kept going up and up and up. I was shocked.
I read the Ethereum whitepaper and was fascinated by it. I thought the idea of a decentralized world computing design was the coolest thing in the world. I jumped in, but I had no idea what I was going to do. Other than knowing I wanted to work in open source software and cryptocurrency, the rest is history.
I joined Solana specifically after I realized this. I feel like parallelization is really important. I think a lot of people looked at the current blockchain architecture during the ’17-’18 bull cycle, and this has been discussed and researched a lot from then until now. But I just became a parallelization maximalist, so I became very excited about Solana and a lot of other modern blockchains that are now with us.
😀Summary: Arimani entered Web3 at about the same time as you and I, but he is a parallelization maximalist and is also excited about the evolution of modern blockchains.
3. Host: You established the Backpack wallet in the Solana community. Why did you choose to make a wallet in the first place?
Arimani replied: I think if there's one point that speaks to why this industry is important and why a lot of us are here, it all comes down to self-custody. I think without self-custody, a lot of the stuff we're doing and building wouldn't matter.
So I think from that perspective: wallets are one of the most important tools, if not the most important tool, to bring people into this industry and showcase the best of what this technology has to offer. So wallets are extremely important and very exciting.
I feel like we were able to bring something new to the space, especially on Solana. It's obviously become and evolved a lot since then. But self-custody is a core principle of a lot of why we're here. It's where we came from and why we went down this path.
😀Summary: Self-custody is important for the crypto industry, is the gateway to the crypto industry, and is the core principle of Backpack
4. Moderator: Things got really interesting when you minted Madlads NFT, and it became the number one NFT on Solana. Can you share some data you got through Madlads? Why did you decide to do NFT?
Arimani replied: Yes, going back to the Madlads minting, we minted it at the bottom after the FTX bear market. Especially the Solana bear market, the network was at a low point. It was knocked down, people were kicking it and spitting in its face, and it was a really dark time. But a lot of NFTs are the golden children of the network, there are incredible businesses like Magiceden and Tnesor and Hyperspace and other products that were born out of the NFT bull cycle. They make me think that this network is culturally relevant in a way and culturally robust and rich.
What’s unique about minting for Madlads is that we have the ability to customize it from start to finish. I think a lot of people at the time were really used to these launch pads. The first time you mint an NFT with this cookie-cutter approach. But NFT minting is probably the most important time for a project. You get the opportunity to tell your story and the world is watching you in a way that’s hard to replicate after you’ve built a project. So we’ve always looked at minting from that perspective, and this is the most important moment for Madlads to show the world how different we are.
What we’re excited about: Showcasing our product and really leveraging attention, so we built the entire experience from start to finish, including whitelisting, so before we even got to minting, we already had a rabid group of NFT enthusiasts from all over the world in our discord.
People download wallets, download apps, play AI-generated guessing games like dolly. We made a lot of games where you have to compete to get whitelisted for NFTs.
For example, in the game AI Raw Pictures, the user has to guess the hint. We heard some noise, I don't know if it was the scream of an owl, and you have to guess the type of owl.
We did a Microsoft 3D puzzle hunt where users had to open their wallets and travel through the world to find these invite codes.
We built a lot of things that I think really start telling stories and engaging in ways that I think are very unique and new, and I think that’s what’s driving a lot of the hype.
But what was unique about the casting experience was that about a week before we cast Madlads, I got a message from a hacker on TG.
He said Armani, I can shut down your website, pay me. He was basically blackmailing me. I was like: well, no, I'm not paying you. He was just DDOSing us.
We got to the minting and this guy came back. You can see all the requests and logs. It was basically a famous battle at the time between us and this group of people who were just trying to DDOS the minting to stop us from minting or simply steal our NFTs.
So this was a back and forth battle between us and this hacker. It was very dramatic. We had to delay minting for the day, which caused us to not be able to successfully mint the NFT. The trade-off was you could mint it now. And then that guy stole all the NFTs. Or you could wait and build up more anticipation to successfully mint it today. We chose to fight, and I think that was the right choice.
😀Summary: Soana has a very good cultural source and can give birth to great web3 products.
We customized all aspects of Madlads from its birth to maturity, and we are proud of those very unique and novel gameplays. Before the whitelist was issued, we created a lot of fun games, which won us the support of enthusiastic NFT enthusiasts.
Before the launch, I was threatened by hackers, but we withstood the pressure and successfully completed the launch!
5. Moderator: How did you choose the visual language in Madlads? What is the story behind this particular style? Who do you want to attract? What kind of people or community do you want to attract?
Arimani replied: I think I love to see an artist or a company or anyone for that matter, any kind of creator and say: wow, this person is such a genius.
They sit in this room and really think about this and through their soul or divine intervention are able to come up with this really creative thing.
But I think the right analogy is actually more like mining. If you think about it: you're in the desert, and you're digging in the sand. And then you find that, your shovel hits a rock, and then you're like, wow, that's kind of interesting. So you keep digging in that area. And eventually you unlock or discover this lost civilization, and there are some buildings, structures, or monoliths, and they're from an alien civilization.
I think the creative process was similar. We faced some design constraints in Madlads:
I think the first design constraint was first of all: it had to be different. It had to be a group of creatures at the time, so it was as simple as using humans. Then you start thinking about fashion and art direction. An interesting time point that really resonated with everyone was the British and American gangsters of the 1930s to 1940s, the Peaky Blinders look and so on.
I think a lot of the credit goes to Tristan, but it was all about unraveling these things one by one, so that was the first moment we saw a piece of art. It was fun.
Peaky Blinders or American Gangster style artwork. Then slowly but surely new creative inputs came in, which I think helped discover the IP.
I think another big moment that I really like is from Gonzalo or Monkey, sitting alone on the sand here. He made this short film inspired by Quentin Tarantino. It's like a must-see Kill Bill or something. And he played the Kill Bill music in the background. It just had the word mad on it. And we didn't do anything with it. It was just a creative inspiration, and I think he distilled the soul of the artwork emotionally.
There are so many moments like that that I can point to. And any one of them contributed so much, it was the mosaic that all of them came together to create. To create what I think became Madlads.
Obviously there's the community and the casting experience and a million things you could point to. But I think that's what's really interesting and beautiful about the creative process. Is that there's not one single moment, but a million moments that come together over a long period of time to create this painting.
😀Summary: Madlads contains a rich background story. Imagine that you found a lost civilization in the desert, imagine that you became a razor gang after the end of World War I and "killed everyone" in the Birmingham area, imagine that you "killed everyone" in revenge. The collective creativity converged in addition to this wonderful painting of madlads.
(PS: I understand that the collapse of FTX is the end of World War I. Solana is in chaos. Madlads is the story of the Razor Party redeeming the reputation and revenge for the excellent blockchain Solana)
6. Host: Switching from a wallet to an NFT project is a pretty ambitious and bold move. Now that you have established very loyal and very active relationships, as well as a high purchasing power consumer base in your community, why did you decide that now is the time to build a fully compliant centralized exchange for your community?
More or less, it is my belief that most projects in this space will eventually fall into decentralization.
On one hand, I think people are going to be completely decentralized, these are the uniswaps of the world, really representing the best of what the industry has to offer. Whether it's immutable smart contracts or really novel incentive mechanisms that are able to coordinate people from all over the world with no single point of control. There's no vulnerable central point of failure, it's censorship-resistant, and it's decentralized in the truest sense of the word. I think that's a lot of the original spirit of this space.
There is another aspect: basically wherever there is traditional finance, wherever there is a compliance team, there are rules and regulations. This regulatory infrastructure supports most of the financial systems in the countries and regions where you serve users, and it is also a very important component.
I think one of the big challenges in the industry is that a lot of people have been in this awkward middle ground. They talk about decentralization, but they're not actually decentralized. They're actually very fragile.
I think at the limit or the end state, you really have to be at these two extremes. For us, wallets are one extreme. And centralized exchanges are the other extreme. Where a wallet is just a piece of code that you run on a client on your computer. That's the epitome of free speech. No one controls your destiny except you.
While an exchange is indeed a traditional financial institution, it must abide by all the rules and regulations that any other compliant exchange must abide by.
But because of that, you get access to a lot of traditional assets and value. I think that's probably going to be a very interesting part of the conversation in terms of what the exchanges actually unlock. But I think that's the unresolved philosophy that's leading us into this space.
😀Summary: This field should not be in the middle, but must choose decentralization or centralization. Both are Backpack's choices, but this extreme will successfully form an indescribable unified beauty in Backpack.
7. Moderator: Can you share some data about Backpack Exchange so far? Your scale expansion is impressive. Where is Backpack now? What milestones have you achieved so far?
We launched spot-only exchanges on Solana, ETH, and BTC. So far, we have basically caught up with the wave of Solana from $8 to $200. We saw a lot of high-quality tokens launched and listed them: W, PYTH, DRIFT, TNSR. I think most of the impressive teams on the Solana network are around the same time as Backpack launched, which is a good fit.
So I think we're very fortunate to be able to ride this wave with these tokens. We've had $60 billion in transactions to date from people all over the world. That's probably the biggest metric.
😀Summary: The launch of a large number of high-quality tokens and the launch of Backpack have inexplicably united to form a terrible synergy, which has promoted the development of Solana ecology and web3. Backpack is very lucky to be able to work with so many high-quality projects to promote the progress of the crypto market.
8. Moderator: As we end the panel discussion, what does the Korean market mean to you? Why is the Korean market important to Backpack as an exchange, community, etc.?
I think Korea is obviously known for a lot of really creative culture. Before we went on stage, we talked about all the arts events and festivals and performances and a lot of the culture in Korea.
I think if you think about Backpack and Madlads the heart and soul of the brand is also really rooted in cultural elements that are very unique to our wallet and exchange.
The cultural attributes of Backpack have a lot in common with Korea's well-known creative culture.
😀Summary: Backpack attaches great importance to the Korean market. The cultural core contained in both will be the best motivation for Backpack to overcome difficulties in Korea.
