Written by: Haotian

How to view the recently discussed @Backpack wallet? Exchange? NFT community? You see, many people will have a kind of confusion about how to position BP when they first get to know it. In my opinion, it is a "super app" that integrates NFT, wallet, and compliant exchange, and can even be understood as a "closed-loop ecosystem" for users to develop through xNFT protocol DApp mini programs + wallet exchanges. Why? Next, let me briefly talk about my understanding.

What is Backpack actually laying out?

If you don't see the whole picture of what Backpack is doing, it's easy to be led into a fragmented understanding. Some people are fond of the NFT community culture of Madlads, some like the smooth interactive experience of the Backpack wallet, and some are optimistic about its integrated on-chain + off-chain trading new paradigm. How to put it? These are all typical characteristics of BP. Compared with the liquidity market that is completely separated and connected by composable transactions in the current blockchain ecosystem, what BP does always gives people a feeling of a closed-loop ecosystem like Apple's.

In fact, in a completely open-source blockchain protocol combination market, doing closed-loop things always seems somewhat unique. But in the long run, has there been a loser in the competition and battle between Android and IOS? A closed-loop ecosystem based on community attributes will have a long process of popularization through different product lines. The closed product line is backed by strong community cohesion, leading product user experience, and strong resource integration capabilities, which will form a combined force at some point in time and become a competitive barrier that others cannot surpass. There was "Apple" in the past, and now there is "Xiaomi", both are making such business layouts.

2) At the current stage, the entire product line of Backpack has a clear imprint of the Solana ecosystem, which means its development will also be heavily tied to the Solana ecosystem. In a sense, Backpack has built a set of native wallet + exchange for the Solana ecosystem, as well as a set of xNFT mini-program DApp application market.

In the short term, Backpack's advantages and disadvantages in competition with other products and protocols in the entire blockchain environment are obvious. For example, compared with general CEX, Backpack cannot timely cover the entire blockchain ecosystem to attract a wide range of users with various listing advantages. However, undoubtedly, some projects with obvious Solana genes can ferment and grow in Backpack, and users who have early and heavy participation in the Solana ecosystem will also receive greater expected market returns.

What challenges and difficulties does Backpack face?

Precisely because of this, Backpack will inevitably encounter certain resistance in the process of expanding the market, and the airdrop distribution event is a typical example. Objectively speaking, due to compliance factors, Backpack selects high-quality projects to distribute airdrops to users who contribute to trading volume. This is a long-term incentive and gain behavior. In the long run, as a user of BP, you will definitely have good returns. For users, it is equivalent to earning a stable "high annualized return" on a certain exchange. However, as mentioned above, user benefits are the secondary distribution of platform resources, and the intensity of user participation, capital investment, and most importantly, the expected release of chips by the project party all need to be coordinated by the platform. It's okay to extend the period and consider the comprehensive returns, but it's very difficult if it only focuses on a single instance of trading volume and airdrop returns. Moreover, if not handled properly, it will definitely face public opinion backlash.

Why is this happening?

Essentially, Backpack is a platform that accumulates and integrates resources, attracting high-quality project parties to distribute airdrops, and then attracting high-quality users to drive growth. This will be a long-term dynamic and constant trade-off process. The platform cannot guarantee that every operation can guarantee absolute returns for users every time. After all, it is the project party that distributes the chips, the total amount of airdrops is constant, and the number of users and the amount of funds participating in the airdrop activity are uncontrollable. When there are too many participants, the porridge will definitely be less, a very simple truth.

Essentially, this is an incentive process for chip distribution, and the platform is based on the goal of attracting new users and increasing activity and achieving user participation and retention. Avoiding being "anti-lured" is actually a technical activity. Instead of taking a short-term mindset to bear the risk of loss for excessive arbitrage returns, it is better to extend the period and calculate the return rate from a longer time dimension. On the one hand, the platform has top-level resource advantages (Pyth, W, etc.) obtained through resource premium for airdrop benefits, and on the other hand, after all, the platform's own growth expectations (issuing coins) are also a "compensation" benefit that will land at some point in the future.

How to define the industry value of Backpack?

I tend to view Backpack as a "super app" derived from the high-performance layer1 public chain based on @solana.

In the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems, everyone is talking about the story of layer2 infra, and the story of applications has been delayed to at least the next bull-bear cycle due to the slow landing. In contrast, the Solana ecosystem has a big difference. Around the high-performance public chain, it plays with MeMe to attract off-chain incremental users, plans the super narrative of DePIN to lay the foundation for future application landing, and in the process, it has also spawned a large number of diverse gameplay such as DeFi, Games, NFT, Payment, and other applications. There is a feeling that the Solana ecosystem has been developing with the genes of web2+web3 from the beginning, so the development of "applications" is a problem that cannot be avoided and will become the main theme of the current bull market in the Solana ecosystem.

At the current stage, almost every blockchain system faces the objective factor that telling the story of B-side has greater imagination space than C-side applications. So when everyone is enthusiastic about layer2 and other infra, the Solana ecosystem has grown a "super app" paradigm that integrates NFT, wallet, and compliant exchange. NFT does community culture and stickiness, the wallet serves as the user participation entrance and DApp application distribution center, and the compliant exchange serves as the compliance channel for onboarding and connecting with the real world.

In the current blockchain ecosystem, which is criticized for having an overly financial hype attribute, the "super app" paradigm of Backpack seems to be inputting a mature product line growth model from web2 into the web3 environment. It has a certain leading significance for the landing of application ecology and the popularization of mature web2 product philosophy.

Above

Based on the above observations, it is not difficult to understand some of the problems that BackPack is currently facing:

1) The excessive community attribute is both an advantage and a drawback for large-scale expansion of the user base. A large part of the early users who did not participate in the community, including myself, will be passively brought into the community.

2) Being too focused on compliance is the foundation for its future growth, but it also limits the diversity in early products and models, requiring continuous long-term growth drivers.

3) The "super app" is always a good story, but when can the entire crypto industry move away from infra and focus more on the story of applications? This is not just a challenge faced by the Solana ecosystem, but all builders in the entire crypto ecosystem are working towards this.

I have often said that Solana, as a high-performance layer1, is in a "forward" form of a leading public chain in advancing the progress of Crypto infra architecture. It seems that now I need to add a footnote to this judgment. The DApp mini-program under the xNFT protocol and the integrated closed-loop system of the Backpack software are also "forward" leading the integration of web2 and web3 applications.

Note: Many people are interested in Backpack because of its growth expectations as "FTX 2.0", and they all want to know what kind of development height a project with FTX genes and equivalent background, and can learn from the lessons and "start again", will achieve. Let's wait and see.

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