I didn't come into crypto 9 years ago to launch a shit coin.
I didn't come into crypto to get rich quick.
I came into crypto because I believe it's going to change the world, and that the industry was something worth dedicating my life to.
But somewhere along the way, amidst the booms, the busts, the moonshots, the decentralization theater, and the straight up scams, we lost our way.
I don't know about you, but I'm just tired of false promises. And that's what most things are today, simply promises. We live in the most centralized era crypto has ever experienced, and the more centralized something is, the less meaningful a token is.
While it's tempting to want to commit to these same promises, what happens if the team gets acquired? What happens if we want to re-invest into growth? What happens if we divert our time, energy, and resources out of band and circumvent the token altogether? What happens when the team and investors unlock? For many projects, the honest answer to these questions is not pleasant, and you see it in the price chart over and over again.
Unless something is completely decentralized to the point where an immutable protocol can function with the team having retired in the Bahamas sipping pina coladas all day, then utility is just a promise. Often that promise is admirable and well intentioned--but ultimately an unenforceable promise nonetheless. Outside of BTC, ETH, SOL, and a few others, nothing really passes this test. Noble new token models have emerged to solve this problem (shout out to MetaDAO), and today, we introduce our own.
Users that stake the Backpack token for at least a year will have the opportunity to exchange those tokens for equity at a fixed ratio--20% of the company today.
It's such a simple idea, but as far as I'm aware, this is the first time a user has been able to earn the equity of a company by just using the product. So obvious in hindsight, and something I hope others start to adopt as they march on their path to progressive decentralization--both in crypto and outside of the industry.
We have a lot more utility coming, things we'll share over the coming weeks, months, and year. As the Backpack community grows, we will decentralize the token, offering new things over time, some centralized like our equity offering, some decentralized as our product evolves. In the limit, I expect the token to represent more than anything a single company has to offer, but in the short run, it's the best we can do to show our long term commitment to our users.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I can't promise anything. The only thing I can promise is commitment.
We go big or we go home--together, actually together.
Waking up to see this post, I'm a exhausted, disappointed, and heart broken to see it go viral and to see the responses.
No one cares about our users more than our team, and if you take the time to actually read our Discord and my tweets over the past day, I hope you'll see that. The team has spent the past 24 hours all hands on deck to make sure every single user story has been accounted for.
I don't have a crisis management team for this post. I honestly am shocked by it, given how much of a disconnect there is between how we actually feel, our actions, and the sentiment of the tweet. All I can do here is to give as much information as I can and to let the reader infer the truth.
As most of our long time users know, we often make mistakes, but we always do the right thing. This post appears to have taken a reply to a question out of context, where I'm explaining why something happened at a technical level. It doesn't mention our policy, our response, or what we're actually doing after yesterday's massive liquidation cascade.
The truth is that
- We paid out each and every trader *yesterday* immediately and automatically without issue. This has never been an issue.
- If you read our Discord announcements, you'll see that there has been zero clawbacks and zero socialized losses.
- We published our daily proof of reserves yesterday and the exchange has been operating uninterrupted since yesterday (although certainly with plenty of hiccups along the way)
- However, liquidity dropped off significantly when the market collapsed, causing a cascade of liquidations and ADLs on Backpack and every other exchange.
- As you can imagine, due to the massive liquidations, there are a lot of questions about what happened, e.g., what's auto deleveraging?
- This quoted screenshot and the associated tweet is completely taken out of context and doesn't communicate what is actually happening.
The screenshot, in truth, is a somewhat technical reply illustrating *how* futures profits and losses work. It is *not* a policy choice in response to any incident. It's explaining *why* something happened.
For those that don't have the context, here are the details:
- Firstly, Backpack is a completely neutral party. The exchange doesn't take on positions for users. We don't provide liquidity ourselves. The whole system works without reliance on any priviledged trader, vault, or any other party. In essence, it's infrastructure acting as a peer to peer match making service/exchange between longs and shorts, winners and loser.
- Every long has a short. This is a fundamental invariant of any perpetual futures system.
- When positions are closed, there is a settlement process, where profits and losses are exchanged between longs and shorts, winners and losers. Profits for perps are not printed out of thin air. It is not taken directly from our wallets either. Settlement is an intermediate step to realize the PnL.
- Winners on perps earn profits from losers. It's zero sum. That PnL is always conserved between the two parties on any given trade. Your counter party is the person on the other side of the exchange. When you profit on a perp, the losses are paid out directly from losers. If the losers run out of money, e.g., due to going bankrupt, then there's no money for the winners to realize their profits.
What happened yesterday, and what this quoted post is referring to, is that some of the losers went bankrupt and as a result their accounts were stuck in this "settlement" step. As a result, when those losing positions deposited into the exchange, the settlement process was able to automatically complete and the winners were automatically paid.
The issue: a small amount of these bankrupt users deposited into the exchange *before* we settled all accounts on the exchange on behalf of user. What the quoted post fails to mention is that we did this already, yesterday, before we published our daily proof of reserves, and we did this without question because it's simply the right thing to do.
Make no mistake: all positions have been settled without question across the board. We did not touch a single penny of unrealized PnL from our users and will never do so.
Going back to the topic of settlement mechanics. Settlement is not some horrible decision we made where we decided that we would take money from users after yesterday's event. It's a fundamental part of how the peer to peer system works: Loser pay winners directly. The exchange itself is not the counter party for a trade. The counter party is the person on the other side of the trade when you open a long or a short.
As a result, there's never a run on the bank risk. That's one of the many reasons why we are so comfortable publishing proof of reserves every single day, even on a historic liquidation day like yesterday. Even if the whole system were to blow up, the losses, contagion, and risk is isolated between all the longs/shorts, winners/losers. Anyone holding spot with no leverage is unaffected. This is a relatively technical point but it's an important one. We put an enormous amount of work into designing a system robust to these types of situations. Risk isn't an after thought, it's a core part of how the whole system is built.
To any user that deposited while their account was being settled--or to anyone that was unexpectedly affected for any reason--they should please email [email protected] and give us any and all information so that we can help. We are also present in Discord to answer questions. We do our absolute best to be available there all day every day, although in this case email is a lot easier for us to stay organized to move as quickly as possible.
In any case, I hope this clarifies the below quoted tweet, and what is actually happening. Honestly, we try to be some of the most approachable people we can. There's no question we don't answer. There's no PR crisis management team, here. We just do the right thing and hope that is good enough for the world.
We've put our heart and souls into our product, users, and community, and we will continue to do so.
Thank you for reading.