tun.btc

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.

In the Backpack tokenomics, we have one guiding principle. - Insiders "dumping on retail" should be impossible: no founder, executive, employee, or venture investor should receive wealth from the token until the product hits escape velocity. Of course it begs the question, what does it mean to "hit escape velocity". Every project is different, and it's impossible to generalize. For Backpack, the answer is clear: we want to IPO in the USA. Going public might happen quickly, it might happen not so quickly, and in fact, it might not happen at all. In any case, we're going for it. But before going public, we have to grow--a lot. The odd thing about Backpack's growth over the past year--and in fact one of the things that makes Backpack so different from basically every token project in crypto--is that, today, Backpack Exchange only serves about 48% of the world. We've been very slow, very intentional about opening up our product to the world, ensuring that we have every "i" dotted and ever "t" crossed as a regulated financial institution. Growth that sometimes feels like running with a parachute, but we are happy to take the long path, because it's precisely that parachute that will allow us to fly. For those that don't know us, the reason for this is simple. Backpack is trying to not only build great crypto products, but we're also trying to build great TradFi products. We're trying to not only give our users access to every crypto asset, every blockchain, and every decentralized application, but we're also getting banking rails around the world, USD client money accounts in the USA, EUR in the EU, JPY in Japan--every currency on every major payment network you can imagine. We're trying to build a great securities product, whether that's getting access to your favorite stocks in a traditional brokerage or bidding on primary shares of a company about to go public on NASDAQ. We want to serve not only retail users worldwide, but we want to serve regulated products for regulated counterparties and regulated institutions around the world. All of this takes an enormous amount of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears. We've been working on this for over three years at this point, laying an international foundation for the company and for the product slowly but surely, brick by brick. If we're lucky, we'll spend a lifetime. What this all means is that, in the most literal sense--and I know this sounds silly--we're just getting started. We still have half the world to open up into. We still have some of our most exciting products to launch. And this leads to our next guiding principle in our tokenomics. - Liquid tokens should exclusively go to users, fueling growth triggered by key product milestones. Every time we open up a new region, every time we launch a new product, that's an opportunity to grow. Open up EU => grow. Open up Japan => grow. Open up the USA => grow. Open up predictions => grow. Open up stocks => grow. Open up card => grow. Like gasoline onto a fire, the token serves to continuously kickstart new markets in the same way points kickstarted Seasons 1-4. With every growth lever we pull, tokens unlock in a predictable way to users, bringing in a new wave of token holders, growing the community, and allowing the product to soar to new heights. The objective constraint for this to work is precise: the value of added growth created by new token unlocks must always be greater than the dilution of those unlocks. As long as that condition holds, we can continue to unlock tokens direct to our most active users, growing along the way. Last but not least is the question: Ok so if all the liquid tokens are going to users, then what about the team? How exactly do you remain incentive aligned while ensuring the team cannot unlock, dump on retail, and become enormously wealthy without building something great? And the answer is simple: not a single founder, executive, team member, or venture investor has been given a direct token allocation. The entire "team allocation" sits in a "corporate treasury", i.e. on the balance sheet of the Backpack company--locked until at least one year post IPO. The team owns equity in the company, and the company owns a large percent of the token supply. It's not until the company goes public (or has some other type of equity exit event), that the team can earn any wealth from the project. It's not until the company has access to the largest, most liquid capital markets in the world by going public--and it's not until the company has done all the hard work to earn access to those markets--that the team can reap the rewards of the value created by the Backpack community from now until then. We either go big, or we go home.

25% on day one. As we approach TGE, we'll be releasing our tokenomics, one step at a time. It's unclear if "token" will even be the right way to describe our TGE. It'll be a token in form, but everything about it will be different from the status quo. The distribution will be different. The utility will be different. Even the functionality will be different. In fact, it'll be so different that it probably warrants a new name, a topic for another day. Today, we only serve about ~48% of the world. Over the next year, we'll be opening up Backpack to the rest of the world, releasing new products, and expanding the community along the way. To be definitively clear with no exception: There has never been a sale of a single Backpack token, and the entire supply will go towards growing Backpack into one of the largest financial institutions in the world. We've come a long way, and we have an even longer way to go. LFG