Author: Princess Christine (@0xsexybanana)
There are actually two methodologies for grooming :
The first approach, in my opinion, is Lao Dong's style: cast a wide net and focus on execution. Essentially, it's a labor-intensive studio logic: as long as the cost per order is low enough, they'll try to get their hands on any project. This model has an extremely high margin for error; if they happen to stumble upon a super-rich player, it can cover all the sunk costs of being cheated out of their money.
Secondly, my approach is similar to Xu Xin's "sniper strategy" at Capital Today—heavy investment research and deep involvement. Through logical screening, I eliminate speculative investments from my portfolio early on. (This is why I say that investments I'm optimistic about may not succeed, while investments I'm pessimistic about are definitely not going to succeed; my project research checklist can eliminate most potential pitfalls.)
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So what is this checker list? It has four dimensions:
1. Team (People): Sufficient intelligence, strong execution ability, and kindness are all essential. None can be lacking.
How to judge: Use the founder's tweets to determine if they are a truly brilliant person or just a hired front-line coin touting their token launch. Meet them in person to see if they are humble and nice enough. Many founders' tweets are empty, consisting only of slogans, lacking any insight into their industry.
For most people who engage in promotional activities, it's quite difficult to get in touch with the project teams. Even for KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders), if they do meet with project teams offline, it's hard to assess their true character because the teams often wear social masks.
2. Product (Location):
There are three dimensions here: 1) The product itself has Product-Product-Factory (PMF). 2) The team delivers the product effectively. 3) The team has a responsible attitude towards their product.
How do you judge this? They never release subpar product versions; they have product aspirations. Look at OKX; whether delivering an early-stage or mature product, they never hand over a product riddled with basic errors to users.
3. Narrative (Location): It is in a relatively new and unproven track, and enjoys a very high valuation premium.
How do you judge this? You need to assess whether this narrative has room for hype in Web3 and whether it is a hot investment area in Web2—the hype logic of these two is often in sync.
This is why I heavily invested in Openmind last year: the AI + robotics sector was a trillion-dollar darling in Web2, and that hasn't been disproven in Web3 either. (Although it later suffered an epic reversal, with airdrops going to nothing, that's a black swan event of another dimension, which I won't go into detail about now.)
4. Time and Cost (Days):
Is market sentiment extremely FOMO or extremely pessimistic? Is the cost of participation low or high?
How do you identify FOMO (Fear of Monetary Demand)? When Twitter is flooded with FOMO bloggers urging you to participate, and everyone is bullish on the next big opportunity, but the cost of participation is high, you'll hesitate.
If you're hesitant, it's best not to participate.
In today's crypto, when everyone is participating in an opportunity, it's no longer a great opportunity for arbitrage. The profit pool of this 1.5-tier market simply can't support such a large volume. Even if it's a good project, if everyone participates, big profits become small profits, small profits become nothing, and nothing becomes a huge loss.
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So now, based on this checker, why didn't I focus on working on backpacks?
1. Narrative Logic: False Needs and Compliance Constraints
I've said on Twitter before that I'm not optimistic about the narrative of "compliant centralized exchanges." Why did Hyperliquid succeed? A large part of its growth came from users' needs for tax avoidance and censorship resistance. Under increasingly stringent compliance frameworks, facing extremely mature giants like Binance and OKX, where is Backpack 's competitive advantage? Where will its new users come from? Why do users choose Backpack's Unique Selling Point over Gate and Matcha? I still don't understand it.
2) Product: Lack of respect for product delivery
I've rarely seen an exchange with such a dismal technical infrastructure as Backpack. Countless outages and rollbacks in six months, along with multiple large-scale user compensations. Every new feature release feels rushed and perfunctory. A team responsible to its users should release even the simplest feature smoothly and completely, not a poorly made, half-finished product.
In contrast, even in its very early days with only 2,000 followers, Hyperliquid had virtually no visible bugs (its only drawback at the time was poor liquidity, which was jokingly referred to as Hyperliquidated).
In early 2024, a friend dragged me to work on Backpack. I remember clearly that Backpack was so rudimentary back then that it only had trading pairs for BTC and SOL. But instead of refining the product and expanding the range of tokens, they started aggressively recruiting people by using the gimmick of "airdropping SOL tokens to boost trading volume." This typical "growth before product development" approach exposed the management's extreme lack of operational experience and systematic strategy; they were a complete charlatan.
These small observations made me very disillusioned with Backpack, and I consistently refused to participate in his airdrop farming.
3) Time and cost: extremely high.
Starting in 2025, some zero-fee perks began to become popular. Around the same time, Backpack launched its Season 3. Compared to the zero-fee Lighter, I've never understood why Backpack, with its 0.5u cost for grinding, was so attractive. So even though all my friends who were grinding were doing Season 3, I chose to avoid the competition.
Later, with BN's dominance and its exclusive support for Meme tokens on BSC (around the time when Chinese tickers like "Binance Life" became wildly popular), I observed a growing distance between the Sol Foundation and Binance, and the Foundation seemed to feel some sense of crisis. I speculated that the Sol group might support its own CEX to counter Binance's monopoly. Therefore, I chose to OTC-buy 100,000 tokens at 0.3. This OTC action was a small bet on whether the Sol group would aggressively replicate BNP Paribas. However, it seems that they didn't.
4) Team
I lack close observation and understanding of the BP team, so I won't comment further.
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My attitude towards Backpack has always been relatively objective. Running an exchange is different from running memes for shill. Exchanges require excellent underlying technology and operational capabilities, which Backpack clearly lacks. They cannot deliver good products, nor do they have the product operation capabilities to run features effectively (such as the previously touted prediction market). What's even worse is that they are heavily focused on compliance, putting shackles on their own growth before they have even matured.
Therefore, I currently view Backpack as a meme coin disguised as VC coin. As a platform coin, I don't think 200 million FDV is expensive (I'm holding for now). Of course, this is just secondary market speculation and has nothing to do with profiting from it.
