On March 27, 2026, the Backpack team faced a series of controversies surrounding the BP token TGE that were brought to the forefront. The token generation event was supposed to be a key milestone in the project's development, yet during the launch window, it was magnified by the community into a collective interrogation about allocation fairness and governance transparency. Three conflicting lines of inquiry simultaneously erupted around the TGE: whether the team was cashing out through OTC trading, what core rights should early users of Mad Lads enjoy, and whether the witch attack detection mistakenly harmed real participants.

Under public pressure, founder Armani Ferrante took to social media to respond point by point, denying OTC fake news, explaining the VIP rights of Mad Lads, and committing to reviewing the witch determination cases, attempting to reframe the narrative: this is not a simple "token issuance scandal," but rather a value declaration about "long-term builders first" and the fair order of TGE. The questions followed: why did a token generation event rapidly evolve into a test of community trust in the project team?

OTC cashing out accusations: Founder denies amidst information vacuum

The first round of sharp questioning surrounding the BP TGE pointed to "whether the team was cashing out through OTC trading during the sensitive period." The community's main doubts stemmed from piecing together on-chain fund flows and secondary market shifts. Once sensationalized on social media, it was packaged into a "insiders dumping at high levels" narrative—especially during the window of TGE, when liquidity and sentiment were most fragile.

In response, Armani publicly stated on March 27 that the "OTC cashing out accusation" was completely false news and emphasized through media that the team had not sold off assets outside the market. According to sources like Jinse Finance and Planet Daily, this denial was clearly recorded, becoming one of the few parts in this round of controversy that showed a "very clear stance." However, the denial alone was not enough to quell all suspicions—especially in the absence of more detailed data disaggregation.

The TGE is a moment when funds, chips, and expectations converge intensely; any rumor about the flow of funds easily amplifies the market's distrust towards "insider advantages." Especially when the official tokenomics specific allocation ratios have not been fully disclosed, the community can only fill in narrative gaps based on fragmented information: how many chips does the team hold? Are there low-price chips circulating quietly? This space for imagination expands rapidly under insufficient transparency.

From the project perspective, a single clarification is not enough to reduce this space for imagination. More constructive approaches include: within the allowed scope, synchronously disclosing team-related addresses, unlocking schedules, and trading constraints during this period, using verifiable on-chain data to clarify "what has not been done"; during critical TGE periods, enhancing regular explanations of fund and chip changes rather than waiting to respond passively after public sentiment has ignited. For Web3 projects, technically “on-chain verifiable” is one thing; being understood and trusted in narrative practice is another.

Expectations and Discrepancies of Mad Lads' Old Players

To understand the complexity of this storm, one must return to Mad Lads itself. As one of the most symbolic NFT IPs within the Backpack ecosystem, Mad Lads is not just a badge of identity for the early community; it is also evidence of many old users' long-term participation and accompaniment in the project's growth. Within the BP token TGE narrative, it is inherently viewed as a bridge for value continuity—old players hope this "old ticket" can continue to play a role in the new token system.

According to information compiled by Rhythm and PANews, Backpack officials clearly stated: Old users holding Mad Lads prior to the TGE will retain VIP rights. This statement aimed to address the old community's sentiment of "not wanting to be forgotten," trying to fulfill promises with ongoing rights instead of a one-off airdrop. However, the specific forms and value densities of these rights have not been fully disclosed in public information, leaving the market to speculate on future privileges and benefits from vague labels like "VIP."

Within the community, discussions about Mad Lads' rights quickly bifurcated into two tense expectations. Some were concerned about “whether rights are overly concentrated”—if VIP rights are tied to a small number of NFT holders, could this reproduce the "old money dominance" structure in the new token narrative, further widening the treatment gap between new and old users? Others focused on “whether rewards are reasonable”—based on past contributions and risk-taking, do Mad Lads holders receive sufficient returns reflecting their "historical cost" and "emotional cost"? These emotional data points were marked as unverified in briefings, but it is certain that a gap in expectations undeniably exists.

This case reflects a broader issue: how old NFT users should be treated in the long term as Web3 projects evolve from NFTs to token economies. If a one-time airdrop is used as a solution, it may condense years of participation into a short-term gain, after which the relationship quickly returns to zero; if long-term VIP rights are emphasized, it would require continued fulfillment across multiple dimensions such as tokenomics, product permissions, and revenue sharing, testing the project’s execution capability and cash flow resilience over many years. Mad Lads is just a typical sample, representing the issue of how to build sustainable contracts between old NFT users and the new token system.

Witch Review Reboot: Between Anti-Cheat Measures and Misfires

Besides funds and rights, witch attack detection became the third main point of controversy during the BP TGE. Like nearly all major airdrops and TGEs, Backpack introduced a witch detection mechanism to identify and filter "cheating" behaviors such as batch addresses and volume manipulation. But similar to other projects, once the list was established, questions arose rapidly around "whether determinations were accurate" and "whether real users were mistakenly flagged."

According to Foresight reports, in response to these doubts, the team has publicly committed to: re-reviewing witch attack determinations, suggesting that some addresses previously classified as witches could be overturned or corrected. Although specific technical standards and threshold indicators were missing in the briefing and were clearly marked as forbidden to fabricate, the very fact of "re-reviewing" indicates that the team internally is not entirely confident in the completeness and fairness of existing determinations, and there is still room for optimization.

From a longer-term perspective, witch detection has become a common technical challenge in Web3 airdrop allocations. Algorithms and rules are often designed to be "black and white" to improve efficiency and reduce gray areas, yet they struggle to cover the diverse and complex user behaviors in reality—such as shared home network environments or the same person managing multiple wallets without malicious volume manipulation, etc. This "technical binary classification," once combined with highly emotional allocation results, can easily evolve into a standoff that neither side finds satisfactory: those deemed witches feel wronged, while the project team fears that relaxing standards may be exploited by real witches.

To find a more trusted balance between preventing witch attacks and not misjudging real users, process design needs to shift from "one-way judgments" to "dialogue-based procedural justice." This includes but is not limited to: more clearly publicly specifying the broad logic of witch identification and behaviors that easily cross the line prior to the TGE, giving users opportunities for self-check and adjustment; after determination results are published, establishing transparent appeal windows and work order mechanisms, providing listed users with a verifiable feedback path; where possible, through third-party audits or open-sourcing some rules, ensuring "who calls the shots" is no longer solely a unilateral decision by the project team. Backpack's commitment to re-examination reserves room for such improvements; the key lies in how it will be implemented next.

Long-term Builders First: Value Declaration and Reality Game

On the other side of the controversy, Backpack also tried to reshape the value narrative through public statements. Reports indicated that officials stressed “prioritizing long-term builders over short-term speculators” (this phrasing was marked in briefings as unverified), attempting to find moral and strategic legitimacy for the allocation and locking logic of BP tokens: tokens are not intended to generate short-term wealth effects, but to gather resources and governance rights for ecological construction in the coming years.

In contrast to this narrative, the demands of short-term participants have continuously existed during the TGE phase. For many users, the core motivation for participating in the TGE lies in the immediate price performance and liquidity of tokens once they go live—they are more concerned about "when can transactions happen," "what is the unlocking rhythm," and "how deep will initial price retracement be," which creates inherent tension with the project team's desire to filter out those truly willing to contribute long-term through shares, lock-ups, and rights binding.

From a token design perspective, what Backpack aims to do is to bind "long-term contributions" with "ecological construction" through TGE rules: for example, allowing certain key roles to gain more lasting governance or revenue sharing rights; using lock-up structures and incentive mechanisms to guide users' attention from short-term prices to product usage and development support. However, in the real market environment, this idealized design will continually face reality checks—especially when overall market conditions are volatile, the friction between “long-termism” and “fund withdrawal pressure” will be significantly amplified.

This is also why the "builders first" narrative struggles to be easily implemented amidst bull-bear cycles and financial contests: in a bear market, builders willing to invest long-term are already scarce, and projects need attractive incentives to retain them; in a bull market, the influx of short-term capital will constantly impact token prices and narrative rhythms, translating every technical adjustment or announcement into "positive/negative" short-term signals. In such a cycle, "prioritizing long-term builders" appears more like a practice that requires long-term fulfillment than a one-time public relations slogan.

TGE Trust Crisis Chains: Backpack is Not an Isolated Case

Taking a broader perspective beyond Backpack, we can see a more widespread context: several projects have recently experienced trust crises within their communities due to token allocation issues following their TGEs. Regardless of the track or chain variations, the keywords of controversy are often highly similar—“information opacity,” “expectation gap,” “insider advantages,” “witch misfire.” The BP incident is just the latest link in this chain but not an isolated example.

In comparison, Backpack shares obvious commonalities with other projects in terms of “allocation fairness” and “disclosure of key information”. On one hand, the specific allocation ratios of tokens, the chip situations of the team and early investors, as well as the scale and rules of airdrops are often only disclosed in summary format, leaving the community with a large interpretive space; on the other hand, operations like witch detection, list adjustments, and quota corrections during the TGE process are usually completed intensively within high-pressure time windows, making it difficult for outsiders to track the logic in real-time, only able to piece together the whole picture afterwards through scattered announcements and community leaks.

In these types of storms, witch detection, rewards for old users, and team chips have become three repeatedly high-risk conflict points:

● Witch detection, once questioned as "algorithmically crude" or "rules unclear," quickly evolves into a conspiracy narrative that "the project team is trying to save money";

● Rewards for old users, if regarded as "disproportionate" or mismatched with historical contributions, can easily harm the most staunch early supporters, turning them into the most vocal critics;

● Team chips, as long as there is a lack of detailed disclosure, cannot escape suspicions of "insider high-level cashing out," even if actual operations do not cross the line, the emotional layer remains difficult to soothe.

Under the current mainstream TGE model, the game structure between project teams and communities is becoming more strained: while projects aim to balance between different participants through flexible mechanisms, communities tend to view all allocation behaviors through a "zero-trust" framework, seeing any opacity as a potential risk. The result of lacking middle ground is that both sides exhaust the trust stock in high-pressure confrontation—one TGE is no longer just about distributing tokens but rather a political moment about “who is in power, who benefits, and who pays the price.”

The Price of Transparency: Corrections the Backpack Incident Can Bring

Returning to Backpack itself, the controversy surrounding the BP TGE also presents a complex duality: on one hand, the team swiftly responded, with Armani publicly denying OTC cashing out "fake news", and clearly stating that they would re-examine witch determination cases while emphasizing that old users of Mad Lads would retain VIP rights—these are all positive actions under high-pressure public opinion; on the other hand, key issues such as detailed token distribution, specific standards of witch detection, and details of VIP rights still have considerable "gray areas," leaving the outside world to infer from fragmented information.

If Backpack wishes to genuinely turn this incident into an opportunity for trust rebuilding, the next improvement directions could be more actionable. For example, with regard to witch re-examinations, clarifying timelines and handling processes, publicly disclosing the broad logical criteria for re-examination, and providing statistical results, rather than relying primarily on individual case feedback; regarding data disclosure, creating continuously updated dashboards around team addresses, lock-up arrangements, and major chip flows, rather than one-off PDFs or tweets; and regarding the appeal mechanism, building transparent appeal entry points and handling queues to let misjudged or doubtful users see a traceable process instead of merely "shouting for replies" on social media.

From a more macro perspective, to rebuild trust in future TGEs, project parties need to upgrade in three dimensions: on rule expectations, locking key rules with simple, detailed language as much as possible before issuing tokens, providing examples for edge cases to reduce "post-event change" space; on real-time communication, establishing dedicated information channels during the high-pressure TGE period to respond promptly to key rumors and technical anomalies, rather than waiting for sentiments to finish secondary transmission before clarifying; on verifiable processes, as much as possible modularize and audit the allocation logic, detection rules, and list adjustment processes, allowing "trust the team" to gradually transform into "trust the processes and data."

The BP incident serves as a lesson for subsequent Web3 projects: TGE has evolved from a purely technical and financial event into a concentrated reflection of governance and community participation models. How project teams view old users, how they handle the boundaries of cheating and misfires, and how they insist on long-term construction narratives amid short-term financial games will all be scrutinized during these crucial days. The "price of transparency" that Backpack has paid will also become a reference for future projects—whether to choose to repeatedly test and make mistakes in the same pitfalls or to take this opportunity to correct rules and reconstruct trust will determine who can truly treat the community as collaborators rather than just a source of liquidity in the next cycle.

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