Between Promise and Extraction: The Backpack Airdrop and the Illusion of Web3

Between Promise and Extraction: The Backpack Airdrop and the Illusion of Web3

Introduction

It seems the time has passed when airdrops were seen as one of the fairest mechanisms of participation in Web3. A form of redistribution, almost a political gesture: rewarding early users, decentralizing ownership, creating a sense of belonging.

But like any incentive-based mechanism, airdrops have not remained intact.

What once appeared to be an instrument of alignment between users and protocols now often operates as a system for capturing attention, capital, and behavior. The recent case of Backpack makes this transformation clear, and may mark yet another turning point in how Web3 relates to its own users.

The Construction of Expectation: Origins and Context

Backpack did not emerge out of nowhere. Developed by Coral, the platform carries a relevant technical legacy within the Solana ecosystem.

Initially proposed as an innovative wallet, it introduced the concept of xNFTs — executable applications embedded within the wallet itself — repositioning the wallet as a kind of Web3 operating system.

With the launch of Backpack Exchange, the project expanded its ambition: not only to custody assets, but also to intermediate markets. This move gained traction within a specific context, the vacuum left by the collapse of FTX, which destabilized a significant portion of Solana’s infrastructure.

In this scenario, Backpack was not just another product. It was a promise: a new foundation, more secure, more aligned, more aware of past failures.

Airdrop as a Driver of Behavior

It was within this environment that expectations around Backpack’s airdrop began to take shape. Even without a fully explicit announcement, the signals were sufficient to guide user behavior: trading volume, recurring deposits, and constant activity became implicit indicators of eligibility.

This model is not new. Previous cases, such as Blur, have already demonstrated how incentive programs can artificially inflate usage, pushing platforms to surpass competitors in volume while much of that activity is driven not by real demand, but by the anticipation of future rewards. 

Similarly, the Arbitrum airdrop revealed a recurring dynamic: although large in scale, the final distribution tended toward concentration, disproportionately benefiting more structured users.

In Backpack’s case, this logic was intensified by a social layer. 

Influencers began competing for attention through referral codes, tutorials, and optimization strategies, creating an environment in which usage was no longer simply encouraged, but continuously engineered. Users no longer entered the platform to explore it, but to operate within a pre-constructed expectation.

The experience, then, shifts: what should be use becomes performance. Each interaction no longer carries intrinsic value, but is calculated as part of a potential future reward. The promise of accessibility, “anyone can participate”, coexists with a structure that favors scale, capital, and information, while the average user sustains the system with time, fees, and exposure to risk, without any guarantee of proportional return.

In this process, the airdrop ceases to function as a mechanism of alignment and becomes instead a vector of behavioral induction. The center is no longer the product, but the incentive, and the user, rather than a participant, becomes an operator of an expectation they rarely control.

The Fracture: Expectation, Distribution, and Frustration

As more concrete signals about the airdrop begin to emerge, or as reality starts to impose itself over expectation, a recurring sentiment surfaces within the ecosystem: frustration.

Reports point to a familiar pattern: a small number of highly capitalized users capture most of the benefits. More aggressive, often automated strategies outperform organic usage, and the majority, despite sustained engagement, receive little or nothing.

What was built over time as a collective promise ultimately reveals itself as unequal distribution.

And here lies the critical point: the cost of the system is not only financial, but behavioral. Users generated volume, paid fees, and assumed risks — often without a clear thesis — sustained by an expectation that was never formally guaranteed.

The Invisible Logic: When Web3 Becomes Harmful

The Backpack case is not isolated. It merely makes visible a deeper logic within contemporary Web3.

Airdrops, points, rankings, and engagement campaigns operate as an algorithmic layer that shapes behavior. It is no longer just about rewarding users, but about directing them.

In this process, an inversion occurs: the product ceases to be the center, and the incentive becomes the primary driver. Usage is no longer a consequence of value, but of expectation.

The result is an ecosystem where activity is inflated, retention is fragile, and trust becomes volatile.

There is a recurring narrative that Web3 empowers users, and in many cases, this is true.

But there is also another side, less discussed.

When projects operate primarily through indirect incentives, without clarity, without transparency, without explicit commitment, the risk is no longer merely financial. It becomes structural.

Users begin to act under induced uncertainty, assume disproportionate risks, and sustain systems that do not necessarily recognize them. In this context, decentralization does not guarantee fairness; it merely redistributes the playing field, often favoring those who already possess more capital, more information, or greater operational capacity.

Conclusion: Between Belonging and Extraction

Backpack’s airdrop exposes a fundamental tension within Web3: to what extent are we building participatory systems — and to what extent are we refining more sophisticated mechanisms of extraction?

The original promise remains powerful. The idea of open networks, distributed ownership, and alignment between users and protocols is still, in essence, transformative.

But in practice, what we observe in many cases is different: belonging is replaced by expectation; usage by performance; value by incentive.

And perhaps the greatest risk is not the financial loss of some users, but the gradual erosion of trust in an ecosystem that, at its origin, promised precisely the opposite.