According to a Backpack post on X on February 15, the Solana-based cryptocurrency exchange hit the $300 million milestone less than twenty-four hours after it started its pre-season beta launch.The folks behind Solana’s Mad Lads executable nonfungible token (NFT) collection started the exchange.
Intergovernmental blockchain specialist Anndy Lian, author of NFT: From Zero to Hero, attributes the exchange’s appeal in part to the Backpack ecosystem’s record-breaking Mad Lads xNFT collection and the potential of the underlying Solana blockchain.He stated to Cointelegraph
“Backpack Exchange leverages the Solana blockchain, one of the fastest and most scalable platforms for decentralized applications […] Solana is also seen as a potential contender for the future of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which is a fast-growing sector of the crypto industry.”
In just one day after launching for the preseason, Backpack recorded 6,000 unique deposit transactions, as the company’s founder and CEO, Armani Ferrante, said in an X post on February 13.
According to Ferrante, the recently opened exchange has remarkable trading data, such as order placement times of one millisecond and order cancellation times of less than one millisecond.Overtaking the trading pair of Binance, the largest exchange in the world with $2.4 million in 24-hour trading volume, was Backpack’s SOL/USDC spot trading pair, with over $643 million in trading volume.In October 2023, Backpack Exchange obtained a license as a virtual asset service provider (VASP) from the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA).In the latter part of 2023, the exchange obtained numerous additional operating licenses in various jurisdictions across the globe.
As a result of Backpack’s success, Mad Lads NFTs’ 24-hour trading volume increased by 77.93% to over $1 million, making it the third-largest collection by daily trading volume among all blockchain networks.With a 20.19% increase in sales volume to $7.35 million, Solana surpassed Ethereum as the second-largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT sales volume, with $18.28 million in 24-hour NFT sales volume, as reported by NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam.