Ferrante Denies OTC FUD, Admits Backpack's Witch Hunt Got 'Too Mechanical'

Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante is currently doing the crypto equivalent of playing whack-a-mole with PR fires, publicly denying that the team conducted over-the-counter sales to exit its BP position while also conceding that the exchange's aggressive anti-Sybil process unfairly penalized parts of the community. It's a classic "yes, and also no" situation that would make a politician proud.

In a detailed post on X, Ferrante wrote: "OTC. I can't believe I have to say this, no, we aren't OTCing our own tokens to cash out," adding that "FUD is an opportunity to either address misunderstandings or to identify mistakes and simply fix them." He stressed that past mentions of OTC were "only about helping serious buyers find tokens," not about offloading the team's allocation. Nothing says "we're totally fine" quite like having to publicly assure people you aren't secretly dumping your own bags at 2am.

The comments follow days of anger over BP's token generation event on March 23, where airdrop rewards were sharply reduced or revoked for users flagged as "witches," or suspected Sybil accounts. On X, Ferrante acknowledged that the review process had become overly rigid, writing that the team's approach to witch cases had been "too mechanical" and that "more complex cases are being re-evaluated." Nothing like being called a witch by an algorithm to really bring out the community spirit.

An analysis by AInvest noted that Backpack has now opened an appeal channel and committed to restoring up to 50% of tokens for some affected users, alongside a buyback program aimed at stabilizing BP's secondary-market liquidity. Generous offer, assuming you can prove you're not actually a witch. The appeals process is apparently looking for people who are, in technical terms, "witch-adjacent but not fully coven."

The storm erupted as BP began trading with a fully diluted valuation that quickly pushed toward the $200 million range, in line with probabilities markets had already priced in. In February, Odaily reported Polymarket markets assigning a 98% chance that BP's FDV would exceed $100 million and an 87% chance it would surpass $200 million on the day after listing, implying a price range of roughly $0.10 to $0.20 per token. AInvest later estimated that BP had fallen to about $0.27, putting its FDV near $200 million as community trust wobbled. The market had basically already decided BP was worth $200 million before it even launched, which is either impressive confidence or a massive case of pre-launch hopium.

Ferrante, however, urged users to look past short-term market swings. "FDV is not the core metric we are optimizing for," he wrote, arguing instead that "long-term product-market fit, compliance and transparency" would determine Backpack's eventual value. Translation: "Please stop looking at the number that makes us look bad and focus on the abstract concept of 'value' which is much