Mad News: July 2025

Backpack Season 2 has started, Mad Lads jackets have started shipping, stocks are tradable on Solana and a dormant wallet suddently woke up

Jul 22, 2025

July 3rd marked the start of Backpack Season 2, and it wasn’t an easy launch. We’ll cover it in this edition of Mad News, but in short, the team faced some big challenges, which they overcame with success, showing incredible professionalism and genuine care for the community

Mad Lads holders who pre-ordered their bomber jackets were excited to receive the famous “your order is on the way” email and not so long after some event got a nice box delivered at their home!

Meanwhile, something you don’t see every day happened on the market… a BTC wallet dormant since 2011 suddenly moved! The wallet, holding over $8B worth of BTC, caused quite a stir among traders and oponned the door to all kinds of speculation on X

As always, July turned out to be another amazing month for Mad Lads holders as they keep growing stronger as a community, meeting up at IRL events, and creating top-level content all over X (one Lad even got his post commented on by Toly himself, what a flex)

Backpack S2

A challenging launch

July 3rd marked the start of Backpack Exchange Season 2. The day kicked off with an announced and scheduled maintenance for on/off ramping.
What should have been something quick and simple turned into a bigger challenge: a programming error made its way into the production system, affecting historical trader data and the exchange’s ability to function as intended

Once the issue was discovered, the system was immediately halted while the team worked on a fix. After a few hours, everything was back up and running properly. It’s important to note that funds remained safe and secure throughout the process but the user experience that day was understandably less than ideal…

Over 300 cases where funds or trades were impacted were identified by the team. The affected accounts were reimbursed and to further compensate, everyone received double points for the day

The team handled the situation very professionally by addressing complaints on Discord and X, refunding traders, doubling points and following up with people in the days after to ensure everything was back to normal

https://x.com/armaniferrante/status/1940834839399383264

New regions are coming

Some people have already noticed that some new faces did set up their accounts on Backpack Exchange, completed the KYC process and started their ascension in the Season 2 leaderboard

https://x.com/docha3desu/status/1944483954226340161/video/1

Europe support hasn’t been officially announced by the Backpack team yet. However, it is worth regularly checking for new countries on the exchange. Remember, if your country isn’t on the list yet, hold tight and never forget these wise words from our founder, Armani Ferrante:

We can't just decide to do or announce things on our end. The best we can do unfortunately is take questions here. But please know that everyone involved fully understands the importance of this. No one wants to move fast on this more than me.

There is a step-by-step tutorial available on the Mad Lads Hub: https://www.madlads-hub.xyz/backpack

Why rank matters

Each Friday, 10 million points are shared among the weekly traders. Depending on various metrics, you’ll earn more or fewer of these points

But it wouldn’t be fun to just stack points each week…no! These points actually let you rank up from Bronze to Challenger, and it really matters

Recently, we saw two airdrops for Backpack traders that were directly tied to their trader rank and it’s only the beginning!

https://x.com/Backpack/status/1939588790135529791

https://x.com/Backpack/status/1933109962559111587

https://x.com/Backpack/status/1945337643568365592

DeFi Explorer

Backpack shipped an amazing feature on July 2nd: DeFi Explorer

Whether you’re an OG in the space or you joined not so long ago, you’ve probably deposited funds into some dApps or received airdrops you’ve completely forgotten about

Explore the new DeFi tab, which lets you see all your positions directly in your wallet (Some people even joked that Backpack turned into Santa Claus when they found thousands of forgotten dollars sitting on the Solana blockchain)

https://x.com/Backpack/status/1940395029903941927

Mad Lads Bombers Jacket

Back in April 2025, Mad Lads holders had the chance to pre-order the Mad Lads Bomber Jacket and this month, it finally arrived at some lucky Lads’ homes!

The packaging? Apple-tier
The bomber jacket? MAD

https://x.com/2red/status/1942415191955694029

https://x.com/_nasteenish_/status/1943730963688620211

Gorbagana or dev having fun

At the end of June, Solana’s ecosystem was shaken by the launch of Gorbagana, a cheeky take on “garbage chain” inspired by Oscar the Grouch. What began as a meme rapidly evolved into a fully functional devnet blockchain, live within 48 hours, highlighting both the speed and spirit of Solana’s developer community

While Gorbagana started as a satirical experiment sparked by a casual tweet from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, it quickly became a serious tech demonstration. Developers reverse-engineered Solana's code, spun up a testnet with native $GOR gas token, and processed millions of transactions in less than a week

One standout moment in this whirlwind launch was the native integration by Backpack Wallet, enabling seamless access to the Gorbagana chain without needing custom RPC settings . This meant developers and users could immediately interact with the testnet through their Backpack Wallet

Why it matters?

Decentralized Agility: Gorbagana proves that a community-driven team can iterate and ship testnet code faster than many institutional projects
Flagship Wallet Flexibility: Backpack’s ability to integrate non-standard chains shows real adaptability compared to more rigid wallets
Culture + Code: This is where meme culture meets blockchain innovation

https://x.com/Backpack/status/1936055164009693643

BTC wallet waking up

July kicked off with a bang on-chain. A Bitcoin wallet, dormant since 2011, suddenly woke up from its nap and moved over 80000 BTC (worth $8–9 billion) in 8 giant transactions to a single wallet

https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/1b186a9c-1972-46c8-9de7-d2e8e3db28d7

Seeing that much BTC move after more than 10 years gave traders the sweats but the market didn’t react much. In fact, we even saw BTC hit $120k during mid-July

However, analysts didn’t brush this off so easily. Was it a hack? A government deal? A simple security upgrade? Or some legal action?

What is known so far:

Perfect pattern: suggests that these wallets weren’t randomly created and could even have been automatically generated by a program
Hidden messages:
- first message “LEGAL NOTICE: We have taken possession of this wallet and its contents”
- second message “Not abandoned? Prove it by an on-chain transaction using private key by Sept 30”
- third message “NOTICE TO OWNER: see salomonbros.com/owner-notice”
- last message “4 8 15 16 23 42” (LOST numbers)
However the salomonbros.com website only was registered few days before it all happens
Old technology: created with P2PKH encryption which has known flaws

Both thesis are worth watching:

Legal test or seizure: old coins aren’t as safe as you think
Hack: brilliant reminder that even ancient wallets aren’t invincible

If this was a test, we’ve been warned.
If it was an attack, it was brilliant.
And if it was real, it changes everything.

We do encourage you to stay curious and keep yourself informed about these events, especially since it can give you a serious advantage versus most of CT “kol”

Lads take care of Lads

In the previous Mad News, we had the chance to get to know some of our OG holders a bit better. In this edition, we’ll learn more about Mad Canny, one of our OG Lassies who has been taking the moderator role very seriously for over a year now

Canny bought her first crypto back in 2021, and like many people, she started with ETH. But thanks to an article about metaverses, she found her way into Solana!

She’s known for diamond-handing almost everything she gets, and let’s just say she now has a very interesting NFT collection to show for it

When she heard that Armani and Tristan were building a wallet, she instantly jumped into the server (she even joked that she thought she’d been kicked out multiple times because the logo kept changing). She managed to score her beta code, which led her to the whitelist and the mint

As a moderator, Canny always reminds us that we are Mad Lads by Backpack, not the other way around. It’s on us, the holders, to push the mission forward and make sure Backpack wins

Every day, she stays motivated because she truly believes Mad Lads can grow into something much bigger but it takes more of us stepping up to make that happen. She really wants to inspire every holder to get involved, try new things, and spread the madness. Her mindset? Do something beyond the norm, beyond your norm!

She also understands the frustration some holders feel when they can’t use the exchange yet, especially since she’s in the same situation herself. But she knows it’s coming, and in the meantime, you can still create content and help the mission grow. And if you need help with anything, all you have to do is ask and someone will always help you. WAO

I’ll let Canny’s own words close this out, directly quoted from her answer:

I’ve been here for the highs, the lows, and everything in between. I’m still here. With you. We were forged in the fire. We are fockin’ MAD. Never forget that. Let’s build. Together.

Backpack Achievements

Backpack Exchange just launched a new gamified way to enjoy the exchange through achievements

Some achievements are tied to specific Seasons, some aren’t. Some are fun, some are less fun (like getting liquidated) but in the end, we all want to collect them all, just like in a AAA video game where we’d grind extra hours to hit that 100% completion and unlock every trophy

Or maybe… we only need one achievement. The ultimate one, the MAD one