The impact is serious, and it is not advisable to promote contract experience funds to college students.

Recently, ETHPanda and LXDAO co-initiator Brucexu.eth revealed on social platforms that some currency trading platforms are distributing so-called "contract experience funds" to college students. Such experience funds cannot be withdrawn directly, and once profitable, the income belongs to the students; if there is a loss, there is no need to repay, and showing high returns on WeChat Moments can also obtain additional incentives.

From giving away principal, to leverage stimulation, to social fission, this entire process is precisely harvesting the college student group. In essence, this behavior is not a popularization of contract knowledge or user education, but a gambling induction dressed in the guise of "financial enlightenment", which accurately harvests college students with weak risk awareness and insufficient fund management capabilities.

Even though crypto trading platforms are currently facing a bottleneck of user growth as a whole, this does not mean that college students can be used as a breakthrough for business expansion. Such behaviors not only have compliance risks, but also have long-term negative impacts on the industry image.

High-risk financial tools should not be targeted at college students

After the combination of technology and finance, the "precision induction" of young people is almost a global problem. Whether it is the structural design that induces excessive lending in the US student loan system, or the proliferation of usury targeting young people in Internet financial products such as Indonesia and the Philippines, countless young people around the world are deeply trapped in debt quagmire.

In 2015, China's mobile payment had just emerged, and advanced consumerism was quietly spreading among young people. At the same time, a group of "Internet financial companies" represented by platforms such as Qufenqi, Fenqile, and Aiyoumi have made great efforts to enter universities under the banner of "advance consumption and credit growth".

Qufenqi is the most representative player among them. It directly enters the campus through an offline underground promotion team and holds a "campus sale" with mobile phone, computer and cosmetics merchants to attract college students to use their platform for installment consumption. You only need an ID card and a student ID to "get a free iPhone" for free, and the monthly payment is less than 300 yuan.

However, this carnival of "financial innovation" quickly showed its fangs. Problems such as opaque interest rates, high handling fees, and unreasonable repayment dates have quickly pushed a large number of students into the debt trap of advanced consumption. In order to repay the debt, many students were forced to tear down the east wall and make up for the west wall, borrowing loans between different platforms.

What's worse is that as the difficulty of collecting debts increases, some platforms or underground collection organizations have evolved extreme oppressive measures such as "naked loans" - requiring female college students to provide indecent photos as "mortgage", and once they breach the contract, they will be threatened. After this incident was exposed by the media, it shocked Chinese society.

From a moral perspective, this trend has completely penetrated the bottom line of society. The once popular Qufenqi, even though he later tried to transform into an "installment e-commerce platform" and a "B-end financial technology service provider", was still labeled as "campus loan initiator" and encountered widespread boycott.

Qufendian's auto finance project launched by Qudian in 2018 aims to provide car installment services to young people through "renting instead of purchasing". Also boycotted. In 2022, Qudian founder Luo Min announced a high-profile entry into the pre-made vegetable market and promoted it through Douyin live broadcast and other methods. However, due to the history of "campus loans" that has aroused public doubts, the Chinese stars who cooperated with him, such as Jia Nailiang and Fu Seoul, have drawn a clear line with him.

This is a memory of the times and a painful lesson. There was no clear supervision at that time, and no one stood up to stop it. It was not until thousands of families paid for it that it finally ended.

In the cryptocurrency field today, contract experience money is promoted to college students openly, which seems to be the beginning of another disaster -it uses not usury, but a more secretive and difficult-to-know gambling addiction cultivation.

The contract is innocuous, but the hand of greed should not reach to the

campus

Since this cycle, college students have once become the protagonists of Web3 public opinion, and many projects and VCs tend to recruit hard-working, studious and motivated college students as interns. Even the crypto trading platform has launched a new campus ambassador program. College students can apply to join and receive rebate rewards and employment qualifications through active users. However, this event was stopped shortly after the launch of the event, and the official website is no longer available.

Nowadays, some trading platforms have directly increased their investments, using contract bonds to attract college students to "invest". Compared with campus loans that year, this time, the promotion of crypto contracts has not even touched the basic regulatory red line.

Many centralized trading platform servers are distributed in various countries, with disclaimers written in user agreements, and employees are also distributed around the world. They often do not accept full supervision from any country, but operate on a global scale, especially in countries and regions where financial education has not yet been popularized.

In such a vacuum, it is difficult for us to expect effective intervention of policies in the short term. This means that the moral constraints of the public and the collective actions of users are the most realistic and powerful "regulatory means". Every user and every practitioner should not remain silent about the behavior of inducing college students to participate in contract trading.

As a financial instrument, contract transactions are reasonable, but they must distinguish the scenarios. For example, the following three situations can be regarded as "morally reasonable" usage scenarios:

First, risk hedging, which is the initial design purpose of the contract. Institutions or mature investors use contracts to hedge spot price fluctuations, such as miners locking in mining returns, traders managing position risks, etc. This is a professional means based on clear asset and risk strategies.

Instead, it is a small position for adults who are independent and self-responsible. Some individual users may use a very small proportion of funds to conduct short-term trading as a high-risk operation of entertainment nature. This premise is that they have a certain sense of risk, have a complete financial security network, and are clear about the consequences they bear.

Finally, there is the "gambling dog" that goes in two directions with the casino. This is the most common type of contract trading users at present -they do not hedge or analyze, and they rely solely on feelings to trade. Although such behaviors are not encouraged, if an adult clearly knows that he is "gambling", the deal reached by the platform can be said to be "willing to accept the loss".

But - college students are not gambling dogs.

They have not entered society yet, have insufficient income, risk awareness or financial literacy, and they should have constructed their way of thinking on campus, rather than being induced by the platform to build leverage logic. Any trading platform that extends its promotional tentacles to college students is doing an extremely bad thing.

Please take action and put pressure on CEX

Faced with such behaviors that induce college students to participate in high-risk contract transactions, the industry can no longer remain silent. This not only deviates from the original intention of financial technology inclusiveness, but also poses serious damage to the credibility of the entire crypto industry. Therefore, there must be clear and continuous social feedback to resist these behaviors that give away experience funds, encourage the display of returns, and guide leverage operations.

Therefore, we must make a rejection and draw the bottom line with actions:

We can—resist the CEX of this business on social platforms, refuse to register and recharge on such platforms, and remind them with the absence of real money: the user is not an ATM;

We can—exert ongoing public opinion pressure on companies that are still executing such market strategies;

We can — encourage industry KOLs and media people to publicly expose and seriously criticize this method of harvesting.

Only in this way can the platform be forced to realize that the regulatory gap does not mean the moral gap, and the college student group should not become a breakthrough for the industry to attract new opportunities. If the industry truly pursues long-term development, it should first give up the growth model at the cost of destroying the future of a generation. This will not only not cause the industry to usher in development, but will instead further stigmatize the industry, thereby hindering the entire industry's global compliance process and deviate from the true vision of cryptocurrency.

This is not the first time that the industry has seen the bottom line in the gaps of morality. Today is college student experience fund, and tomorrow may be a "contract loan", or a "small-value high-frequency leverage recommendation system" tailored for young people who are just entering the currency circle. There are always people designing traps for young people who have not yet established risk perceptions.

If we don't want to witness the "naked loan" disaster repeating itself in the crypto world, if we don't want to see young people being trained to become gamblers, we must start from now on and resist this behavior. If the platform still turns a blind eye, we will join forces with more KOLs and the media to continue to reveal it until all this is over.