The impact is severe, and promoting the behavior of contract experience funds to college students is absolutely unacceptable

Recently, Brucexu.eth, co-founder of ETHPanda and LXDAO, revealed on social media that some cryptocurrency trading platforms are distributing so-called "contract experience funds" to university students. These experience funds cannot be directly withdrawn, but any profits made belong to the students; if there are losses, there is no need to repay. Additionally, sharing high returns on social media can yield extra incentives.

From giving away principal to leveraging incentives, and then to social media expansion, this entire process is precisely targeting the university student demographic. This behavior is essentially not about popularizing contract knowledge or educating users, but rather a gambling inducement disguised as "financial enlightenment," effectively preying on students with weak risk awareness and insufficient financial management skills.

Even though cryptocurrency trading platforms are currently facing a bottleneck in user growth, this does not mean that they can use university students as a breakthrough for business expansion. Such behavior carries compliance risks and can have long-term negative impacts on the industry's image.

High-Risk Financial Instruments Should Not Target University Students

The combination of technology and finance has led to a global challenge of "precise inducement" targeting young people. Whether it is the structural design of the U.S. student loan system that encourages excessive borrowing, or the rampant high-interest loans in internet financial products targeting young people in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, countless young people worldwide are trapped in debt.

In 2015, when mobile payments were just emerging in China, consumerism began to quietly spread among young people. At the same time, a group of "internet financial companies," represented by platforms like Qufenqi, Fenqile, and AiYouMi, aggressively entered universities under the banner of "advance consumption and credit growth."

Qufenqi is the most representative player among them. It directly entered campuses through offline promotion teams, collaborating with mobile phone, computer, and cosmetics merchants to hold "campus sales events," attracting university students to use its platform for installment consumption. With just an ID card and a student card, one could "get" an iPhone with a monthly payment of less than 300 yuan.

However, this "financial innovation" soon revealed its fangs. Issues such as opaque interest rates, high fees, and unreasonable repayment dates quickly pushed many students into the debt trap of advance consumption. To repay their debts, many students were forced to borrow from different platforms, creating a snowball effect.

Even worse, as collection difficulties increased, some platforms or underground collection organizations resorted to extreme coercive measures such as "nude loans"—demanding female university students provide indecent photos as "collateral," threatening to use them in case of default. This incident shocked Chinese society after being exposed by the media.

From a moral standpoint, this trend has completely breached societal bottom lines. Once a hot topic, Qufenqi, even when it later attempted to transform into an "installment e-commerce platform" or "B-end financial technology service provider," was still labeled as a "campus loan initiator" and faced widespread resistance.

Qufenqi, renamed Qudian, launched an auto finance project in 2018 aimed at providing car installment services to young people through "rent-to-own" methods. It also faced backlash. In 2022, Qudian's founder, Luo Min, announced a bold entry into the pre-prepared food market and promoted it through Douyin live broadcasts. However, due to its "campus loan" history, public skepticism led collaborating Chinese celebrities like Jia Nailiang and Fu Seer to distance themselves from it.

This is a memory of an era and a painful lesson. At that time, there was no clear regulation, and no one stood up to stop it until countless families paid the price, finally bringing it to an end.

Now, in the cryptocurrency field, the promotion of contract experience funds to university students seems like the beginning of another disaster—it uses not high-interest loans, but a more subtle and harder-to-detect addiction to gambling.

Contracts Are Not Inherently Sinful, But Greed Should Not Reach Campuses

During this cycle, university students have become the protagonists of Web3 discourse, with many projects and VCs inclined to recruit diligent and motivated students as interns. Even cryptocurrency trading platforms have launched campus ambassador programs, allowing students to apply and earn commission rewards and job qualifications by bringing in new users. However, this initiative was quickly halted amid community opposition, and there is currently no official interface for this activity.

Some trading platforms have even escalated their tactics, using contract vouchers to lure university students "into the water." Compared to the campus loans of the past, this time the promotion of cryptocurrency contracts has not even touched the basic regulatory red lines.

Many centralized trading platforms have servers distributed across various countries, filled with disclaimers in their user agreements, and their employees are scattered globally. They often do not accept complete regulation from any one country, yet they operate globally, especially expanding aggressively in countries and regions where financial education is not yet widespread.

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

As a financial tool, contract trading is reasonable, but it must be distinguished by context. For example, the following three scenarios can be considered "morally reasonable" uses:

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

Second, small position speculative entertainment by independent, self-responsible adults. Some individual users may use a very small proportion of their funds for short-term trading as a form of high-risk entertainment. This premise is that they have a certain level of risk awareness, a complete financial safety net, and are clear about the consequences they bear.

Finally, there are "gamblers" who engage in mutual gambling with casinos. This is currently the most common type of contract trading user—they do not hedge or analyze, trading purely based on feelings. Although this behavior is not encouraged, if adults clearly know they are "gambling," the transactions made with the platform can be said to be "willing to gamble and accept the loss."

But—university students are not gamblers.

They have not yet entered society and do not have sufficient income, risk awareness, or financial literacy. They should be building their ways of thinking on campus, not being induced by platforms to construct leverage logic. Any trading platform that extends its promotional reach to university students is doing something extremely harmful.

Please Take Action and Pressure CEX

In the face of such inducements for university students to participate in high-risk contract trading, the industry can no longer remain silent. This not only deviates from the original intention of inclusive financial technology but also seriously harms the credibility of the entire cryptocurrency industry. Therefore, there must be clear and continuous social feedback to resist these behaviors that promote experience funds, encourage flaunting profits, and guide leverage operations.

Thus, we must raise our voices in rejection and draw the line with action:

We can—boycott CEXs that engage in this business on social media, refuse to register or recharge on such platforms, reminding them with our absence of real money: users are not ATMs;

We can—apply continuous public pressure on companies still executing such market strategies;

We can—encourage industry KOLs and media personnel to publicly expose and seriously criticize these harvesting tactics.

Only in this way can we compel platforms to realize that the absence of regulation does not equate to the absence of morality, and the university student demographic should not become a breakthrough for industry expansion. If the industry truly seeks long-term development, it must first abandon growth methods that destroy the future of a generation. This will not lead to industry growth or new highs in cryptocurrency asset prices; rather, it will further stigmatize the industry and hinder the global compliance process, deviating from the true vision of cryptocurrency.

This is not the first time we have seen the industry testing the bottom line in moral gaps. Today it is university students' experience funds; tomorrow it could be "contract loans," or a "small high-frequency leverage recommendation system" tailored for young people new to the cryptocurrency world. There will always be those designing traps specifically for young people who have not yet established risk awareness.

If we do not want to witness a disaster similar to "nude loans" replaying in the cryptocurrency world, if we do not want to see young people being trained as gamblers, we must start taking action from this moment to resist such behavior. If platforms continue to turn a blind eye, we will unite more KOLs and media to continuously expose this until it all comes to an end.