From “Campus Loans” to “Contract Experience Funds”: Beware of History Repeating Itself, Don’t Let Crypto Platforms Ruin the Next Generation
Recently, Brucexu.eth, a co-founder of ETHPanda and LXDAO, revealed on social media that some cryptocurrency trading platforms are issuing so-called “contract experience funds” to college students. These experience funds cannot be withdrawn directly, but any profits made belong to the students; if there are losses, there is no need for repayment. Additionally, sharing high earnings in social circles can lead to extra incentives.
Yesterday, I confirmed a fact while talking to students: some centralized exchanges (CEX) offer students contract experience funds that cannot be withdrawn. If they earn, it’s theirs; if they exceed a certain multiple and share screenshots on social media, they can receive extra rewards.
Are we cultivating gamblers starting from college students? It’s truly disgusting — Brucexu.eth ❤️ (@brucexu_eth) April 13, 2025
This entire process, from principal gifts to leveraged stimulation and social fragmentation, is precisely targeting college students. This behavior is essentially not about popularizing contract knowledge or user education; rather, it is a gambling inducement cloaked in the guise of “financial enlightenment,” precisely harvesting a demographic that is weak in risk awareness and lacks capital management skills.
Even though the current overall crypto trading platforms are facing a bottleneck in user growth, this does not mean that college students should be seen as a breakthrough point for business expansion. Such behavior poses compliance risks and has long-term negative impacts on the industry’s image.
High-Risk Financial Instruments Should Not Target College Students
With the combination of technology and finance, the “precise inducement” of young people has become a global issue. Whether it is the structural design of excessive borrowing in the U.S. student loan system or the rampant high-interest loans targeting young people in online financial products in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, countless young people worldwide are trapped in a debt quagmire.
In 2015, when mobile payments were just rising in China, consumerism began to silently spread among the youth. At the same time, a group of “internet finance companies,” represented by platforms like Qufenqi, Fenqile, and AiYouMi, entered campuses 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 merchants selling mobile phones, computers, and cosmetics to hold “campus sales fairs,” attracting college students to use its platform for installment consumption. With just an ID card and a student ID, one could “freeload” an iPhone with monthly payments of less than 300 yuan.
However, this “financial innovation” quickly revealed its fangs. Issues such as opaque interest rates, high fees, and unreasonable repayment dates rapidly pushed many students into the debt trap of advance consumption. To repay their debts, many students were forced to borrow from different platforms, rolling their debts like a snowball.
Even worse, as the difficulty of debt collection increased, some platforms or underground collection organizations resorted to extreme coercive methods like “naked loan” schemes—requiring female students to provide indecent photos as “collateral,” which would be used as threats upon default. This incident shocked Chinese society when exposed by the media.
From a moral standpoint, this trend completely undermined societal bottom lines. Once a hot commodity, Qufenqi, even while trying to transform into an “installment e-commerce platform” or a “B-end financial technology service provider,” was still labeled as a “campus loan initiator” and faced widespread boycotts.
After rebranding as Qudian, it launched an auto finance project in 2018, aimed at providing car installment services to young people through “rent-to-own” methods. It also faced boycotts. In 2022, Qudian founder Luo Min announced a bold entry into the pre-prepared food market, promoting it through Douyin live broadcasts. However, due to its “campus loan” history, public skepticism arose, leading cooperating Chinese celebrities like Jia Nailiang and Fu Shouer to distance themselves.
This is a collective memory of an era and a painful lesson. Without clear regulation and with no one stepping forward to stop it, millions of families were left to bear the consequences until it finally came to an end.
Now, in the realm of cryptocurrencies, contract experience funds are being brazenly promoted to college students, which seems to be the beginning of another disaster—using not high-interest loans, but a more subtle and harder-to-detect addiction to gambling.
Contracts Are Not Inherently Evil, But Greedy Hands Should Not Reach Campuses
During this cycle, college students have become the protagonists of Web3 discourse, with many projects and VCs inclined to recruit diligent and motivated college students as interns. Even crypto trading platforms launched campus ambassador programs, where students could apply to join and earn rewards for bringing in new users along with qualification benefits for employment. However, shortly after this initiative was launched, it was halted due to community opposition, and there is currently no official activity page for it.
Now, some trading platforms have even doubled down, enticing college students into “the waters” with contract vouchers. Compared to past campus loans, this time, the promotion of crypto 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, with employees scattered globally. They often do not accept complete regulation from any single country but operate on a global scale, especially expanding aggressively in countries and regions where financial education is not yet widespread.
In such a vacuum, it is hard 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 inducement of college students to participate in contract trading.
As a financial tool, contract trading has a reasonable existence, but it must be distinguished by scenarios. The following three situations can be considered “morally acceptable” usage scenarios:
Firstly, risk hedging, which is the original design purpose of contracts, where institutions or mature investors use contracts to hedge against spot price fluctuations—for example, miners locking in mining revenues, traders managing position risks, etc. This is a professional approach based on clear assets and risk strategies.
Secondly, small speculative entertainment positions by independent, self-responsible adults, where some individual users might use a very small proportion of funds for short-term trading as a high-risk entertainment activity. The premise is that they possess a certain level of risk awareness, have a complete financial safety net, and understand the consequences they bear.
Lastly, there are the “betting dogs,” who are the most common type of contract trading users today—they do not hedge, do not analyze, and purely trade based on intuition. Although such behavior is not encouraged, if adults clearly know they are “gambling,” the transactions they engage in with the platform can be considered “willing to bet and accept the loss.”
But—college students are not betting dogs.
They have yet to enter society and lack sufficient income, risk awareness, or financial literacy. They should be building their ways of thinking on campus, not being induced by platforms to construct leveraged logic. Any trading platform that extends its promotional reach to college students is engaging in extremely detrimental practices.
Take Action and Apply Pressure on CEX
In the face of such inducements for college students to engage 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 severely damages the credibility of the entire cryptocurrency industry. Therefore, there must be clear and sustained social feedback to resist behaviors that offer experience funds, encourage flaunting profits, and guide leverage operations.
Thus, we must raise our voices of rejection and delineate boundaries through action:
We can—boycott CEXs that engage in this business on social media, refuse to register or fund 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 figures to publicly expose and seriously criticize such harvesting methods.
Only in this way can we compel platforms to realize that regulatory gaps do not equate to moral vacuums, and college students should not become breakthrough points for the industry’s expansion. If the industry genuinely seeks long-term development, it must first abandon growth strategies that destroy the future of a generation. Such actions will not lead the industry to growth or new highs in cryptocurrency asset prices; rather, they will further stigmatize the industry and hinder the entire sector’s progress toward global compliance, deviating from the true vision of cryptocurrency.
This is not the first time we have seen the industry testing its boundaries in moral gray areas. Today it is college student experience funds, tomorrow it may be “contract loans” or a custom “small high-frequency leverage recommendation system” for young people new to the crypto space. There will always be those designing traps specifically for the young, who have yet to establish risk awareness.
If we do not want to witness disasters reminiscent of “naked loans” replaying in the crypto world, if we do not want to see one young person after another turned into a gambler, we must act from this moment onwards to resist such behaviors. If platforms continue to turn a blind eye, we will join more KOLs and media in ongoing exposure until this all comes to an end.
This article is collaboratively republished from: Rhythm