Raoul Pal The Journey Man · Sep 24, 2026 · 56m · 41m saved
With Armani Ferrante, Founder of Backpack
Only about 200 stocks trade as tokens across all the blockchains today, Armani Ferrante said. His exchange, Backpack, wants to bring the entire US stock market onto Solana, with each token redeemable one-for-one for a real share.
Most crypto exchanges founded after FTX's collapse opened to the whole world on day one. Backpack went the other way, getting licensed country by country, because Ferrante thinks crypto's next stage of growth will come from regulated finance moving onto blockchains.
"It's how do you bring the entire world's regulated economy and bring it onchain and that's where all the asset growth is going to come from."
Ferrante, founder of Backpack and the Mad Lads NFT collection, on Raoul Pal The Journey Man, worked at Alameda Research in 2018 and built some of Solana's earliest wallets and exchanges before starting Backpack. He has lived in Tokyo for three years to build its business in Japan.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 56 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 13 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
FTX's collapse wiped out Backpack's entire runway, and the team stayed on Solana anyway
Crypto will grow 100x from regulation and mainstream adoption, not from the industry's wild west
Backpack mapped every country in an office in Chicago and has been licensing market by market since
Blockchains are a global API for finance, letting anyone buy a stock, an option or foreign currency with one call
Giving AI agents access to money is underexplored, and he said it raises the odds of AI going badly
Tokenized stocks are about to go from 200 symbols to 10,000, each redeemable for a real share
The CLARITY Act appeared dead that morning, which he said hurts Backpack less than rivals
Prediction markets are closer to futures than to gambling, and sports betting is "not the Hill to die on"
1. Into Crypto
Raoul Pal asked how Ferrante got into crypto.
"I like pain and suffering." — Armani Ferrante
He said he got hooked one weekend at a Philz Coffee in San Francisco, read the Ethereum white paper, watched videos of Vitalik Buterin and fell in love with a niche subculture of engineers doing strange things. He left his corporate job in 2017 and has not looked back.
The scaling problem
Everyone in crypto in 2017 and 2018 identified the same problem, he said: blockchains were slow and not ready for real demand. By accident, in 2018 he ended up at Alameda Research, then a small trading firm in Berkeley, California, before FTX existed. He left after a couple of months to work on Ethereum open-source software.
Solana's early days
In 2020 FTX invested in Solana and asked him to work on anything and everything on the network. He built developer tools and one of the first wallets, and worked on what he called probably the first central limit order book on any blockchain. That open-source work took off in the 2020-21 bull run, and in late 2021 or early 2022 he spun it out into the company that became Backpack.
