From the FTX Collapse to the Rise of Backpacks — A Conversation with Armani Ferrante

Author: When Shift Happens; Compilation: Plain Talk Blockchain

In November 2022, FTX’s collapse was like a deep-sea bombshell—wiping out years of credibility in the crypto industry in an instant, and causing Armani Ferrante’s company-book assets to evaporate by 90% overnight. In the air at roughly ten thousand meters up, facing a financial exam that was close to a dead end, this structural engineer deeply embedded in the Solana ecosystem didn’t choose to walk away. Instead, he carried out an ideology-style self-inquiry about “who I am.”

In the ashes of that disastrous event, a backpack quietly came into being. It wasn’t only a global trading platform with a trading volume that broke through $420 billion—it was also Armani’s technical response to a “panopticon”-style modern surveillance regime. From the smooth path of Silicon Valley’s Apple headquarters to Japan Tokyo’s high-stakes bet for the “sleeping giant”; from simple code to the community faith behind a bunch of crazy young guys, in this interview Armani for the first time deeply replays and revisits that moment of hell. This is not just a hard-core survival story of entrepreneurship—it’s also the ultimate prophecy about the global wave of Tokenization of financial assets in 2026. When your understanding of reality and the truth become disconnected, will you choose to go along with the crowd, or rebuild the rules on top of the ruins? The answer lies in this in-depth conversation that spans the boundary between philosophy and engineering.

A Defining Moment for the Character: Surviving the Ashes of an FTX Collapse

Host: Let’s rewind the clock to that turbulent moment. During the FTX collapse, Backpack was still a brand-new project, and you were in the midst of serious danger. I remember you mentioning that at the time, the company’s assets were all held in FTX accounts?

Armani Ferrante**：**That’s right. It was a kind of digital number that fascinates every entrepreneur. Back then, we had $14.5 million in funds on FTX—about 90% of our company’s assets-and-liabilities balance sheet. When I was on a flight over the Lisbon plains, watching the Wi-Fi connection intermittently as Crypto Twitter messages kept fermenting, my sense of what was real started to collapse. If the rumors were true—later it turned out reality was even more intense than the rumors—then my company was basically already declared dead.

Inside that airliner cabin in midair, the air was filled with the same anxious feeling from peers who were also attending crypto conferences. I couldn’t help but start thinking existentially. I asked myself the most fundamental question: Armani, what kind of person are you, exactly?

Are you the kind of person who gives up when hit by a destructive blow beyond anyone’s control, and sighs that fate is unfair? Or are you the kind of person who, no matter how heavy the adversity in front of you is, will still choose to keep digging for life and fight it out to the end? Running a gas station on a street corner—in the face of extreme circumstances, the essence of what you do is the same. In that moment, I realized this was a defining moment for one’s character. I chose the night. When the plane made an emergency landing, I was already prepared to fight all the way to the last moment.

Host: That tendency is truly moving. But ironically, you previously had two points of intersection with Alameda Research—the company founded by SBF. Did this “close-up observation” give you more complex feelings later when facing a collapse?

**Armani Ferrante：**That’s indeed a remarkable twist of fate. In 2018, I had just left Apple and was deeply attracted by Ethereum and the open-source allure of blockchain. Alameda was hiring at Berkeley and needed engineers to build trading systems. I was there for three months, involved in early development, but soon realized that pure trading business wasn’t what I was passionate about—I was more focused on building base protocols and applications.

The second intersection was in 2020, when FTX had already accumulated momentum. They invited me back to help drive construction of the Solana ecosystem. I wasn’t working inside FTX itself; I was writing infrastructure for the Solana network—things like the developer framework Anchor for early development, multi-signature wallets, and so on. Solana, as a piece of wood, was like a blank page—filled with engineering challenges.

I need to clarify one thing—this was also the point I felt most deeply during the collapse period: the huge gap between perceived reality and actual reality. When Solana dropped to $8, mainstream media and social platforms tagged it as the “FTX chain,” and believed SBF was the cause of it dying. But as someone who knew the truth on the ground, I knew that Solana’s codebase, the validator network, and FTX’s financial situation were two separate things. The strong nodes of a centralized network do exist—and it’s a resilient system. It doesn’t disappear just because a party’s host falls.

Panopticon and Free Will: The Philosophical Tone Behind Crypto Technology

Host: When you talk about “who you are” and the company’s vision, you mentioned Michel Foucault and the concept of the panopticon. That’s a very profound entry point for a CEO with a technical background. Can you talk in detail about how this philosophical metaphor influences your view of the crypto industry?

Armani Ferrante**：**The panopticon—the panopticon—was originally a prison model designed by Jeremy Bentham: the guards in a central tower can monitor all the cells arranged in a ring, and prisoners loudly know at this moment whether they are being watched. This unfair kind of surveillance leads prisoners to “self-monitor” and continues.

In the digital age, we’re actually living in an ever-expanding panopticon built by the government. Large tech companies, and even public ledgers, record every transaction and every text message. If you acknowledge that privacy is the cornerstone of human beings and freedom, then many blockchain technologies involved are actually misleading. Bitcoin and Ethereum’s public ledgers are completely transparent. In a sense, tracking a Bitcoin is easier than tracking cash.

Host: So do you think existing blockchain technology is not enough to protect freedom?

**Armani Ferrante：**Absolutely not. If a system exposes your entire financial history to the light, it becomes a perfect surveillance tool. That’s why I have real respect for privacy-preserving technologies—like the zero-knowledge proofs used by Zcash.

While building Backpack, we’ve been thinking the whole time: are we just adding bricks to this panopticon, or are we using technical means to provide people with inexpensive tools to fight over and seize this kind of power? For ordinary people, they generally won’t be able to see their bank balances. Our goal is to improve efficiency using crypto’s “atomicity” and “verifiability,” while tightly preserving individuals’ control over data and assets within a compliant framework. This isn’t just writing code; it’s a redistribution of power.

Host: Does this obsession with “building what you want” match what you called the “chip on your shoulder”—the spark that keeps motivated people moving forward?

**Armani Ferrante：**Honestly, I’m not used to glamorizing my own struggle history too much. If I have to name a driver, it’s my love for the act of “creating” itself. I’m an engineer. In the product I work on, I’ve seen an idea go from code into hundreds of things. FTX’s collapse did give me a chance to prove myself, but I’ve always believed it’s not “zero” in your bank account—it’s whether you successfully have enough resources to do experiments that are more interesting and more impactful.

Many people postpone happiness in life, thinking that once they’ve made enough money and hit a milestone, they can start truly living. But this way of thinking—“putting life off”—is the root of suffering. Today, you can choose the lifestyle you want, be around interesting people, and solve difficult problems. This kind of immediate, in-process fulfillment is the most effective food for overcoming adversity.

The Tokenization Revolution in Finance: From a “makeshift crew” to Infrastructure

Host: You have a unique optimism about the current crypto industry, especially since market sentiment in 2026 isn’t high. Do you think finance is at a turning point right now?

**Armani Ferrante：**Yes. If previously the crypto cycle was more about narratives, speculation, and the mania around meme coins, then now we’re entering the stage of “infrastructure going live.” Go look at top institutions on Wall Street—people like Larry Fink talk a lot about AI, but privately they’re more bullish on the Tokenization of assets.

Imagine the difficulties of traditional finance: if you buy shares of an Apple company and settle that trade, it involves an extremely complex chain behind the scenes. From brokers to settlement systems, and then to the central securities depository (CSD), every layer has to reconcile and check. This leads to settlement delays of T+2 or even longer. But on the blockchain, we can unify asset archiving, transaction logic, and funds settlement into a single “atomic operation.” This process of compressing deep learning time into a global state machine will release tremendous capital efficiency.

Host: Is this the core problem Backpack is trying to solve? Please explain your “unified margin account” product to everyday users.

Armani Ferrante**：**Simply put, the current financial system is fragmented. You deposit money in a bank, buy stocks with a broker, and buy coins on a crypto trading platform. If you want to use stocks as collateral to borrow money, the process is indeed cumbersome.

Backpack’s “unified margin account” breaks down those walls between asset classes. If you hold high-quality Tokenized assets—whether Tokenized U.S. Treasuries, stocks, or crypto—you directly use them as collateral. Without needing to sell the assets or triggering a taxable event, you can borrow liquidity directly. In the traditional world, only high-net-worth people (ultra-high-net-worth people) enjoy this kind of premium financial service. What we do is democratize this service through smart contracts and real-time risk engines, letting ordinary users around the world access it.

Host: This sounds like Backpack is becoming a global, regulated super-finance application.

**Armani Ferrante：**Exactly. We’re not just building a trading platform; we’re using a high-performance network like Solana to rebuild the structure of modern markets. Solana’s high TPS (transactions per second) isn’t merely a technical metric—it means we achieve real-time risk management. In traditional finance, if markets crash, it may take several hours or even days, which can trigger a chain reaction. But on Solana, we can execute hedging and liquidation at the millisecond level, greatly reducing systemic risk—thereby enabling higher leverage efficiency.

Strategic Shift and the Opportunity in Japan: Why Choose Tokyo?

Host: Since your target is global, why did you move your headquarters and life focus to Tokyo? When you left California three years ago, many people didn’t look favorably on Japan’s crypto market.

**Armani Ferrante：**Choosing Tokyo was a carefully considered strategic bet. Japan has a special position in crypto history. As early as 2017, more than half of the world’s Bitcoin trading volume came from Japan. Even though early hacking incidents led to extremely tightened regulation, precisely because of that, Japan also built a very mature and transparent regulatory framework.

We believe Japan is a “sleeping giant.” As the Cambodian government has clearly proposed making Web3 part of a national strategy, and as potential tax policy reforms come into view (from 55% down to around 20%), the energy in this market is being reignited.

More importantly, the Japanese market has very high barriers. Due to the special requirements of language, culture, and compliance, U.S. regulators like Coinbase and Gemini can’t easily land here directly. For a team like Backpack—willing to deeply work in the local area and respect regulation—this is a huge blue ocean. We’re not just looking for an office; we’re putting down roots here and growing together with Japan’s financial ecosystem.

Host: On the topic of regulation, you previously mentioned that FTX spent $800 million to buy licenses, while you obtained a similar bundle of licenses at a very small cost. Is there a secret in between?

**Armani Ferrante：**There’s no shortcut in regulation, but there is a “latecomer advantage.” Many older exchanges faced problems: they first ran for a few years under no regulation, and were then forced to pivot to compliance. In the middle, it accumulated a large amount of “compliance finance” and architectural patches. To clean up these historical issues, they ended up having to abandon compensating for legal audits and costs.

Backpack designed the system from day one according to regulation. Our custody approach, risk engine, and anti-money laundering (AML) procedures were built in sync with the system architecture. In addition, we have a truly cross-disciplinary team that understands both finance and law. When your system itself is transparent and audit-ready, the cost of communicating with regulators drops dramatically. We aren’t winning trust by technical strength.

The Power of Culture: Mad Lads and the Community Connection

Host: We have to talk about Mad Lads. As a founder of a trading platform, you created one of the most influential NFT series on Solana. At the time, it looked like an off-duty side project that wasn’t focused on business, but now it seems like it became your most core asset?

**Armani Ferrante：**That’s exactly what I want to emphasize: in the crypto world, “people” are always more important than technology.

To me, NFTs are fundamentally a form of social text. No matter whether you’re in Tokyo, New York, or London—if you put a Mad Lad avatar on Twitter, or speak up in Discord, you immediately find a group of people with aligned values. Mad Lads expresses a spirit of never giving up. It’s a cultural symbol of the Solana community insisting on building even in the darkest times.

This new culture has brought Backpack tremendous loyalty. In several stages, what you need isn’t just users, but “momentum”—the people who understand your vision and are willing to stay with you as you iterate the product together. Mad Lads gives us a strong sense of identity. When we build the product, we always know who we’re serving.

Host: This kind of conversion—from culture to product—is indeed very rare. At the end of the interview, what advice do you have for builders who are struggling in the 2026 market?

Armani Ferrante**：**Stay optimistic, stay curious. The most important point is: do the things that genuinely excite you.

The crypto industry is like a huge early-stage laboratory. We will experience explosive growth, and we can also experience failures as brutal as FTX. But remember, the evolution of underlying technology isn’t determined by individual will. Tokenization, decentralization, personal sovereignty—these big trends are irreversible.

2026 is still the best era for building. If you can choose to act like us—despite the threat of your assets going to zero in custody—then you’ll find that the most fascinating part of this industry isn’t the shape of the price curve. It’s that we’re actively participating in creating the infrastructure for a future global economy. Don’t postpone your life for some vague milestone. Start building now. Start living now.

Host: Thank you, Armani. Your enthusiasm and romantic approach to engineering are very infectious. Thank you for supporting our unwavering confidence in an era full of variables.

**Armani Ferrante：**Thank you. The future belongs to builders.