Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante on Battling Back From The FTX Collapse

In the chaotic aftermath of FTX’s collapse, as much of the crypto industry was still sifting through the wreckage, Armani Ferrante made a choice. With 88% of Backpack’s cash reserves locked up in the failed exchange, the rational move might have been to shut it all down. Instead, he doubled down.

“I think at the time, everybody thought Solana was more or less dead,” Ferrante recalled. “There was a ton of confusion, a ton of misinformation… but if crypto was going to exist, a world computer was going to exist. And if a world computer was going to exist, it was going to be built a lot like Solana.”

That conviction has driven Backpack’s evolution into a multi-faceted crypto platform spanning an exchange, a wallet, and even one of Solana's largest NFT projects, Mad Lads. If that sounds like an odd mix, Ferrante sees it as all part of the same mission: demonstrating the power of decentralized, trust-minimized systems.

Backpack’s exchange isn’t just another trading platform — it’s a deliberate attempt to fix some of the structural flaws that allowed FTX to implode in the first place. “FTX is an example of the perils of traditional finance,” Ferrante emphasized. “Crypto, blockchain technology, all of this is purpose-built literally to solve this problem.”

To that end, Backpack’s exchange set out from day one to integrate cryptographic proof-of-reserves and state transition verifiability, ensuring every transaction can be independently verified. “Every state transition is signed with a cryptographic key pair. You can always look at any snapshot of the ledger… There's no question that we can't answer with the core exchange ledger.”

That level of transparency stands in stark contrast to the opaque operations of most major exchanges, which Ferrante noted still operate their own internal market makers — essentially their own versions of Alameda — trading against users today. “This isn’t speculation. Everybody knows this.”

But if Backpack is designed to solve the trust problem, it’s also tackling another issue: usability. The exchange was born in part from frustration over Solana’s lack of centralized exchange support following FTX’s collapse. “At least especially when we started the exchange, no major centralized exchange was supporting Solana,” Ferrante said, noting that Coinbase is increasingly getting called out by Solana fans for not making things easier. "I think the entire industry views Coinbase with so much admiration and respect for everything that they've done for it, but you do have a member of the executive team that openly, really competes with Solana."

Coinbase has incubated its own Ethereum Layer-2 in Base, and even Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly mentioned increased efforts at the exchange to boost Solana support.

“From our point of view, it’s not our job to have preferential treatment, but to invest time and resources in projects that we believe are important for the world," Ferrante said.

But regardless if things are launched on Solana or on Base — both Backpack and Coinbase and any exchange, really, are always grappling with what to do with memecoins. On the one hand, as Ferrante explains, memecoins are frowned upon by many in the industry for devolving into pump and dumps — but on the other hand they may be necessary early primitives to demonstrate the soundness of exchange functionality.

That’s why Ferrante sees the real opportunity not just in crypto, but in bridging the gap between crypto and traditional finance. “The U.S. capital markets are the most trusted capital markets in the world. It turns out that’s a pretty good outcome,” he said. “And I think that is the contribution we’re trying to bring into crypto.”

That means expansion—internationally, into new asset classes, and into deeper regulatory compliance. “It’s that global presence that allows us to upgrade financial markets in a way that really has never been done before.”

It’s a long road, but for Ferrante, the path forward is clear: “Let’s go out and solve all of the hard problems… bring everybody together, and create this global hub of money and commerce in a way that never existed prior to the advent of blockchain technology.”

For a company that nearly died with FTX, that’s a bold vision. But if there’s one thing crypto has proven, it’s that narratives change fast. And this time, Ferrante is betting he’ll be writing the next one.

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