Conversation Armani Ferrante: From the FTX Collapse to the Rise of Backpacks

Article: When Shift Happens

Compiled by: Plain-Speak Blockchain Community

In November 2022, the collapse of FTX was like a depth-charge explosion in the deep sea—it instantly wiped out years of credibility in the crypto industry, and it also made Armani Ferrante’s balance-sheet assets evaporate overnight by 90%. Up in the cruising altitude of ten thousand meters, facing an almost hopeless financial exam, this structural engineer deeply embedded in the Solana ecosystem didn’t choose to exit. Instead, he completed an ideology-style introspection about “who I am.”

In the ashes of that catastrophic disaster, a backpack quietly came into being. It’s not only a global trading platform that has broken through $420 billion in trading volume; it’s also Armani’s technical response to a “panopticon”-style modern surveillance regime. From the smooth path taken from Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley to the market gamble of Tokyo’s “sleeping giant”; from simple code to the community faith behind the crazy guys, in this interview Armani is revisiting—at deep depth—the hellish moment for the first time. This is not just a hardcore survival story of entrepreneurship. It’s also the ultimate prophecy of the 2026 wave of Tokenization of global financial assets. When your perception of reality becomes disconnected from the truth, do you choose to follow the current, or do you rebuild the rules on top of the ruins? The answer lies in this in-depth conversation spanning the boundary between philosophy and engineering.

The moment that defines the character: Surviving within the ashes from the FTX collapse

Host: Let’s rewind the clock back to that turbulent moment. When FTX collapsed, the Backpack was still a brand-new project, and you were in serious danger amid disaster. 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 digital figure that every entrepreneur would be interested in. At that time, we had $14.5 million on FTX—about 90% of our company’s balance-sheet assets and liabilities. When I was on a flight over the Lisbon plains, and I kept catching the flickering on-and-off Wi‑Fi through the aircraft screen and watching Crypto Twitter messages keep fermenting, the sense of reality started to crumble. If the rumors were true—later it turned out reality was even more brutal than the rumors—then my company was basically already dead.

In that airplane cabin at high altitude, the air was also thick with anxiety, filled with other peers who were attending crypto conferences. Without intending to, I found myself having an existential thought. I asked myself the most fundamental question: Armani, what kind of person are you really?

Are you the kind of person who gives up when hit by a destructive blow beyond your control and laments that fate is unfair? Or are you the kind of person who, no matter how heavy the adversity ahead is, will still choose to keep digging for life and fight to the end? Running a gas station on a corner—when facing extreme circumstances—the essence of what you do is the same. At that moment, I realized it was a defining moment for 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 inclination is definitely moving. But ironically, you previously had two points of overlap with Alameda Research (the company founded by SBF). Did this “close-up observation” give you more complicated feelings when facing the collapse later?

Armani Ferrante: It really was a remarkable bit of fate. In 2018, I had just left Apple, and I was deeply attracted by the open-source appeal of Ethereum and blockchain. Alameda was also hiring in Berkeley—engineering talent to build trading systems. I was there for three months, participating in early development. But I quickly realized that pure trading business wasn’t where my passion lay; I was more committed to building foundational protocols and applications.

The second overlap was in 2020. By then, FTX had accumulated momentum, and they invited me back to help drive the buildout of the Solana ecosystem. I wasn’t working inside FTX itself—I was writing infrastructure for the Solana network, such as early developer frameworks like Anchor, multi-signature wallets, and more. “Timber” Solana was like a blank sheet of paper—full of engineering challenges.

I need to clarify one thing—it was also the point I felt most deeply during the collapse: the huge disconnect between perceived reality and actual reality. When Solana dropped to $8, mainstream media and social platforms labeled it as the “FTX chain,” and people believed that SBF was gone. But as someone who knew the ground-level truth, I knew that Solana’s codebase, the validator network, and FTX’s financial situation were two different things. Strong nodes of a centralized network exist—it’s a resilient system that won’t disappear just because one party’s gathering collapses.

The Panopticon and Free Will: The philosophical undertone of crypto technology

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

Armani Ferrante: The panopticon (panopticon) was originally a prison model designed by Jeremy Bentham: guards in the central tower can monitor all the cells arranged in a ring, while prisoners loudly know whether they are being watched right now. This unjust form of surveillance leads prisoners to “self-monitor” and go along.

In the digital age, we’re actually living in a panopticon whose scope of surveillance is constantly expanding—by government, by large tech companies, and even by public ledgers, which record every transaction and every text message we make. If you acknowledge that privacy is a cornerstone of human beings and freedom, then many blockchain technologies involved are actually misleading in nature. Bitcoin and Ethereum’s public ledgers are completely transparent. In a sense, it’s easier to track a Bitcoin than it is to track cash.

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

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

In building Backpack, we’ve kept thinking about whether we’re adding bricks to this panopticon, or whether we’re using technical means to provide individuals with an inexpensive tool to contest for this kind of power. For ordinary people, they don’t generally see their bank balances. Our goal is to improve efficiency by leveraging crypto’s “atomicity” and “verifiability,” while tightly preserving individuals’ control over their 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” equal the “chip on your shoulder” you mentioned—the spark that motivates people like you to keep moving forward?

Armani Ferrante: I’m actually not comfortable overly romanticizing my struggle story. If I have to say what motivates me, it’s love for “creating” itself. I’m an engineer. In the products I use, I can see an idea turning from code into hundreds of things. FTX’s collapse did give me an opportunity to prove myself. But I’ve always believed that it’s not zero dollars in a bank account, but whether you manage to have enough resources to carry out experiments that are more interesting and more impactful.

Many people postpone happiness in life, thinking that once they’ve earned enough money and reached a certain milestone, they can start truly living. But this mindset of “postponing life” is the root of suffering. Today you can choose the kind of life you want—to be with interesting people, to solve difficult problems. This kind of immediate, process-based sense of satisfaction is the most effective food for fighting adversity.

The Tokenization Revolution in Finance: From “amateur hour” to foundational infrastructure

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

Armani Ferrante: Yes. If the previous crypto cycles were more about narratives, speculation, and the frenzy of meme coins, then now we’re entering the stage of “infrastructure finally being implemented.” Look at the 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 challenges of traditional finance: if you buy shares in an Apple company and settle them, you’re dealing with an extremely complex chain behind the scenes. From brokers to something like the omnibus—then to the Central Securities Depository (CSD)—each layer has to verify the details. This leads to settlement delays of T+2 or even longer. But on the blockchain, we can unify asset archiving, transaction logic, and fund settlement into a single “atomic operation.” This process of compressing deep learning time into a global finite state machine releases tremendous capital efficiency.

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

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

Backpack’s “unified margin account” breaks down these barriers between asset classes. If you hold high-quality Tokenized assets (whether tokenized government bonds, stocks, or crypto), you directly use them as collateral to borrow liquidity without needing to sell the assets and without triggering a taxable event. In the traditional world, this is a premium financial service that high-net-worth groups (ultra-high-net-worth groups) deserve to receive. What we do is to democratize this service through smart contracts and real-time risk engines, so ordinary users around the world can access it.

Host: This sounds like Backpack has become a global, regulated super-financial application.

Armani Ferrante: That’s right. We’re not just building a trading platform—we’re using a high-performance network like Solana to rebuild the structure of a modern market. Solana’s high TPS (transactions per second) isn’t only a technical metric—it means we can achieve real-time risk management. In traditional finance, if the market crashes, it may take hours or even days, which can trigger a chain reaction. But on Solana, we can complete hedging and settlement within milliseconds. This greatly reduces systemic risk, enabling higher leverage efficiency.

Strategic shift and the Japan opportunity: Why choose Tokyo?

Host: Since the goal is global, why did you move your headquarters and your life’s center of gravity 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 place in crypto history. As early as 2017, more than half of the world’s Bitcoin trading volume came from Japan. Even though, due to early hacking incidents, regulation became extremely tight, it’s precisely because of that that Japan has built a very mature and transparent regulatory framework.

We believe Japan is a “sleeping giant.” As the Cambodia government has clearly put forward that Web 3 be made part of the national strategy, and with potential tax policy reforms (from 55% down to around 20%), the vitality of this market is being reignited.

More importantly, the Japanese market has extremely high barriers. Because of the special requirements of language, culture, and compliance, U.S. licensing regulators (such as Coinbase, Gemini) find it difficult to set up directly here. For a team like Backpack—willing to go deep locally and respect regulation—this is a huge blue ocean. We’re not just looking for an office. We’re planting roots here and growing together with Japan’s financial ecosystem.

Host: Speaking of regulation, you once mentioned that back when FTX spent $800 million to buy licenses, yet you guys obtained a similar bundle of licenses at very small cost. Is there any secret in between?

Armani Ferrante: There’s no shortcut in regulation, but there’s a “late-mover advantage.” Many issues faced by older trading platforms are that they did years of unregulated business first, and then were forced to pivot to compliance. In the meantime, they accumulate large amounts of “compliance accounting” and architectural patches. To clean up those historical issues, they inevitably have to give up the legal audits and costs needed to make up for the gaps.

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

The power of culture: Mad Lads and the community bond

Host: We have to talk about Mad Lads. As the founder of a trading platform, you created one of the most influential NFT series on Solana. Back then, it looked like an unfocused side project, but now it seems to have become one of your core assets?

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

For me, NFTs are essentially a social text. No matter whether you’re in Tokyo, New York, or London—if you put a Mad Lad avatar on your Twitter, or speak up in Discord, you immediately find a group of people who share similar values. Mad Lads expresses a “don’t give up” spirit. It’s a cultural symbol of the Solana community that keeps building even in the darkest times.

This new culture has brought Backpack immense loyalty. At different stages, what you need isn’t just users, but “momentum”—those who understand your vision and are willing to stay with you to iterate the product together. Mad Lads gives us that sense of identity. It lets us always know who we’re serving as we build the product.

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

Armani Ferrante: Stay optimistic, stay curious. Most importantly, do the things that truly excite you.

The crypto industry is like a huge lab in an early stage. We’ll experience explosive growth, and we’ll also experience brutal failures like 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 time to build. If you can choose to stay in the game even under the threat of your asset custody going to zero, then you’ll find 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 future’s global infrastructure with our own hands. Don’t postpone your life to reach some vague milestone—start building now, start living now.

Host: Thank you, Armani. Your passion and your romantic view of engineering are very contagious. Thank you for, in an era full of variables, standing behind us and supporting our firm confidence.

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