Armani Ferrante was involved in the early development of Solana's developer tool Anchor, later founding Backpack and MadLads. After experiencing financial losses during the Alameda/FTX period, he persisted in building a regulated exchange and self-custody wallet combination; the company chose a licensed path, expanding in places like Japan, and focusing on tokenized securities as its core business, emphasizing real redeemable shares rather than purely synthetic assets.

On the capital front, Backpack is investing resources into regulatory compliance, a single API, and liquidity for real shares across accounts, motivated by the goal of bringing traditional market structures on-chain to capture network effects; funding is shifting from pure crypto trading and speculation to securitization and global liquidity layers, while connecting users and company equity through mechanisms like the BP token.

This is similar to the early internet protocols becoming application aggregation layers, and is akin to payment infrastructures like Stripe expanding from single services to economic primitives; the current blockchain industry is in a phase of expanding from crypto-native asset dominance to integrating traditional economic market structures, with Solana attempting to occupy a unified settlement and aggregation position.

Essentially, this represents a restructuring of the industry chain: Solana is evolving from a high-performance execution environment to an aggregation layer that integrates traditional market structures, with mechanisms that leverage network effects to concentrate money and liquidity in a single shared state, allowing real assets to move seamlessly between brokerages and DeFi, thus shifting the financial industry chain from multi-chain fragmentation and closed exchanges to a unified on-chain market structure center.

ABAB News · Law of Cognition

Network effects are money, and the aggregation layer is the endpoint.
Integrating market structures is more valuable than inventing new assets.
A single API can bring the entire stock market on-chain.