Raoul Pal: The Journey Man Solana, Tokenized Stocks, and Backpack w/ Armani Ferrante | Raoul Pal The Journey Man
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Sep 24, 2026 
Armani Ferrante, founder of Backpack and Mad Lads, is a software engineer building crypto infrastructure on Solana. He discusses surviving FTX’s collapse, Backpack’s compliance-first approach, tokenized stocks, and bringing global finance on-chain. The conversation explores AI agents with financial agency, prediction markets, data economies, and crypto’s potential to become finance’s global API.
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Backpack Survived Losing Its Entire Runway
- Backpack lost $14.5 million, its entire runway, when FTX collapsed, while Solana faced widespread abandonment and funding pressure.
- Armani Ferrante and his team stayed because they believed crypto would reinvent finance and Solana could scale.
Crypto’s Next Growth Comes From Regulation
- Crypto’s next 100x growth will come from regulated adoption, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and integration with national financial systems.
- Backpack combines crypto-native products with licensing, banking, derivatives, and regulatory expertise across multiple countries.
Crypto’s Biggest Opportunity Is Regulated Finance
- Bringing regulated finance onchain unlocks products that decentralized protocols cannot offer alone, including derivatives and tokenized stocks.
- The central challenge is combining high-throughput blockchain infrastructure with licensing and compliance.