Backpack Launches 24/7 US Equity Trading for International Investors

**Armani Ferrante** (0:00)
What this story really kind of is pointing towards is, well, stable coins really being the technology to assert kind of the proliferation and the continued kind of dominance of the US dollar all around the world. And so in the exact same way that stable coins did this by tokenizing, you know, cash sitting in bank accounts and treasury bills, I fully expect the exact same thing to happen to stocks, right, because the US capital market is, you know, the envy of the world.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:34)
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Today, Backpack announced the launch of 24-7 trading of some US equities for international investors. Joining me now is Backpack CEO, Armani Ferrante. Hello.

**Armani Ferrante** (1:00)
Hey Jen, it's great to be here.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (1:02)
Yeah, great to have you here. As you announced this news, so just lay the foundation for me super quick. What equities are going to be available and who are they going to be available to?

**Armani Ferrante** (1:10)
Yeah. We're super excited to go live with 24-7 trading on the Backpack brokerage today. I mean, a lot of people know us for going live with the SpaceX IPO on Solana where SpaceX went live on a Friday, markets close at the end of the day and very quickly became the most highly traded assets on the Solana network. And in fact, probably the most high-volume and deeply liquid markets over the weekend for SpaceX around the world. And we've been building this broader concept of a neo brokerage for quite some time now.
And getting 24-7 trading live on the brokerage itself is really the next big milestone as we get ready to launch symbols like SpaceX, Micron Technology, SanDisk to our users internationally all around the world.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (2:01)
Something I know that folks have been wondering about since equities have become available to investors all over the world 24-7, is this, if I buy Micron at let's say 3 a.m. on a Sunday, when the NASDAQ is closed, whose shares am I buying? How does that work? And where does the price come from?

**Armani Ferrante** (2:21)
Yeah, it's a great question. So the shares are held natively inside of a brokerage. So there's always this question when you're thinking about tokenized stocks or stocks more generally of what actually is the asset that you're buying. Is it a proper stock, a proper security entitlement, or is it some other thing? 24-7 trading, just to set back for a moment, 24-7 trading in crypto has been around for quite some time. This is the key thing that tokenization brought into the world.
If you look at what the asset issuers are doing for tokenized stocks right now, what they're really doing is they're putting shares inside of a brokerage. They're then wrapping those shares and creating a completely new security. That new security isn't necessarily fungible with the underlying security entitlements, and it will have different properties. You'll have different legal rights associated with them. A lot of them are cash settled, and so they're more akin to something like a CFD than a genuine stock.
And so you have these two different worlds of two different asset types where you go back and forth. They're not fungible. You might have taxable events when you're going back and forth between them, and they're really these derivatives or these synthetic assets that are built to really provide price exposure or an economic approximation to the underlying securities. But they're really more akin to like derivatives than they are the actual stock. And so what we're doing with the brokerage is, we have a traditional brokerage that 24-5, it trades through NASDAQ or the overnight venues or whatever it might be in traditional finance. And as those shares accumulate inside of the brokerage, whether it's through market makers, retail traders or other participants on the platform, those folks can continue to trade over the weekends even as markets close. But the beauty of our system is we built this brokerage from the ground up with blockchain rails and mine. And so step one of this was all about getting the liquidity going and getting markets going in DeFi on Solana, where we've been listing all the symbols that we've talked about and more, bot, DRAM and so on and so forth, and we'll continue to do that on Solana.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (4:27)
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