Backpack had about 90% of its capital on FTX at collapse, says founder

Backpack had about 90% of its capital parked on FTX when the exchange imploded in November 2022. Founder and CEO Armani Ferrante has been retelling that story publicly, and it is not the usual founder origin myth.

Ferrante’s account matters now because Backpack is no longer a scrappy Solana wallet. It is a regulated exchange that owns what used to be FTX Europe.

The hole FTX left

The research behind Ferrante’s comments puts the loss at approximately $14.5 million. That figure represents somewhere between 88% and 90% of Backpack’s operating capital at the time.

The timing made it worse. In September 2022, just weeks before the collapse, FTX Ventures co-led a $20 million funding round in Backpack. The investor and the custodian turned out to be the same sinking ship.

Ferrante discussed the exposure publicly during an October 19, 2026 interview. He has recounted the episode across several conversations, framing it as the defining crisis of the company’s early life.

Before founding Backpack, Ferrante worked at Alameda Research, the trading firm whose entanglement with FTX sat at the center of the 2022 failure. He is also known for building Anchor, a widely used development framework for Solana programs.

From near-zero to a regulated exchange

Backpack did not fold. The company leaned on community support to restart operations after the collapse, then launched an exchange in beta in 2023.

Early 2024 brought a $17 million Series A round. For a company that had lost most of its capital barely over a year earlier, that was a meaningful vote of confidence.

The real headline move came in January 2025. Backpack acquired FTX Europe for $32.7 million.

The acquisition came with a MiFID II license, the European Union framework that governs investment services across the bloc, and responsibility for claims tied to around 110,000 European customers of the old FTX entity.

By early to mid-2026, Backpack reported cumulative trading volume exceeding $420 billion and more than 420,000 verified users.

Building around the FTX lesson

Backpack’s pitch leans heavily on not repeating FTX’s mistakes. The company emphasizes regulatory compliance, decentralized architecture and user control as core design principles.

One concrete example: independent verification nodes for balances. The idea is that users and third parties can check that funds are actually where the exchange says they are. That is a direct answer to the FTX failure, where customer balances on screen did not match assets in reality.

The company has also signaled plans to expand into tokenized equities on Solana.

What this means for users and the market

For the roughly 110,000 European customers tied to FTX Europe claims, Backpack’s track record carries unusual weight. The company running their claims process is one that was itself a victim of the same collapse.

For the broader exchange landscape, the MiFID II license is the strategic prize. Regulated access to European users is hard to obtain from scratch, and Backpack effectively bought a shortcut through an acquisition.

Backpack’s founder had insider knowledge of the ecosystem and still kept about 90% of capital in one place. If a builder with an Alameda background got caught out, retail users should take note. Spreading custody across venues, or holding assets in self-custody, is what separates an inconvenience from a near-fatal blow.