Backpack founder and CEO Armani Ferrante has been retelling the story in recent public appearances: when FTX — then one of crypto's largest exchanges — imploded in November 2022, roughly 90% of Backpack's capital was parked on the platform. The account is not the usual founder origin myth. It carries weight now because Backpack is no longer a fledgling Solana wallet — it is a regulated exchange that owns what used to be FTX Europe.

The Hole FTX Left

Research underpinning Ferrante's comments puts the loss at approximately $14.5 million, a figure representing somewhere between 88% and 90% of Backpack's operating capital at the time.

The timing made the hit 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 ultimately proved to be one and the same troubled ship — exactly the kind of entanglement the 2022 failure dragged into the open.

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 relied on support from its community to resume operations after the collapse, then launched an exchange in beta in 2023. Early 2024 brought a $17 million Series A round — a meaningful vote of confidence for a company that had lost most of its capital barely over a year earlier.

The headline move came in January 2025, when Backpack acquired FTX Europe for $32.7 million. The acquisition included a MiFID II license — the European Union framework that governs investment services across the bloc — along with 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 positions itself squarely around avoiding FTX's mistakes, emphasizing regulatory compliance, decentralized architecture, and user control as core design principles. One concrete example is independent verification nodes for balances: users and third parties can check that funds are actually where the exchange says they are. That is a direct response to the FTX failure, in which customer balances shown on screen did not match the assets held in reality — the gap that turned verifiable reserves into a baseline trust question for the exchange industry.

The company has also signaled plans to expand into tokenized equities on Solana, an offering that would put share-like instruments on-chain.

What It 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 administering their claims process is itself a survivor of the same collapse that created those claims.

For the broader exchange landscape, the MiFID II license is the most strategically valuable piece. Regulated access to European users is difficult to obtain from scratch, and Backpack effectively secured it through acquisition rather than organic build-out.

The episode also underscores the risks of concentrated custody. A founder with insider knowledge of the ecosystem — and a prior background at Alameda Research — still kept about 90% of his company's capital in a single venue. As the story illustrates, spreading holdings across platforms, or holding assets in self-custody, can be the difference between an inconvenience and a near-fatal blow.

Where the story goes next is largely signposted by the company itself: how the claims process for around 110,000 European customers unfolds under Backpack's administration, and whether the signaled tokenized equities rollout on Solana takes shape. Both are concrete, trackable developments.