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Backpack TGE Live
Recorded: March 23, 2026 Duration: 0:53:54Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think we're live. Armani, welcome, sir, and congratulations on the start of a very big week indeed for you. TGE, this is a big moment. Congratulations, sir. Walk us through a little bit about what you're feeling, what's going through your mind right now. This is a monumental moment.
a monumental moment. Well, firstly, thanks for having me, Ramsey. Glad to be here. What am I
feeling right now? I mean, I'm feeling like, let's get the token out and get back to building,
to be honest. That's kind of the way I'm feeling. There's so much that we're working on right now,
so much, I think, to be excited about, whether it's Backpack, Solana, the token, the industry
at large. There's a long road ahead of us, and it's never been a better time to, the token, the industry at large, there's a long road ahead of us.
And it's never been a better time to, I think, get a token out into the public and to get
to the next milestones.
Absolutely.
All right.
That's really good to hear.
And I know, Armani, you've held this ethos for a long time, really, ever since you've
stepped foot into the industry.
And I know a lot of people know you from Backpack,
but you've done a number of things, both within Solana and outside of it.
I would love to just give you some space to talk a little bit about your history,
the team's history, how you guys got to this moment,
and sort of what kind of made that possible.
Yeah, I mean, you can't talk about the history of Backpack without
talking about the history of, I guess, you know, coming into Solana back in, you know, early 2020,
September 2020, I had the privilege of coming into the ecosystem, I got to meet, obviously,
Anatoli and Raj and a bunch of folks at Solana Labs, and really had the privilege of working
on a lot of the early projects on the network, right?
Back in those days, it was really just a message bus,
SBL tokens.
There wasn't even the associated token account standard
back then.
And it really had the privilege on working on,
you know, anything and everything you can imagine.
Everything from obviously Serum
and the first central limit order book on Solana. I think that was probably the first central limit order book
on any blockchain ever. Solana was really the first L1 that was actually able to have enough
scale to sustain at least the early versions of a club to, you know, building out Anchor and the
first kind of developer framework on the network to, you know,
you know, being able to participate in some of the early DAOs and, you know, building the first multi-sig and all these kind of, you know, nooks and crannies of a young burgeoning blockchain
network. And that was an incredible time, right? Back when Solana was, I mean, I hate talking about
price, but it was, you know, in the single digits and cents
and, you know, seeing that rise in 2020 and 2021
and ultimately the fall in 2022
and sticking with the ecosystem
and just genuinely believing in everything
that, you know, the folks at Foundation Labs
and how Anza were working on
and the re-rise from the ashes into what I would
describe one of the wonders of modern computing, that is the Solana network. And Backpack was
really born off of the back of that journey and a lot of that work where, you know, going back to 2022, we started as a self custodial wallet.
This was kind of the early days of, of, of Solana mobile.
The kind of, I think proof of concept of Solana had been proven.
The ecosystem had been really born even before the collapse of FTX.
And I really felt compelled to start working
not at the developer ecosystem level,
but to actually start building apps
to think about consumer adoption
and the next phase of not just Lawn and Network,
but the crypto industry at large.
And so that kind of what segued us
into building the backpack wallet.
And that was really kind of the genesis of the company,
you know, far kind of before, you know, evolving to what we are today.
Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's pretty clear, right? Like when you
look at the Backpack team's history, when you look at the product itself today,
it's quite representative of work that's been done iteratively over the last few years.
And so I want to kind of dive into this a little bit further. You've mentioned a number of times
some of the products that are coming up. We've spoken offline about them, super exciting stuff.
And I think it's while the product today and the team's composition today is representative
of kind of all the work, the incredible work that's been done in the past, you really do seem to be standing at the precipice of where DeFi is heading
and kind of this like C DeFi world evolving into something that can actually function at scale.
So we would love to understand just a little bit more about the roadmap ahead, perhaps how the
token fits into that. I know that there's something a
little bit different about the TG. It's not just a regular token launch. There's a lot of ways we
can take this question. But yeah, I would love to start off just by understanding sort of in your
view, what the next year or two, three looks like for Backpack and perhaps where the token fits into that story. So let's start by just taking a look at crypto today, right?
I think what we've seen over the past decade is an incredible evolution of the frontier
of distributed systems really being built out in real time and this constant push and
pull of experimentation happening on Solana, Ethereum, and all the
networks that kind of came out of the smart contract platform wars, if you want to call
it at that.
I think where a lot of the industry is standing today is kind of this question of what's next.
And I think crypto and blockchain has always been categorized as this solution looking for a problem. But that criticism has always been clearly misguided to me because the problem is super clear.
know peer-to-peer electronic cash and crypto but it's always been uh uh uh how do we build uh uh
you know the next you know uh a generation of financial systems and you know in the context
of solana i think a lot of people uh uh have not only been building kind of great products but
there's this meme coin mania that happened, right? And the rise and fall of meme
coins over the last cycle. And meme coins really were the first test, right? Meme coins, they're a
toy, right? It's not, I think, why I'm here in Solana. It's not why I'm here building. It's an
important, I think, part of, I think, the birth of a lot of these
systems to use the Chris, I think it's Chris Dixon that coined the term that the next big
thing starts looking out like a toy. But, you know, in some fundamental sense, like who cares
about the price of a meme coin? Like, honestly, like if that's like what we're all here for,
like we should all just like pick up our bags and like go into AI, right? That's not like
fundamentally interesting or useful for the world.
And I think a lot of people in Solana might come at me for saying that, but that's just like the
truth, right? Like if that's the case, you know, if we're all just going to be like speculating on
air and, you know, building these DeFi projects that just farm their own token and emit other
vegetable tokens that go into a vault
that then farm more of the same vegetable token and you have this circular Oris-Boris
of a DeFi ecosystem, then I think we're all kind of wasting our time here. I firmly don't believe
that's what's happening. And I think the world is waking up to this fact. And you see it, I think the world is waking up to this fact.
And you see it, I think, in a very clear distinction when you talk to crypto people, which are maximally bearish right now, especially given the markets.
And you contrast that against the people on Wall Street who are maximally bullish and maximally excited about the future of crypto and finance, whether you're talking to institutions, hedge funds, high-frequency
trading firms, even regulators, congresspeople, you name it.
And it's ultimately because finance, it's like accounting software, right?
sense is it's like accounting software right accounting is not useful in a vacuum right it's
Accounting is not useful in a vacuum, right?
only useful in the context of real world goods and services right the real economy right people that
are uh you know you have farmers that are harvesting uh a corn you have people building
buildings and and giving people homes and offices to to live and and build in uh you have you know
folks building cars and rocket ships like that is what finance is for.
It's for not just accounting, but capital formation and creating market structure
for the real world economy to flourish all around the world. And the big step that we are taking as
a collective industry, and I think Solana is certainly at the forefront of this, is taking this, you know, this testbed of this parallel economy that's been built
in various ways and shapes and forms over the past 10 years, and starting to embed that into
the backbone of the real economy. And this is happening as the technology is now becoming ready,
as the products and builders are ready to make that leap. how powerful and transformative this technology is to reimagine all assets and all pieces of value
all around the world. And that's where we're going, right? Anything that has a notional value
attached to it, whether it's something as simple as a stable coin to something as I think promising
as a security and a stock to things that are a little further
out like real estate. It's going to be every piece of value all around the world that's
put into tokenized form as the canonical file format, if you want to use that metaphor,
placed on the public blockchains like Solana and reinventing a market structure in every country around the world. And that is the thing that gets
me really excited. That is the thing that, you know, makes me proud to be working in this industry.
And I think that is the thing that is of, I think, original values of building
open, verifiable and permissionless systems that were born out of Bitcoin and now kind of have
evolved into things like Zcash. It's like this convergence of things coming together to genuinely
kind of flip the current economy upside down and
say, no, this is a better way of doing things.
And it's genuinely going to change the world.
And so that's like my core kind of a view.
And I think if you look at how we've been building the company and how we've been building
the product, it's really kind of about setting the stage for this big leap
that the industry is going to make into kind of, you know, the quote unquote real world,
whether it's things like, you know, stablecoin legislation, the Genius Act in the US to things
like, you know, the CFTC and the SEC being very clear about wanting to bring security markets on chain and bringing perps onshore.
And so this is the core reason why we took the path that we took, right? So FTX collapsed.
There was a bunch of kind of exchanges that popped up. Backpack was really the one and only
exchange done with the regulated path. You can count them on one hand and there's one finger and it's basically
backpack. Right. And it's because it's extremely hard to do.
It's, you know, something that has taken, you know, multiple years.
I've been living in Japan for three years alone.
And it wasn't because I like the food in Tokyo.
I do love living here in Tokyo.
It's because we wanted to
work very closely with the regulator here so that we can do things like get a Japanese bank account,
so that we can do things like be on the frontier of bringing, you know, Solana and the crypto kind
of world into kind of, you know, the backbone of the Japanese market. That's true in Japan,
it's true in Europe, and it's certainly true in the US, especially with all the political tailwinds that you're seeing kind of over there right now.
And, you know, the question is, okay, like, that's all fine and dandy.
But what do I, what does that actually mean when you, when you look at the product?
And what is like the future of, of, of DeFi and Solana and Backpack actually look like in this world?
And I think one of my favorite kind of examples of this
is a project like SuperState.
So SuperState, for the folks that don't know,
is a Solana native project.
They're on Solana and Ethereum,
and they are what is known as an SEC registered transfer agent,
which basically means that they define the canonical record
of who owns what stocks for any company.
And the reason why SuperState is so important
is because it is bringing the world back into the original form factor of the stock certificate. So
this is maybe a whole other rabbit hole. And I know we weren't going to talk for very long,
but it's worth talking about. So let me explain this. So there's this very rich history of the evolution of US capital markets,
specifically in the context of stocks and securities,
where going back to the late 60s and the early 70s,
there was literally something called the paperwork crisis.
And basically what happened was stock volumes,
trading volumes just kept going up.
And there was what affected to be basically like a denial of service attack,
like a DDoS attack on just the logistics of trading stocks
because you have millions of dollars of trading volume going back and forth.
People like standing on the trading floor screaming back and forth or whatever.
And it just became infeasible to trade more and more stocks when you have a physical piece of paper that says you own the stock. And so there was this
and a combination with a bunch of other things that were happening at the time that caused people
to question the status quo. So things that were happening, for example, was a bunch of fraud.
When you have a piece of paper that says you own the stock, you can literally just like
forge the piece of paper. You know, Ramsey owns the stock, but I could actually say, no,
just kidding, Armani owns the stock. And I just like photocopy it and just like, you know,
write my name on it or whatever, right? There was all sorts of fraud. There was, you know,
burglary, theft, tax evasion. Congress came in, they created legislation and basically said,
okay, this is a problem. We need to fix it. The regulators had a mandate to create trust in the markets, things like
insider trading, things like market surveillance, and even things as simple as the fact that
companies need to know who the actual shareholders of their companies are. These are all things that
are mandated by law. And so what happened at that time is it basically gave birth to the
rise of DTCC, right? So DTCC is basically this other kind of, I guess, company that also determines
who owns all the stocks in the world. And basically all the broker dealers basically hook up into DCCC
and they determine, okay, this is who owns all the stock and all the margin counts for all the
brokers around the world. And so there was this very
rich evolution away from stock certificates and this bearer asset to this, you know, DTCC centric
model where you had this intermediated financial system that all became electronic and kind of
ushered in the next wave of capital markets in the US. And that's basically what we
have today. And, you know, I think that has gone extremely far. But when you start looking into
the US stock market, several different issues start coming to life. And I think there's this
incredible story with Dole Food that really kind of exemplifies the issues that come up with electronic
stocks as it exists today. So there's this company, Dole Foods, it's a publicly traded company.
And going back to, I think it was like 2013, the CEO comes along and he says, okay, I'm going to
take Dole Food private. So he offers to all the shareholders, hey, I'm going to buy Dole Food private. And so he offers, you know, to all the shareholders,
hey, I'm going to buy you out at $13 a share. And the shareholders get a whiff of this and
they ask the question, are you, do you know something? I don't know, right? Why is it $13
a share and why is it not more? And so the shareholders sue. The shareholders sue,
they go to the courts and the courts eventually ruled in favor of the shareholders. And they instructed the company or
the CEO to pay an additional two or so dollars extra per share. And there was about 39 million
shares outstanding at the time. So that's an additional $80 million that the shareholders
got. But the interesting thing that happened was when the shareholder showed up, there was more
than 39 million shares that showed up. There was something on the order of like 46, 47, I don't
know the exact number of million shares that showed up. So there was more shareholders that
showed up to claim their extra dollars than was actually recorded on the books of the company.
And as you can imagine, this is a huge problem, right?
It's like, you know, you're telling me
there's this like $80 million that's gonna be distributed.
Who does it go to?
And is that even enough, right?
And this problem is a direct consequence
of the intermediated financial kind of structure
that emerged out of that paperwork crisis, right?
When you go buy and sell a stock
on like something like Robinhood or your favorite broker,
you're going through all these different parties and introducing broker,
an executing broker, clearing broker. Maybe you get filled on NASDAQ or something. After that,
you have T plus one settlement for updating DTCC's ledger. And then underneath all of that,
you have the transfer agent. And so what things like Solana do, what things like SuperState 2,
and the promise of blockchains is the moment you have this
new magical database technology that nobody controls, but everybody can collectively look
at and say, this data is correct. You can collapse all of this in total structure into a single
atomic state transition, right? When all the stock in the world is sitting on Solana, you no longer need this intermediated structure. You now have the perfect canonical record of who owns all the
stocks in the world that can be transferred, settled, and traded anywhere around the world
in real time, no matter what country you're in, and maintaining all of the design constraints
and integrity guarantees that game rise out of that paperwork crisis with all the rules and regulations and things of that nature.
And so going back to SuperState, the reason why I'm so excited about SuperState is because it collapses all of this into a single record.
You have the transfer agent, you have the blockchain, I have a token that says I own the asset, and the world went from bearer instruments and SOC certificates to an intermediated model with DTCC.
And now it's going back to the bearer instrument inside of the in the form factor of the token.
And then you might ask the question, OK, like, why do I actually care about the bearer instrument beyond this, like Dole Foods example?
That's like really interesting, Armani. But like, what more do I get?
your money, but like, what more do I get? And if the Dole Foods example didn't kind of convince you
enough, then it's worth explaining how margin is going to completely change once you get into this
world of bear instruments as collateral. So, you know, how do margin calls and margin accounts
work in like broker dealers around the world? You know, you buy Apple stock on margin and your
E-Trade account or whatever, maybe the price goes down, you get margin called and you have 24 hours or whatever to deposit more money into the exchange. And if
you don't do it, they margin call you, they liquidate you. If it's not enough money, they'll
go after your mortgage, they'll go after your bank account, they'll go after... It's inherently
a system that does not have trust. And the core difference between that and crypto margin systems
and crypto exchanges, whether it's DeFi or Binance, is that it's trust minimized in the risk
engine, right? Everything is fully collateralized, whether it's Aave or Perps on Binance, where
when you don't actually have to go after people outside of the system, you can have much more kind of, you know, much more liquid markets where you can aggregate capital from untrusted sources all around the world.
And this is exemplified in the PERP, where the PERP is really the first example of a real-time risk management system, a real-time margin system that can liquidate collateral in real time, where you have these incredibly liquid markets now that do over a hundred
billion in trading volume every day.
And it was really the stable coin that came around as the primary example of elite collateral
for a real-time risk engine.
And now, as tokenized stocks are slowly becoming a thing. And as kind of the SEC
brings like the US capital markets kind of on chain, as tokenized stocks start to kind of take
over modern finance, you move into this world where you now have new asset as collateral,
which is not just the stable coin, but now you have portfolio margining with equities that is,
you know, the next step function improvement in margin and risk
management for kind of these modern margin systems that kind of have been being kind of tested and
built out in the crypto world. And that is like the big transformative thing that's going to happen
to every exchange, every broker dealer, whether it's crypto or CeFi, and it's all created off of the
back of the public blockchain. And so this is like the thing that I think gets me really excited.
And it's a big reason why we built Backpack and the way we built it, right? Where, you know,
we're a regulated exchange. We're really focused on not just crypto as a technology, but also
regulated assets with regulated market structure
and regulated counterparties so that we can bring this evolution into the world. And so this is kind of a big part of what we're working on right now and kind of a big part of the product roadmap,
whether it's SuperState on Solana or kind of, you know, tapping into traditional capital markets and
bringing that on chain. So it's an incredible change that's like, you know, we're in the
middle of. And it's one of the reasons why I've never been more excited to kind of be
building in crypto, irrespective of where the market is today.
Yeah, I mean, covered a lot there, but I think incredibly valuable. And every time we speak, Armani, I feel like I learn a thousand new things.
But this notion of disintermediation is actually incredibly salient.
We did a thought experiment here at the foundation where we were assessing the kind of effective cost rate for a equity through the traditional rails.
And then perhaps an equity that would have been entirely tokenized
and distributed through like a super state, for example.
The result is pretty staggering.
It's something like 288 times more expensive
because of all the intermediaries
and the intermediary layers in a traditional context
as compared to what we could potentially build on Solana.
So a lot of opportunity here, as you said.
I know you're also focused on some other product verticals as well.
I think you guys are doing some stuff in the prediction space.
Would love to just get your thoughts on sort of the auxiliary or complementary products
that you're pushing forward for Backpack as well.
I think the two biggest problems in prediction markets is
the first big one is just liquidity. So I think prediction markets right now, they're kind of like
where crypto exchanges were in 2017, where they're super exciting. It's a wild west. You know,
there's issues that happen seemingly every other week, namely with resolutions. But people know
that they're going to be huge. The prediction
market space is going to 10x easily from here over the next one or two years. Volumes just rise and
rise every day. Calci and Polymarket have really been leading the way there as pioneers to bring
those products mainstream. But the exchanges are still very nascent, at least relative to the margin trading and
perps platforms that have really been growing over the past 10 or so years
in the crypto space, the Binances and OKExs of the world. And I think one of the key
kind of issues is just capital efficiency in the context of
prediction market, right? If, for example, you want to bet on who's going to be the, you know,
the winner of or the nominee for, you know, the 2008 kind of democratic presidential kind of
nominee, you might have the answer, right? You might be right, right? You might have some,
you know, 10% edge on a bet, but you don't want to lock up your capital for, you know, the answer, right? You might be right. You might have some 10% edge on a bet,
but you don't want to lock up your capital for two years, right? It's like, I might have the
answer, but I'm still not going to make the bet because I put my assets into it, but the opportunity
costs of those dollars sitting there is just too high. And so I think one of the big improvements
to make to prediction markets is simply just solving that problem, right?
Where you can introduce portfolio margining and cross collateral into the prediction market kind of structure to be able to make bets while still maintaining exposure to other assets. portfolio, whether it's spot, spot margin, bar lending, prediction markets, perpetual futures,
stocks, crypto, fiat, you name it, all in a single unified portfolio. And so, you know,
Backpack is really kind of, you know, exchange that I think, I mean, a lot of our users kind of
know and love us for our margin system. We were really kind of one of the first, if not the first
kind of centralized exchange to bring a lot of the DeFi primitives into the context of like a regulated market,
things like, you know, borrow lending and cross-margining that and with perps.
And so applying that concept to prediction markets is something that I think is really exciting.
And that will be, I think, at least the only one that I'm aware of that is kind of serving that product on the market today.
So I think the prediction market space is super exciting.
Capital efficiency is a big issue.
And in theory, that kind of leads to deeper, more liquid markets, more volume
and more robust price discovery.
So yeah, there's a ton that we're working on on that front as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's incredibly exciting.
And I know that, you know, like while we're on this notion of all assets,
all potential primitives being tradable and accessible through one network, and that being
Solana, I wanted to get your thoughts. I know you're working a little bit with them,
and we'll hear from them in a little bit as well on the work that Sunrise is doing in terms of
trying to onboard the universe of
tradable assets that are already out there, you know, namely crypto.
But again, we'll get into it in a little bit.
I think there's some plans for some other asset types.
But yeah, I would love to just get your thoughts on what's been going on there.
Yeah, I mean, I think for us, there is a ton of interesting kind of stuff being birthed
in the crypto ecosystem right now. But, you know, if there's one network that you need to be on,
it's Solana. And so, you know, really kind of, you know, excited to work with Sunrise. I know
they're doing a bunch of work on their end to provide liquidity pools
and make markets in the kind of salon of DeFi space. But I think kind of the global market
structure that has been kind of being iterated on over the past several years is really kind
of starting to emerge with really deep and really competitive on-chain capital markets.
to emerge with really deep and really competitive on chain capital markets.
And so I think if you're a crypto project, you've got to be supporting
kind of the Solana network and you've got, you know, there's no better place
to kind of go to market than on, I think, you know,
what I would describe as the most kind of liquid and scalable
DeFi market in the world.
Awesome.
Well, Armani, thank you again for the insightful discussion.
Really excited to see what Backback puts out
in the near future and then the congratulations again
on the TGE incredible moments.
And yeah, just really excited for you guys.
Yeah, thanks so much, Ramsey, appreciate it. Thank you. you And we're back. We are back. Saeed, welcome to the pod.
Good to have you, man.
I don't know if you caught any of our chat with Armani,
but I hear that you and him go way back.
Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, at least five years.
Yeah, it's been...
I've known him for quite a a while i first met him at
the first breakpoint no way so yeah yeah so the first breakpoint i think that was in 21.
it was a very it was a very special time because i think it was the first time that most people who were traveling to that conference
had like traveled post breakpoint or post covid um and so there was just just magic in the air
uh everyone had just not traveled for like two years um everyone had met each other online
during that period of time so everyone who was building on
Solana and it was very early in those days um I mean relative to now maybe not relative to
Solana's entire history but um but yeah it was just you had met all these people online
you had no idea who they were uh most people were not doxxed so you were just talking to you know
a PFP with with some with with a name and you had kind of built these relationships with people that
you really had no idea who they were and so in in that first breakpoint, like everyone had kind of met.
There was this small hacker house that was kind of a side event that's a couple of people have put together.
And that's where I met him. And, you know, it was just really cool to see some of the people who are building really cool stuff within this space.
And he was focused on trading on chain.
You know, he was contributing.
Yeah, he was focused on trading in a time where many people kind of said it was impossible
to build clobbs on chain, impossible to build order books on chain.
chain it was just too slow it was just too complicated and uh you know he was probably at
It was just too slow.
It was just too complicated.
the at the forefront of that you know five years ago um and uh yeah that that that was that was the
first time i met him that's awesome and i know a lot of a lot of listeners maybe know you from
your recent work with sunrise and we'll get into a little bit more about the Sunrise product in a bit.
But I know you've done a number of things, both in and out of the Solana ecosystem, not too dissimilar from Armani's path, but perhaps less consumer facing.
You want to give the folks just a brief overview of your pathway pathway into into fauna and what kind of brought
you um i guess to sunrise today yeah um so at the time i was i was working at an hft i was working
at jump and uh you know i was i was trying prior to that, I was just in traditional tech, kind of startups in that world.
And I had decided to make the pivot into crypto.
Like I wanted to, I've been following crypto since 2010, so really early.
But hadn't done it professionally, had only done it as someone who was kind of
really really down with the ethos really into you know kind of some of the meaningful
technological advancements that didn't exist before you know um following the projects going
through a couple cycles seeing what that looked like how the world was changing as a result of
the technology really keeping up with like bitcoin adoption you know how people were using the you know
these types of assets um how many wallets were created um but until like around 2020 um
i was like okay i really do think that this you know, I had thought I was late, you know, in 2020.
I thought I was really late because EFI summer had just happened.
And I was like, okay, that's it.
But I wanted to kind of shift into to work at a place like that because you could get a 10,000 foot view of the entire ecosystem, right? or blockchain, one type of technology, you really could meet and work with and understand
people across the spectrum from centralized services all the way to like the most niche
DeFi protocol on the most niche blockchain. And yeah, and then, you know, Solana just kept on,
you know, it was like one of those things that was like immediately obvious to anyone who had been doing anything on chain during DeFi summer and who was paying like crazy fees, you know, making a bunch of mistakes, not understanding how gas prices were calculated.
When Solana came out and really like started to have people building applications that you could use, that's when I, you know, I think that's one of the reasons why it's so important to me that this was like this was something that was
different that that definitely had the ability to solve a lot of the pain points that we were facing
in prior years um and then yeah i did a bunch of stuff throughout the solana ecosystem worked with
a bunch of teams early on was part of the first hackathon uh at solana that hacker house that i
was uh referencing in 21 there were no hacker houses
prior to that and the success of that one got me really excited to like contribute to that effort
and and so i was a part of that entire like you know um you know like the one right after it was
the miami hackathon that we did uh and again it was just a bunch of people that loosely found a venue.
I remember my responsibility was to get monitors.
I was in Chicago calling places in Miami where we could get 100, 150 monitors delivered to this location
so that all the builders could meet up there and kind of work out in a
similar environment that that we had uh in in that first break point and then it just kept on kind of
snowballing into uh kind of the famous hacker hacker house uh kit you know um series that that
ended up really drawing a lot of people into the ecosystem. And I was lucky to be a part of, you know, in a small way, a part of those hacker houses
and helping sponsor them, helping kind of do whatever was needed to be done to get them
off the ground.
And I saw a lot of value in that.
Yeah.
No, it's, I think that's pretty awesome.
And generally speaking, I think very reminiscent of Armani's path to Solana as well.
I think arguably a lot of our paths to the ecosystem is we start with a kind of a thousand foot view, as you said,
and it becomes quite clear very quickly that, you know, there's very specific tradeoffs that have to be made when you're building
a decentralized network.
And the trade-offs that Solana made were to the betterment of the kind of trader or the
trading ecosystem, trader experience.
And ultimately, I think that's what's made Sunrise or allowed Sunrise to be so successful.
This kind of this notion that, you know, all assets, one chain, we've been preaching this for a while.
I mean, it even goes back to Tully's initial inspiration of decentralized NASDAQ.
And we'd love to just get your thoughts a little bit.
I'm happy to share also what the foundation is doing and what the plans are in so far as
it pertains to Sunrise and kind of trying to
onboard the universe of both crypto native assets, but also different asset types like commodities,
et cetera. But yeah, I would love to just get your thoughts, you know, like Sunrise has done what,
six, seven launches now. Each of them, I think, kind of building on the last in terms of the
number of integrations, the speed to market, kind of the marketing hype,
the impressions that we're doing on Twitter.
Like what do you think kind of comes next
in the roadmap, the broader roadmap of Sunrise
and how can we kind of improve
on the process that we've built so far?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean that nasdaq on on blockchain um
that was very you know i wouldn't say controversial but it was very like um
enticing like it's an interesting to say and say like how is that even possible
like and and every year it gets more and more possible and then now we've kind of reached a time where
it's like it's it's going to happen right we're seeing all of the signals for that uh in order
for it to you know what that means to me is that okay you can trade any asset that uh that you
could trade on the nasdaq plus a whole bunch more that you can't trade on nasdaq with the same kind of
uh liquidity and speed and and quality of execution that you could uh on nasdaq right like um
that's kind of how i view that and i think it's still very it's hard to do that it's hard to
realize that because it's not just a technological problem.
It's a bunch of different variables, right? And so for us, I think what we've tried to do,
you know, over this short period of time is really understand how different markets form,
you know, whether it's existing markets, whether it's, you know, brand new TGEs, whether it's different asset types.
You know, we had done a couple of firsts, right? First non-native asset to do, you know, to beat sexes and be able to launch on minute one.
You know, clearly proved that we can do that, even though that is a hard task, had never been done before in any kind of meaningful way right um launching existing assets that are non-native launching
native assets in a way that you know kind of tested the part of the um of uh you know of the
of the flow that really focused on liquidity liquidity management um and making
sure that you had liquid markets form for these assets um yeah i mean so i yeah i mean definitely
like speaks to the notion that sunrise is is not just a bridge right this is far more than
than you know bringing um non-salana native assets to Solana traders.
This is, in my mind, it's like a token go to market machine.
It's like if you have a plan to be either TGE or like your token is,
you know, it has some interest or some native demand on Solana,
Sunrise is like absolutely the venue through which you can get the most distribution,
achieve the highest degree of integration on day one.
And I think Monad proved that.
We got something like $80 million of trading volume within the first 24 hours.
Hyperliquid, last I checked over the last month, is sitting at something like half a
billion dollars of trading volume in that
range um and competitive so that's like it's pretty clear that this is becoming way more
than just a brick this is uh yeah like i said go to market machine the the performance gap between
centralized exchanges and and what we're able to do on Solana, you know,
has really shrunk. And I think a lot of the team is focused on parts of the process that allows for
that gap to be eliminated almost entirely. The other process of that is to make sure that,
you know, you grow the user uh on solana and you work
really deeply with the large user base syncs within solana to be able to get them excited about a
launch um and so you know i i think i i agree i think i think that's that's something that is is
very unique i don't again i don't see this happening very many places,
and I don't think it's just Sunrise.
I think it's also structural.
Sunrise does a lot of the hard stuff in the back
and then continues to kind of look for problems
to solve a little bit higher up the stack.
And that's kind of where we are today,
where it's like we've proven out
the go-to-market function the ability to help create markets and kind of light the spark for
these markets in a way that we're you know generally very proud of um but we're not gonna
you know stop there we want to be able to scale i think that's that's going to be a big theme over
the next six to eight months is really how do we scale the amount of launches that we can take
not every asset is is the same right there there is a quality factor there but you know if your
goal is to support all assets and kind of make sure that you provide traders in the ecosystem
with the largest catalog of assets to trade and i mean like trade with a
certain level of quality then you have there's a bunch of other problems you have to solve as well
so you can't just um work with the highest quality assets you have to be able to open up a
permissionless way for everyone to to come and and and and and compete within the Solana ecosystem. So we're definitely focused on that.
Yeah, I completely agree. And as I alluded to earlier, I think Sunrise is something that can
absolutely be used for assets that are not just crypto native. And so I know we have some plans
internally, you guys have plans to kind of bridge out,
maybe look into commodities, some other asset types.
Would love to just get your thoughts
on the broader spectrum of tradable assets on Solana.
What excites you today?
And what do you think we can be doing
that as an ecosystem is differentiated
from what anyone know anyone else
can bring to market right now i think obviously like um there's there's a hole in the perps market
on on solana i think this is very obvious to a lot of people in the in the ecosystem there are good
perps products on solana but the speed at which they can support sunrise
listings is very important to us and i think very important to to our user base um and so we want
to see people trading commodities we want to see people trading um a lot of these non-crypto native
assets on chain and kind of taking taking advantage of all of the benefits that we do have in this ecosystem.
But it requires a lot of effort.
And so we're trying to work with partners,
really anyone in the ecosystem who is, you know,
pushing forward ahead with a, you know,
who's being aggressive when it comes to that stuff,
who's able to list quickly, who's able to support,
who's able to do the right things in terms of attracting the right types of flow and traders to be able to support these markets. I think these are huge markets.
If you get them right, I think it's an important thing. And for us, it's super important. So
commodities are a big one. Obviously,
we're seeing how many people are trading oil on chain. Now it's the highest that it's ever been
ever. I mean, there's no reason why that shouldn't be something that we can help unlock for this
ecosystem. Same goes for commodities in general. Same goes for RWAs, same goes for tokenized assets.
I think especially in bear markets, it's almost like this, I don't know, anti-fragile strategy for the Solana ecosystem where it's like maybe people are kind of like, not as excited and embarrassed for trading crypto native, but they want to trade trad assets or RWA assets.
And so I think it's a good strategy to make sure your ecosystem has both.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I think limiting the subset of tradable assets to just the majors
plus all of the native assets that are listed in your ecosystem
is incredibly limiting um and absolutely
like not representative of what the the like marginal defy user wants um it's very clear like
you said the demand for commodity perps equity perps um you know even like uh less sexy markets
like fx right these things are all all absolutely gaining a ton of traction on
chain. And like, I think as the ecosystem matures, we will see this convergence of maturity,
both from the types of primitives that people want to interact with, as well as the assets
that they are trading. But I think that's is kind of a natural evolution of the ecosystem.
And obviously glad to have Sunrise in our courts to help issue this next class of assets
to the ecosystem, which I think is really the most powerful thing there. It's a single
source of truth. It's a point of reference. And I think it's like a really powerful coordination effort that you guys have done.
So, yeah, obviously very appreciative of all the work, say, you and your team have done for the ecosystem and we'll continue to do together.
Yeah, lots, lots more to go.
Honestly, you know, we couldn't have done it without, you know, this ecosystem and the Solana Foundation support in terms of just wanting to take risks, wanting to make sure you back people who are building cool stuff.
You know, I can't express how important that is and kind of gave us the confidence to continue down this path and kind of moments where we're like, can we do this at scale?
and kind of moments where we're like, can we do this at scale?
Can we do this in a big way?
So you guys have also, you know, been tremendous.
And I think that's just part of the culture here.
And everyone who's built here for a while understands how supportive,
how uniquely supportive the Solana Foundation and the Solana team is
when it comes to people who are trying new stuff,
stuff that hasn't been done before,
stuff that's hard to explain where people are just like,
what is this?
Why does this matter?
You know, it seems like y'all are always willing
to work with the teams and give them advice
and kind of show them the way.
And I think we've benefited a lot from that from you guys.
So I want to also extend the thanks to you
and also to all the great teams on Solana who kind of bought into the vision as well and have helped us um kind of get to to
this spot because really they they're they're just as important to to helping spark these markets uh
as as we are so appreciate it to everyone yeah absolutely and what a what a great way to end the pod.
Sayed, appreciate you joining and let's get trading.
Let's get every asset on Solana.
