Backpack Launches 24/7 US Equity Trading for International Investors

What this story really kind of is pointing towards is, well, stablecoins really being the technology to assert kind of the proliferation and the continued kind of dominance of the U.S. dollar all around the world. And so in the exact same way that stablecoins did this by tokenizing cash sitting in bank accounts and treasury bills, I fully expect the exact same thing to happen to stocks. Right. Because the U.S. capital market is the envy of the world. RealFi, a smarter stablecoin backed by real-world assets. Visit realfi.co. Lower rates, protected Bitcoin. Ledin's lowest loan rates ever. Check yours at ledin.io. Follow JPEG Trading on X for insights on crypto markets, liquidity, and DeFi. Today, Backpack announced the launch of 24-7 trading of some U.S. equities for international investors. Joining me now is Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante. Hello. Hey, Jen. It's great to be here. Yeah, great to have you here as you announce 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? Yeah, so we're super excited to go live with 24-7 trading on the Backpack Brokerage today. I mean, a lot of people kind of know us for going live with the SpaceX IPO on Solana, where SpaceX went live on a Friday, markets closed at the end of the day, And it very quickly became the most highly traded asset 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, you know, 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. Something I know that folks have been wondering about since equities have become available to investors all over the world 24-7 is this, you know, if I buy Micron at let say 3 a on a Sunday when the Nasdaq is closed Whose shares am I buying How does that work And where does the price come from Yeah it 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, generally of like what actually is the asset that you're buying? Right. Is it the proper stock, a proper security entitlement, or is it some other thing? Right. 24-7 trading, you know, just to step back for a moment, 24-7 trading in crypto has been around for quite some time. Right. This is like the key thing that tokenization brought into the world. And 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. And that new security isn't necessarily fungible with the underlying security entitlements. and it'll have different properties. You know, 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, you know, we have a traditional brokerage that, you know, 24-5, it trades through NASDAQ or, you know, 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 in mind. And so step one of this was all about getting the liquidity going and getting markets going and DeFi on Solana, where we've been listing all the symbols that we've talked about in more, bot, DRAM, and so on and so forth. And we'll continue to do that on Solana. Introducing RealFi a smarter stablecoin that backed by RealWorldAssets Launching Launching August 2026 join the waitlist at realfi Ledin just launched its lowest loan rates ever The larger the loan the lower the rate Plus, your Bitcoin stays protected, never lent out for interest. With auto top-ups, LTV alerts, and more, you're always in control. Learn more at ledin.io. JPEG Trading is a global proprietary trading firm operating across cryptocurrency and DeFi markets specializing in providing liquidity. Follow JPEG Trading on X for more. Well, let's dig a little bit deeper into that. You know, I know that with this announcement, users are going to be able to bridge between traditional securities and tokenized versions on Solana like you've just described. Talk to me about one of the most dominant use cases. You know, if I go to Backpack, I pick up a traditional security. What's the use case for me in having that available to me on the blockchain. Yeah. So, I mean, when you're in the context of the backpack brokerage or the backpack exchange, it's all about portfolio margining. This is, you know, real-time risk is really one of the key things that crypto, you know, market structure really brought into the world, right? Especially when you're talking about instruments like perpetual futures, where really kind of the name of the game is getting really good liquidity, but also bringing funding rates down. And this is something we've seen grow enormously over the past year, whether it's on Hyperliquid or Binance or any of these other venues that have really been taking off with their RWA perps. But the key issue with RWA perps right now, it's really funding where you're paying like, you know, a huge cost to keep it open interest open, you know, at any given time. And a big part of that solution is all about collateral. And it's all about the spot asset to actually be able to have it sitting inside of your portfolio so that you can use it for margin to be able to hedge and have these bona fide kind of risk transfers in the underlying market structure. When talking about Solana more broadly, right, you know, this is a story of, you know, not just having one server sitting in New York or Virginia or whatever, wherever kind of, you know, US capital markets traditionally live. It about global price discovery right It about DeFi really becoming a genuine place for capital markets to come on chain where you know down to everything from not just real risk management but real settlement global access I think one of the things that gets me really excited is the whole stablecoin story. If you look at the rise of stablecoins over the past several years, maybe from a domestic US perspective, it's about efficiency. It's about upgrading the existing financial system. But if you look internationally, the story is very different. The story is all about access. It's all about actually bringing U.S. dollars to people that have a huge demand for it, but don't actually have access to local USD banking rails. And the consequence of this has been Circle, Tether, becoming some of the largest holders of U.S. treasuries in the world. And what this story really kind of is pointing towards is, well, stablecoins really being the technology to assert kind of the proliferation and the continued kind of dominance of the U.S. dollar all around the world. And so in the exact same way that stable coins did this by tokenizing cash sitting in bank accounts and treasury bills, I fully expect the exact same thing to happen to stocks. Right. Because the U.S. capital market is the envy of the world. Everybody wants access to not just U.S. dollars, but they also want access to publicly traded companies in the U.S., right, whether it's SpaceX or the upcoming, you know, IPOs with Anthropic and OpenAI. And so I think it's one of the perhaps most exciting trends that we're seeing when you're talking about this whole kind of strategic conversation of how capital markets are going to grow from a U.S. perspective. You know, I love this quote that Jensen Huang from NVIDIA says all the time. He's always saying the world needs to build on the American tech stack. But we don't talk enough about the world building on the U.S. capital market. And whether it's, you know, U.S. dollars and stable coins or whether it's publicly traded companies and securities and equities, all of these markets are coming on chain. And it's genuinely, you know, the future of finance. And I think to me, that's what crypto is all about. Armani, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, thank you so much, Jen.