Rock Preddy 🎒

To give you a concrete sense of what we're doing with @Backpack Securities. - Trade stocks on Backpack - Deposit/Withdraw to Solana - Trade on DeFi in your wallet - On/off ramp to your brokerage account Tokenized stocks that are redeemable for the real thing just like a stablecoin. Demo:

Story time. Over two years ago we attempted Backpack's first fundraise for the exchange. We had lost most of our money on FTX, and we had to re-invent ourself. With a couple small checks and our personal savings, we bootstrapped the initial exchange team to focus on all the hard things regulated companies have to do--not just engineering, but finance, accounting, compliance, customer support, and importantly, the entire licensing process for our first anchor license in Dubai. From the beginning, it was never just about building a matching engine, it was never just about building an app, it was about being able to re-imagine every layer of the stack of modern finance, where the legal code is just as important as the computer code--a thesis at odds with basically every crypto investor in the world. We had our sites set not just on the UAE but on the entire world, and one place in particular, the European Union. From the perspective of many international exchanges, to put it in their own words, a "bloodbath" was coming. The world's largest derivatives platforms were leaving the EU, and it was getting harder and harder to enter the market. At the time, there was a total of zero exchanges offering a regulated perpetual futures product. So we went out to fundraise. Our goal was simple: get enough money to buy FTX EU, do all the hard work to return customer assets, hire up a world class compliance team, solve all the problems that caused FTX in the first place, and re-activate the license. Turns out fundraising wasn't that simple. The world was in a very different place back then. Most people looked at us like we were crazy. A lot of people questioned me and our team for FTX ties. Who wants to invest in ex FTX and Alameda employees trying to buy back the EU arm of FTX, returning customer funds, and gunning to be the first regulated perpetual futures product in Europe. To many it was the most contrarian of bets and a far fetched dream. Why couldn't Coinbase or any of the other giants just beat you and do this first? A fair question. And honestly, I didn't have an answer to that. All I can say is that I genuinely think our team is the best. No one works harder. Works more hours. Has more experience, more ore battle scars, and a more comprehensive of an understanding of crypto exchanges than us. Others might have more resources. Others might have better brands. Others might have been around for longer than us. They deserve all the respect in the world for pioneering much our industry. However, it's my job to think I can do better. It's my job to compete. It's my job to win. I naively thought I could. Investors did not. We failed. So we didn't buy FTX EU. It ended up being purchased by the previous founders. We missed the opportunity. But we didn't stop. Tunnel visioned. Laser focused. We built our product. We went to market. And, turns out, we were pretty successful. In 2024, we made more money than our entire fundraise. We built our spot product, and with the capital on hand, we were ready to re-invest to climb our next mountain. I don't know if it was luck, divine intervention, or just the universe just doing its thing, but we discovered that FTX EU was for sale--again. This time, we didn't have to fundraise to make an offer. We had the cash ready to deploy. And so we did. But the interesting thing about buying regulated companies is that it's not simply a matter of having cash. There's many more people with much more money than us. It's not just about showing up to someone's door with a bag of cash, and you're off to the races. There's diligence. There's compliance tech. There's reporting requirements. There's the ability to steward the return of FTX EU customer assets. There's custody requirements. There's controls. There's bespoke integrations. There's product changes. There's a million little details that go into getting a regulated company off the ground. Details that very few startups at our stage ever have to think about. Some people think we're making our lives harder than they have to be by doing all of this. But it's precisely the hard things that no one wants to do that are worth doing. And I'm proud to say that we did it, joining the ranks of only a handful of crypto companies in the world that have met the highest standards of compliance to offer a regulated product in one of the largest, most important, and most rigorous regions in the world. And for perpetual futures, specifically, one of the first. It turns out you can just do things, and we're not stopping there. This year, we set our sites not just on Europe, but later to Japan, and ultimately our home, the USA. We've come a long way, but we have an even longer way to go. Every day. Little by little. Brick by brick. 🧱

Twitter is San Francisco. The most amazing people on earth and the worst people on earth all together in one app. The only difference is if you walk down the Tenderloin and a mentally ill person screams in your face, you might feel bad, but you generally don’t stop and argue.