(SeaPRwire) –
By: Oliver Hawthorne
Backpack is shouting about 10,000 tokenized stocks on Solana while standing squarely outside the only regulatory pathway the SEC has opened for exactly this kind of product. That contradiction is not a detail. It is the entire story.
The official line comes from CEO Armani Ferrante. He told Solana’s official channel on September 26 that Backpack wants to bring the entire stock market onto Solana. One API. A real share moves between a brokerage account and DeFi and back again. The platform currently lists roughly 200 symbols. Ferrante called the jump to 10,000 “the next leap.” No launch date. No priority list. Just scale as proof of conviction.
The company’s architecture actually does what it claims. Since its June launch, Backpack has let users hold U.S. stocks and ETFs through a licensed brokerage service, convert eligible holdings into tokenized versions on Solana, and deposit them back into standard securities through Backpack Exchange. It cites New York’s Uniform Commercial Code Article 8. It says it handles dividends, corporate actions, and ACATS transfers. It added a SpaceX token via Sunrise in June. Micron and SanDisk followed. CoreWeave joined in September. The plumbing works. The question is who is allowed to run it.
The SEC issued a five-year conditional framework on September 17. It lets certain venues trade tokenized stocks if they prove token holders receive the same rights as regular shareholders and halt trading whenever the underlying security halts. Backpack is not named on that list. It did not apply, or it was not selected. The company has not announced a timeline for expanding U.S. stock services. It did add Kyle Samani, a former Multicoin Capital executive, to its U.S. board. That looks like insurance more than strategy.
The commercial loop is clear. Backpack is trying to make itself the bridge that institutional capital cannot cross on its own. Tokenized shares settle faster. They can be deployed in lending protocols, wrapped into yield strategies, moved across borders without DTCC wires. The value accrues to the platform that owns the rails. If 10,000 symbols trade through one API, every rebalance, every dividend sweep, every corporate action becomes a transaction event on Backpack’s infrastructure. That is the revenue engine. Scale is the moat.
The end-game risk is not technical. It is legal. The SEC warned in January that token rights depend on how the token is built. Some are backed by custodied shares. Some create different claims entirely. Backpack’s own Micron token reinvests dividends as additional tokens instead of paying cash. That is a material difference from a brokerage holding. If the platform expands to 10,000 symbols without SEC venue status, it is running a securities marketplace without the license to operate one. The architecture is ready. The permission is missing. That gap will close, one way or another.
Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne is a Principal Correspondent permanently stationed at an international technology review, covering the intersection of finance, regulation, and decentralized infrastructure.