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Former Alameda Research employee turned crypto exchange founder Armani Ferrante knows firsthand that Eminem’s lyrics — “you only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow” — couldn’t be more true in crypto.
“When you see Elon Musk standing next to his rocket, then it collapses and crashes, he feels bad about it. He loses a lot of money. It’s horrible, but he gets to try again when the rocket crashes,” Ferrante tells Hall of Flame.
“If an exchange collapses, you don’t get to try again; it is game over,” the 32-year-old US-born, Tokyo-based entrepreneur declares.
No one knows that better than Ferrante, an early hire at the now-defunct Alameda Research. He spent three months at Alameda before it officially launched in 2018, then returned briefly in September 2020 to work on Solana projects like Serum. In the end, Ferrante became one of the many victims, losing millions.
The pressure to keep his crypto exchange Backpack squeaky clean is what keeps Ferrante on his toes. Backpack, which has more than $60 billion in trading volume, functions as both a centralized exchange and a self-custodial wallet, letting users trade easily while keeping control of their funds — the opposite of what FTX offered.
When asked if running an exchange and seeing what happened to his former boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, keeps him up at night, he admitted, “Nobody’s ever asked me that before… but I could do a whole podcast on it.”
“That pressure is good. Without that pressure, you don’t have the outcomes you want,” Ferrante says, who now has around 95 people working for him worldwide.
“Because that pressure exists, I wake up every day thinking about how I solve these problems in a way that makes sense,” he adds.
Ferrante’s moving fast, but he still wants to make sure everything’s done properly.
“People used to praise FTX for how fast they moved…it turns out they moved so fast because they took every shortcut in the book.”
FTX co-led Backpack’s $20 million strategic funding round in September 2022, but when SBF’s exchange imploded just two months later, Ferrante lost 80% of his operating capital, which was stuck on FTX. Ferrante decided to take the risk and keep building the exchange with hardly any funds. The bet paid off — within four days of launching in February 2024, it had already crossed $1 billion in trading volume.
How did Armani Ferrante build his X following?
Ferrante first hopped on Twitter in April 2011 and now has 127,100 followers, but he admits his first big bump came alongside Solana’s rise.
“I think it really started growing when Solana started growing,” he says. Ferrante has been a strong supporter of Solana since its launch in March 2020 and is also the creator of Anchor, a developer and security protocol used by nearly half of all Solana projects.
“I was pretty vocal in the early days of Solana. I was working on the developer tools, and it was growing really exponentially,” Ferrante says.
He says that that was the first phase of his follower growth, up to around 30,000 to 50,000 followers.
The second phase was the launch of Mad Lads in April 2023, a Solana NFT project he launched with Tristan Yver, which is Solana’s second largest NFT collection, according to DappRadar.
Ferrante says he probably hit the 100,000-follower mark during the late 2023 Solana memecoin bull run, as interest in the ecosystem and Solana-related founders surged. Not too long after, Backpack went public, giving him another boost.
“Starting Backpack, all these people started tweeting me to do partnerships,” he says. “If you get involved in crypto, so many people are involved in crypto, you start getting a following,” he adds.
What type of content does Armani Ferrante do?
Ferrante admits that his social media content is “so all over the place.”
“It is very inconsistent,” he laughs.
He says his posts are a mix of Backpack updates, new features and storytelling about what the exchange is building.
From reminding Backpack users that their maxed-out leverage gets auto-trimmed as positions grow to taking shots at crypto wallets by calling them “limited bank accounts” to joking about the market downturn by telling followers to ignore his “very negative” P&L — Ferrante’s content is anything but predictable.
He also shares his thoughts on the crypto industry and isn’t afraid to call out lies about him. At the start of 2025, Ferrante took time out of his day to shut down an X user who claimed he was aware of the “rug” and “scams” at FTX and Alameda Research before they came to light.
“Everything in that post is, at worst, a fabrication and, at best, a misunderstanding. A totally fake reality,” Ferrante said in a Jan. 10 X post.
It came just days after Backpack announced the acquisition of FTX EU, the former European arm of the defunct FTX exchange.
Predictions for Armani Ferrante?
Ferrante was quick to say he is “a terrible person” to answer the question of where Solana’s price is going in 2025.
He says there’s no good way to answer a price prediction question. Even when he’s played it safe before with something like, “Prices go up, prices go down, point is, I have no idea,” he still got backlash online.
“If I knew, I’d be so rich you have no F$%king idea.”
Ferrante isn’t so much into predicting prices as he is predicting “the rate of progress” of the entire crypto industry, which he says is progressing quickly.
One big difference this time, he says, is that when the next bull run ends, fewer people will have to ditch crypto and return to regular 9-to-5 jobs like they did after the 2021 bull run.
“People went back to their jobs at Apple or Facebook; they were like, this crypto thing is dead,” he said.
“Nobody is now questioning whether this is going to die or not,” he says.
Ciaran Lyons
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Read moreEx-Alameda hire on ‘pressure’ to not blow up Backpack exchange: Armani Ferrante, X Hall of Flame