Backpack drives Solana tokenized stock volume surge
Backpack added over 200,000 new tokenized stockholders in the last month, accounting for roughly 90% of $657 million in daily Solana trading. The platform’s redemption feature links on-chain assets to traditional brokerages, creating liquidity advantages over competitors.
Backpack, co-founded by Armani Ferrante, has added more than 200,000 new tokenized stockholders in the past month. On the Monday prior to a recent interview, $657 million worth of tokenized stocks traded on the Solana blockchain, with approximately 90% of that volume occurring on Backpack. Ferrante stated that at one point, Solana traded more stocks than the New York Stock Exchange. The platform currently lists 88 stock symbols on Solana and aims to expand to 1,000, eventually covering all publicly traded securities.
The platform’s key differentiator is its redemption feature, which allows users to transfer tokenized stocks between decentralized finance wallets and traditional brokerage accounts such as Interactive Brokers. This mechanism creates arbitrage opportunities that maintain price alignment between on-chain and off-chain markets. As a result, Backpack reports 20x to 40x more liquidity and better price execution compared to competitors like Robinhood Chain. For example, Power USA, a company with a $50 to $100 million market cap, listed on Solana and generated more volume in its first 24 hours than Nasdaq does in a day.
Ferrante describes this as the early innings of a 'token super cycle' where the entire stock market moves on-chain. He argues that tokenization is an inevitable, generational overhaul of capital markets that will unfold over the next decade, driven by the removal of friction and the integration of decentralized and traditional finance rails.