This seems to be exploding.

Yeah, I mean, we are in, I think, the middle of what people are calling a tokenization super cycle.

And it's like, okay, like, what does that mean? It sounds super hype, but it's actually very level-headed, right? We've had, you know, over a decade of people building in this space, a decade of booms, a decade of busts, a decade of existential questions about what are we all doing here? And, you know, it's really been this transformation from this proof of concept into what a lot of people call internet capital markets.

And so the process that we're going through right now is moving from the industry specific crypto native crypto assets into bringing the entire stock market on chain.

And the second order effects I think of this is going to usher in kind of a new era of what we're seeing in crypto where it's no longer DeFi, it's no longer TradFi.

It's like the entire financial systems, respectively speaking, are converging into one.

And so what we've been doing is like one by one going through really on an event driven basis and listing stocks on Solana.

What can I do? Because, you know, Backpack's been successful.

Can you explain what exactly a folder of a tokenized stock on Backpack holds and how you're able to achieve that?

Yeah, so let me break down the different tokenization models and then I'll kind of circle it back to Backpack security.

So you can imagine the spectrum of what you might consider stocks that are as real as it gets to stocks that are less quote unquote real, right? So you can imagine like on one side of the spectrum, you have something like the transfer agent model.

So there's a lot of great companies in this category, companies like Superstate, companies like Equinity, which is owned by Bullish.

And this is as real as it gets.

This is the canonical record.

of who owns shares in a company.

Why structure it this way? Very different from most crypto companies.

And right now, not necessarily on the listing here, but how long do you think before we might see Backpack show up here?

Yeah, it's a great point and a great question.

So, I mean, you can look at tokenized stocks through the lens of TVL, but then you could also look at stocks through the lens of liquidity, execution and volume.

And those are two very different perspectives when evaluating any type of project.

It's very easy to get, maybe not easy, but it's a different ballgame to get a lot of TVL with maybe not a lot of market activity.

What we've really focused on is building market structure on Solana.

We were the first tokenized stock project to finally bring a token that's one-to-one redeemable for a bona fide security entitlement.

How do you explain this to people who are looking at backpack as an investment?

And right now, not necessarily on the listing here, but how long do you think before we might see Backpack show up here?

Yeah, it's a great point and a great question.

So, I mean, you can look at tokenized stocks through the lens of TVL, but then you could also look at stocks through the lens of liquidity, execution and volume.

And those are two very different perspectives when evaluating any type of project.

It's very easy to get, maybe not easy, but it's a different ballgame to get a lot of TVL with maybe not a lot of market activity.

What we've really focused on is building market structure on Solana.

We were the first tokenized stock project to finally bring a token that's one-to-one redeemable for a bona fide security entitlement.

How do you explain this to people who are looking at Backpack as an investment?

And what drew you to Solana as opposed to ETH, what most people were building on back then? Because it was very early days for Solana.

It was very early days.

So back in 2017, 2018, got into crypto, immediately identified the one problem that everybody in those days identified, which is, well, these things are slow.

They don't scale.

They're not actually ready for real demand.

Ended up really by accident in 2018 at a little trading firm in Berkeley, California by the name of Alameda Research.

Was there for a bit.

when you started it? Because it's always interesting where you start with what your idea is and where you end up is always two very different things normally.

Something I know that folks have been wondering about since, um, equities have become available to investors all over the world twenty-four-seven is this, you know, if I buy Micron at, let's say, three AM on a Sunday, when the Nasdaq is closed, whose shares am I buying? How does that work, and, and where does the price come from?

Yeah, it's 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, um, or stocks more gener-generally, of like, what actually is the asset that you're buying, right? Is it a proper stock, a proper security entitlement, or is it some other thing? Right.

Twenty-four-seven trading, you know, just to step back for a moment, twenty-four-seven 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, uh, 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.

You know, if, if I go to Backpack, I, I pick up a traditional security, what, what's the use case for me, um, in having that available to me on, on the blockchain?

So what does that mean for Bakpak?

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Morgan.

I'm super excited to be here.

Um, good morning.

Maybe I should say good evening, given I'm calling in from Tokyo.

Uh, just real quick, you know, Bakpak is a modern brokerage, but we're not just a brokerage.

Um, but how is what you're offering, when we talk about spec- specifically the stocks themselves, how is this different than what else is out there?

But I guess what else do you think it is that Backpack has done right and done well before we dive deeper there?

Yeah, I think there's... a couple of different topics that are worth discussing.

So I think really starting with the stocks conversation, one of the things that I think we really care about is the synergy between you know, these public blockchain networks and the underlying financial institution, we really kind of have this perspective that, you know, the financial institution, the regulated centralized exchange is a big pipe.

It's a big pipe of value flowing from the traditional economy into the crypto economy.

And that's like its fundamental role.

And this really started with the on and off ramping story with exchanges.

This is how a lot of the exchanges really made their initial mark in their businesses.

I'm curious your view and how you think that kind of shapes your view of what you're doing with Backpack over the next few years in terms of What does a token even mean at some point in the future? Does that idea kind of collapse as we tokenize all other assets? Is it, you know, you just become some form of a commodity or an equity or some other asset that kind of already exists? And this this idea of just like, you know, a naked token kind of disappears? Or do you think that there's still some kind of separate category here that that still exists? And I don't know, how do you think that kind of shapes what happens with, you know, Backpack and other crypto based things?