Remy: While global equity markets have long relied on fixed trading hours and century-old clearing houses to settle stocks and as digital financial rails mature, a wider debate is taking hold over whether traditional equity should trade around the clock. Well, advocates say that tokenizing public shares makes capital more mobile as well as accessible around the world, while skeptics warn of thin liquidity volatile weekend spreads. As well as untested regulatory frameworks. While joining us live on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange is Armani Ferrante, who is founder and CEO of Backpack. Armani, great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
Armani Ferrante: Remy, super happy to be here.
Remy: Well, here we are in the final quarter of 2026, and I do want to get your take on tokenization. So tell us where the demand is actually coming from and what the data out there actually tells you.
Armani Ferrante: So you're seeing demand. Across the entire spectrum, on the one hand, you see an enormous amount of demand from the institutions, folks that want to move towards real-time settlements, instant collateral, better risk management, transparent financial systems, but on the other hand, we've seen an enormous amount of demand from the retail audience all around the world, really from the SpaceX IPO up until today, and if you actually look at the numbers, they're pretty staggering. There's been billions of dollars traded all around the world over the past couple of months on the SpaceX IPO. SpaceX went public on a Friday and over the weekend tokenized equities were trading as the most liquid capital markets for SpaceX over the weekend. This Sunday, over $100 million was done on Solana. We're in the early innings. Backpack right now, we're doing about 27% of global tokenized equities trading volume. And you're really in the first, you know, couple of innings of this global transformation of financial markets and it's all happening on the back of blockchains and it's all happening on the back of tokenization.
Remy: And when we take a look back at everything that's happened so far in 2026, you mentioned SpaceX, and when we're looking down the pike, there are a lot of expectations and anticipation ahead of the anthropic IPO as well. And when we look at geopolitics, there has been so much that has crossed the headlines after hours and on the weekend. So what are your expectations for the tokenization space just as we head into year end, but also as we look ahead to the new year?
Armani Ferrante: So if you go to bed and you wake up five years from now and you ask yourself the question, are stocks trading 24/7, but not just stocks, are all financial markets, derivatives, options, futures? The answer is, of course, yes, they're trading 24/7. It doesn't really make sense if you stop and think about why do we turn the markets off other than. I want to take a break over the holiday and things like that, but you know I think really this is a story about not just retail internationally and giving access to international investors to US capital markets, but it's also a story about changing the way that clearing and settlement is done throughout the entire financial system and being able to actually be able to clear markets. Tokens, these bare instruments where you have a transparent ledger to be able to manage risk and move money across financial institutions and not just retail users.
Remy: Armani, I think you highlighted a key word there, and that is risk. So for people who might be concerned about off hours spreads as well as liquidity, what would you say to them?
Armani Ferrante: Yes, I think. If you have a road and you have cars and you have no speed limit, no airbags, no seatbelt, no traffic laws, no law enforcement, of course you're going to get into car crashes and bad things are going to happen, but with any new technology, any new kind of generational transformation to any industry. There is the first stage, the early adopters. There's building out the technology and proving it works, and then there's the mainstream adoption. And the big transformation that's happening right now across the entire financial industry is the regulatory frameworks being put into place for. Everything across the board in crypto, whether it's perpetual futures in the US, whether it's blockchains and DeFi or whether it's tokenization itself, and you have to give all of the credit in the world to the agencies here in the US, whether it's the SEC or the CFTC that have been really on the frontier of ensuring that the US is the epicenter for this transformation and that these markets are happening from American founders happening on. In the US to build those guardrails and to actually build safe, mature, and high integrity capital markets. So this stuff is just getting started and the pieces are coming in place for this to really get to the next leg of adoption.
Remy: Yes, and Armani, you mentioned the regulatory landscape and that is something that we have been paying attention to when it comes to the decentralized finance space in 2026. But when it comes to Tokenization of traditional US stocks in particular. What do you think needs to happen here and what would you say to viewers out there who are concerned?
Armani Ferrante: Yes, I think the way I think about it is in this crawl, walk and run approach. So right now we're definitely in the crawling phase. The SEC came out with their innovation exemption where they established the criteria for TSB. They established tokenized securities. venue with the rules of the road for a regulated sandbox for really the first proof of concepts of these modern venues to come to life, and I think there's a couple key kind of milestones to get to beyond that. I think we're going to see kind of the first set of asset issuers come on chain. I think really it's kind of driven by retail adoption. You know, just as a quick example of this, you know, a lot of people like to take a look at the large cap companies like the Metas, Nvidia, SpaceX of the world, and they get a lot of the headlines. But what you're seeing, I think, on Solana right now is a lot of attention going to undervalued stocks that traditionally haven't received the attention of Main Street or Wall Street. For example, we went live with Power USA. It's a $50 million market cap company, and then in the 1st 24 hours it did more volume on chain than Nasdaq. And so I think as the technology comes into place, as retail users kind of start understanding this, as the regulatory frameworks come into place, you're going to see kind of capital start flowing frictionlessly into undervalued assets, and it's really going to be that value proposition. Of money going to kind of where it really should go, namely net inflows into companies that previously maybe had untapped demand.
Remy: And finally, before we let you go, we have about 60 seconds here. So over at Backpack, what is your vision for 2027?
Armani Ferrante: Yes, so Backpack is a globally regulated financial institution. We're a trading platform on the tokenization front. What circle is to stablecoins, backpack is to securities. We are looking to tokenize the entire US stock market, but we're not stopping there. We're looking at Japan. We're looking at Hong Kong. We're looking at Korea, where you can bring all of modern finance onto new rails, to these global settlement rails that's really going to become the regulated backbone for the world economy. Right now you're seeing a glimpse of it, but this is a transformation that's going to happen over the next decade, and we're really setting the early foundation for that in place for this generational change that's happening in financial markets all around the world.
Remy: A lot to keep our eyes on, Armani. Thank you so much for joining us and hopefully we continue the conversation in the new year as well. Thank you so much for joining us.
Armani Ferrante: Thank you, Remy.
