With the CFTC putting the full force of law behind regulated perps, with the SEC bringing securities onchain, with SpaceX, the biggest IPO in history, about to pop, a new era of crypto is forming.
Until now, crypto has operated as a parallel financial system. Segregated assets, segregated markets, segregated users, and segregated products. We went from the ICO craze, to DeFi summer, to the proliferation of L1s, Ethereum Killers, L2s and the like, to the NFT boom, the memecoin mania, the perp DEX craze, and the rise of DATs.
As crazy as it once sounded, today, the old financial system is merging with the new one. And what follows is the next evolution in global market structure that will forever change the landscape for securities around the world.
It’s not about one blockchain or one token vs another. It’s about crypto making the leap into Modern Finance to grow the industry 100x alongside the largest pools of capital in the world. Finally, it’s time for the old guard to meet the new.
So what’s next?
The dawn of the crypto native stock broker.
Will share more on this soon. It’s been over three years in the making to get to this point, but the holy trinity has been achieved. The only other exchange in the world that has gotten regulated perps, spot, and payments live in the EU is Kraken. The other will be Backpack. We’re coming Europe.
What does the @YumiFinance team focus on rn?
3 main things:
• developing better ways to deliver capital to our clients in CA (building legal infra)
• attracting capital to be able to serve more clients with bigger limits (raising liquidity)
• reaching out to new customers to better understand their individual and market needs
(we are also constantly following up with those already in the loop)
all united by the notion of giving our customers a better service
introducing the next Backpack token utility, we'll be building out this year. IPOs, on chain, directly on Backpack.
Normally when companies go public, the founders and executives go on a roadshow, sharing their story and garnering interest from Wall Street institutional buyers purchasing shares before they go public. For most, you normally have to wait for the stock exchanges to go live before getting access to these shares through your brokerage.
What we're doing: working with Superstate for Backpack to become a stop on the roadshow, so that our users can get access to these IPOs before trading goes live on national stock exchanges.
The catch: Our ability to do this successfully is purely a function of the Backpack community.
The more active and valuable our users, the more viable Backpack is a venue for capital formation. As a result, we've put together this waitlist to collect interest from our users today on this product. The early users that signup will get early access to the first IPO.
The more people that sign up for this, the more engaged and active our community is here, the better access we will get to companies when they go public.
This will be the first test of the community. This is an enormously valuable opportunity, and we need your help signing up for this so that we can go out and get the best IPOs for everyone here that we can.
The ask: add yourself to the waitlist now.
We have a lot more coming on this front, and this is a perfect example of why we did not build a DEX. This is only something a compliant product can do.
Go big or go home.
In the Backpack tokenomics, we have one guiding principle.
- Insiders "dumping on retail" should be impossible: no founder, executive, employee, or venture investor should receive wealth from the token until the product hits escape velocity.
Of course it begs the question, what does it mean to "hit escape velocity". Every project is different, and it's impossible to generalize. For Backpack, the answer is clear: we want to IPO in the USA. Going public might happen quickly, it might happen not so quickly, and in fact, it might not happen at all. In any case, we're going for it.
But before going public, we have to grow--a lot. The odd thing about Backpack's growth over the past year--and in fact one of the things that makes Backpack so different from basically every token project in crypto--is that, today, Backpack Exchange only serves about 48% of the world. We've been very slow, very intentional about opening up our product to the world, ensuring that we have every "i" dotted and ever "t" crossed as a regulated financial institution. Growth that sometimes feels like running with a parachute, but we are happy to take the long path, because it's precisely that parachute that will allow us to fly.
For those that don't know us, the reason for this is simple. Backpack is trying to not only build great crypto products, but we're also trying to build great TradFi products. We're trying to not only give our users access to every crypto asset, every blockchain, and every decentralized application, but we're also getting banking rails around the world, USD client money accounts in the USA, EUR in the EU, JPY in Japan--every currency on every major payment network you can imagine. We're trying to build a great securities product, whether that's getting access to your favorite stocks in a traditional brokerage or bidding on primary shares of a company about to go public on NASDAQ. We want to serve not only retail users worldwide, but we want to serve regulated products for regulated counterparties and regulated institutions around the world. All of this takes an enormous amount of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears. We've been working on this for over three years at this point, laying an international foundation for the company and for the product slowly but surely, brick by brick. If we're lucky, we'll spend a lifetime.
What this all means is that, in the most literal sense--and I know this sounds silly--we're just getting started. We still have half the world to open up into. We still have some of our most exciting products to launch. And this leads to our next guiding principle in our tokenomics.
- Liquid tokens should exclusively go to users, fueling growth triggered by key product milestones.
Every time we open up a new region, every time we launch a new product, that's an opportunity to grow. Open up EU => grow. Open up Japan => grow. Open up the USA => grow. Open up predictions => grow. Open up stocks => grow. Open up card => grow. Like gasoline onto a fire, the token serves to continuously kickstart new markets in the same way points kickstarted Seasons 1-4.
With every growth lever we pull, tokens unlock in a predictable way to users, bringing in a new wave of token holders, growing the community, and allowing the product to soar to new heights. The objective constraint for this to work is precise: the value of added growth created by new token unlocks must always be greater than the dilution of those unlocks. As long as that condition holds, we can continue to unlock tokens direct to our most active users, growing along the way.
Last but not least is the question:
Ok so if all the liquid tokens are going to users, then what about the team? How exactly do you remain incentive aligned while ensuring the team cannot unlock, dump on retail, and become enormously wealthy without building something great?
And the answer is simple: not a single founder, executive, team member, or venture investor has been given a direct token allocation.
The entire "team allocation" sits in a "corporate treasury", i.e. on the balance sheet of the Backpack company--locked until at least one year post IPO. The team owns equity in the company, and the company owns a large percent of the token supply. It's not until the company goes public (or has some other type of equity exit event), that the team can earn any wealth from the project. It's not until the company has access to the largest, most liquid capital markets in the world by going public--and it's not until the company has done all the hard work to earn access to those markets--that the team can reap the rewards of the value created by the Backpack community from now until then.
We either go big, or we go home.
We’re excited to share that we’ll be joining @coinbase!
We built Vector with 1 mission: to create the best onchain trading platform.
We launched at the end of 2024, and the app took off.
Now, with the reach of Coinbase, we’re taking that mission to a global scale—100x bigger.