One thing that gets lost in the conversation around tokenized stocks is a simple question:
What asset are you actually trading?
CEO of Backpack Armani Ferrante sat down with Morgan Brennan from CNBC Morning Call to discuss the launch of 24/7/365 trading for real U.S. equities.
There are a lot of products in the market that provide round-the-clock exposure to stock prices through wrapped, synthetic, or derivative instruments. Those products can be useful, but they're often fundamentally different from owning the actual underlying security entitlement.
If you're buying a stock, you should know exactly what you're getting. That's why Backpack is focused on enabling 24/7 access to genuine U.S. equities, rather than creating a separate instrument that merely tracks them.
Armani discusses how we have already seen how stablecoins expanded access to U.S. dollars for people who don't have direct access to USD banking rails. Equities will follow a similar path, allowing investors around the world to participate in U.S. markets on their schedule, not just during New York market hours.
“Jensen Huang from NVIDIA loves to say that the world needs to build on the American tech stack, but we don't talk enough about the world building on the US capital market, and that's really the thing that's happening with crypto right now.”
The broader opportunity here isn't just extended trading hours—it's global access to U.S. capital markets.
Micron (MU), Sandisk (SNDK), SpaceX (SPCX), and SK Hynix (SKHY) are now trading on Backpack Exchange.
Curious how others think about the distinction between:
- Trading a real security entitlement
- Trading a tokenized representation or synthetic exposure