Backpack founder and CEO Armani Ferrante has a pitch most crypto founders would never make: the team gets no tokens. Not a reduced share. Not a long vesting schedule. None.
Ferrante calls the exchange’s tokenomics the most extreme ever. He also criticized the token warrants that usually hand founders and investors a large slice of supply.
How the Backpack token is split
Backpack disclosed the framework on February 9, 2026. The token has a total supply of 1 billion.
A quarter of that supply, or 250 million tokens, was allocated at the Token Generation Event (TGE). Of those 250 million, 240 million went to points participants. Those are users who earned rewards by using the platform. The other 10 million went to holders of Mad Lads, the NFT collection linked to the Backpack ecosystem.
The remaining 75% is divided into two tranches of 37.5% each.
The first is a pre-IPO tranche of 375 million tokens. These unlock gradually as the company hits growth milestones, such as regulatory progress and new product launches.
The second tranche is tied to a potential US IPO. Those tokens sit in the corporate treasury and stay locked for at least one year after any such listing.
The token itself launched on March 23, 2026, with 25% of supply already distributed.
Why Ferrante is skipping insider tokens
Token warrants give holders, often investors in a company’s equity round, the right to receive tokens once a network goes live. Ferrante’s argument is that this setup lets insiders sell into retail demand. Backpack’s answer is to give founders, executives and investors no direct token allocation and no warrants. Their wealth is meant to rise or fall with Backpack’s equity instead.
The design also swaps time-based vesting for milestone-based unlocks.
Staking, fee discounts and an equity bridge
Backpack is pairing the token with staking programs. Users who stake can get discounts on service fees.
Up to 20% of the firm’s equity pool is connected to the pre-IPO tokens, creating a path to convert tokens into company equity.
A founder with a reason to be cautious
Backpack lost approximately $14.5 million in the 2022 collapse of FTX, roughly 90% of its capital at the time.
The company then bought FTX Europe in January 2025 for $32.7 million. Backpack reached unicorn status that same month, at a valuation of $1 billion.
Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.