The post Armani Ferrante, X Hall of Flame appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Former Alameda Research employee turned crypto exchange founder Armani Ferrante knows firsthand that Eminem’s lyrics — “you only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow” — couldn’t be more true in crypto. “When you see Elon Musk standing next to his rocket, then it collapses and crashes, he feels bad about it. He loses a lot of money. It’s horrible, but he gets to try again when the rocket crashes,” Ferrante tells Hall of Flame. “If an exchange collapses, you don’t get to try again; it is game over,” the 32-year-old US-born, Tokyo-based entrepreneur declares. No one knows that better than Ferrante, an early hire at the now-defunct Alameda Research. He spent three months at Alameda before it officially launched in 2018, then returned briefly in September 2020 to work on Solana projects like Serum. In the end, Ferrante became one of the many victims, losing millions. The pressure to keep his crypto exchange Backpack squeaky clean is what keeps Ferrante on his toes. Backpack, which has more than $60 billion in trading volume, functions as both a centralized exchange and a self-custodial wallet, letting users trade easily while keeping control of their funds — the opposite of what FTX offered. When asked if running an exchange and seeing what happened to his former boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, keeps him up at night, he admitted, “Nobody’s ever asked me that before… but I could do a whole podcast on it.” (Armani Ferrante) “That pressure is good. Without that pressure, you don’t have the outcomes you want,” Ferrante says, who now has around 95 people working for him worldwide. “Because that pressure exists, I wake up every day thinking about how I solve these problems in a way that makes sense,” he adds. Ferrante’s moving fast, but he still…

---

Filed under: News - @ March 26, 2025 4:20 am