From venture capital to boardroom
Samani cofounded Multicoin Capital in 2017 and helped establish the firm as an early institutional investor in Solana, backing projects focused on decentralized finance, blockchain infrastructure and crypto trading. He announced his departure from Multicoin's daily management in February, saying he planned to explore other areas of technology while continuing to advise the firm.
He also remains chairman of Forward Industries, a publicly traded company pursuing a Solana treasury strategy after completing a $1.65 billion private placement led by Multicoin, Galaxy Digital and Jump Crypto in 2025. The strategy is designed to increase the company's exposure to SOL and expand its SOL holdings per share, objectives that remain corporate targets rather than guaranteed results. The position gives Samani experience overseeing a public company with a digital asset treasury and connects him closely to the Solana ecosystem central to several Backpack products.
Backpack did not explain how it would address potential conflicts involving Samani's roles at Forward and Multicoin, nor whether he would be excluded from decisions involving Multicoin portfolio companies.
Backpack builds a regulated U.S. footprint
Backpack describes itself as a financial services group connecting crypto markets with traditional finance. Its products include a crypto exchange, a self-custody wallet and Backpack Securities, which combines a regulated brokerage with a tokenization platform to provide access to conventional securities and blockchain-based asset distribution within one environment. The company did not identify which U.S. licenses each group entity holds, and companies providing securities brokerage in the United States generally must register with the SEC and become FINRA members unless an exemption applies.
The company has already followed a regulated expansion strategy abroad. Backpack acquired FTX EU, assumed responsibility for returning funds to eligible former customers, and later launched its European exchange through a Cyprus-based entity operating under the MiFID framework, giving it a regulated route for offering crypto derivatives to eligible European customers. It reports serving customers in more than 150 countries and processing over $450 billion in trading volume, figures the company provided without an independently audited breakdown.
Equity trading anchors the U.S. push
Samani's appointment followed the launch of continuous trading for several equity products, including SpaceX, Micron, SanDisk and SK Hynix. The company described its offering as trading in "real" equities alongside a growing range of tokenized stocks, though it did not fully explain the execution venues, custody structure, settlement system or shareholder rights attached to each product.
Those distinctions matter because traditional shares, tokenized shares and price-tracking instruments do not always provide identical rights. Depending on the structure, investors may not receive direct voting rights, dividend claims or ownership of the underlying security. Other platforms racing into tokenized equities face the same questions, and competition is intensifying: Kraken recently introduced more than 7,000 traditional U.S. stocks for eligible European customers alongside its tokenized xStocks products, and allows certain tokenized stocks as collateral for futures and margin positions.
Samani joins a board that also includes former acting SEC chairman Michael Piwowar, appointed earlier in 2026. The additions stack venture capital, public company and securities regulation experience into Backpack's governance. Samani said the future of capital markets involves combining "institutional risk controls with onchain efficiency and transparency" — an assessment of the market's direction, and a fitting summary of the seat he now occupies. Solana's institutional circle keeps widening, and Backpack has positioned itself inside it.
