Oliver Sleafer has been named chief financial officer (CFO) of Backpack, the cryptocurrency exchange started by former executives from FTX and Alameda.
In October of last year, Sleafer became the head of treasury at Backpack. He had been with payments startup Stripe for two years as head of liquidity management for the Asia-Pacific region. He had held the same position for the previous five years at Credit Suisse, a major Swiss bank.
Armani Ferrante and Trian Yver, former employees of the now-defunct trading firms Alameda Research and the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, respectively, formed Backpack. They departed the companies formed by Sam Bankman-Fried before they collapsed at the end of 2022.
Less than six weeks before it folded, FTX contributed $20 million to the capital round for backpack maker Coral. It goes without saying that most of this funding did not come through. After that, Ferrante and Vyer started developing a cryptocurrency exchange to close the gap that FTX had left behind. At a $120 million valuation, Backpack just secured $17 million in Series A funding.