xStocks is undoubtedly one of the hottest keywords recently, and has become a tokenized U.S. stock partner of platforms such as Kraken, Bybit, and Jupiter. The developer behind it, Backed, has also quickly caught the wave of the coin-stock integration narrative.
Backed Team Members
The second venture of the “zero-return” team
After digging deeper, we found that the story behind the team is much more complicated than it seems. The three co-founders of Backed Finance, Adam Levi, Yehonatan Goldman and Roberto Klein, were all core members of the DAOstack project.
According to RootData , DAOstack is a decentralized coordination operating system that provides support for decentralized companies, funds, and markets. The project was launched in 2017, when the DAO concept was facing a major crisis and the industry generally doubted whether this field could be put into practical use in the short term. However, DAOstack was launched against the trend amid doubts and completed three rounds of financing in 2018, raising a total of US$30 million.
However, after the GEN token completed ICO fundraising, the team did not list it on any exchange, including small and medium-sized trading platforms. In the end, GEN lost liquidity and ended up with zero. Crypto KOL 0x Todd made a sharp comment: Many second- to fourth-tier exchanges usually take the initiative to list coins, but DAOstack did not even catch up with this forced listing. The team is really a mess.
The DAO concept has never really exploded in the following years, and the popularity of the DAOstack project has declined accordingly. According to KOL Crypto Fearless, the project has been almost suspended since 2020. Finally, in 2022, due to the depletion of funds, DAOstack Limited announced the official closure of the project.
Now, the team has returned to the market with a different narrative, wearing a new coat of U.S. stock tokenization, and successfully caught up with the trend of cryptocurrency-stock integration. How far can they go this time?
Master of Music Management Growth, Backed Team Portrait Disassembly
According to LinkedIn , the overall size of the Backed team is between 11 and 50 people. Further observation shows that, apart from the founders and directors, the core members of the project can be roughly divided into two categories:
One category is anti-money laundering and legal compliance personnel, which account for a relatively high proportion, and most of them have mature legal backgrounds and experience. This configuration is obviously highly consistent with the track that Backed is in, and also provides institutional guarantees for its involvement in tokenized assets.
The other group is former employees from the crypto asset management company 21 Shares, including the current CTO and COO Yotam Katznelson and senior software engineer Łukasz Romanowski. These members constitute the technical backbone of Backed, responsible for promoting the construction and deployment of underlying products.
From a structural point of view, Backeds team relies on the two main lines of technology + compliance to support the basic foundation of the project. However, not all members roles are set so reasonably and clearly. For example, David Henderson, the head of growth, has a rather unusual background.
According to Davids LinkedIn profile, he holds a masters degree in music from the University of Aberdeen. His career experience is mainly concentrated in communication coordination positions in colleges and universities, and he has almost no experience related to encryption or finance. The only thing he has is a six-month strategic digital assessment job related to trust. At Backed, he is responsible for growth and marketing.
Backed co-founders: academic, artistic, and investment
The three co-founders of Backed are all from Israel, and their resumes span a wide range and are very different: a physics doctor, an art gallery owner, and an angel investor. It is worth noting that their Web3 resumes are almost exclusively concentrated in the two projects DAOstack and Backed.
Adam Levi holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He served as an academic officer (lieutenant rank) in the Israel Defense Forces and also worked as a university assistant. He published ten papers on black holes and quantum effects before 2020, and has a pure academic background. Today, he is Backeds external representative and often leads interviews and events.
Yehonatan Goldman calls himself a self-taught multidisciplinary maker and holds a masters degree in the preservation of tangible cultural heritage from the University of Haifa in Israel. He founded the Talish Art Gallery and was also active as a freelance project manager. In 2017, he joined DAOstack and became the projects chief operating officer.
Roberto Kleins experience is more focused on capital operations. He graduated from Tel Aviv University and obtained an MBA from IMD Business School in Switzerland. In his early years, he worked in optoelectronic engineering and investment analysis. In 2009, he turned to angel investment, focusing on renewable energy and financial technology. Since 2017, he has been responsible for legal and regulatory affairs at DAOstack.
From the early exploration of DAOstack to the coin-stock narrative behind xStocks, being on the cusp of the trend is often better than working silently. But what the market ultimately cares about is still fundamentals and sustainability.
At present, some users have begun to question its insufficient liquidity, high fees, and opaque auditing. Can this second entrepreneurial team tell a more mature story? The answer is yet to be revealed.
