Copper provides secure client-side cryptocurrency custody with complete control

An interview with Dmitry Tokarev, CEO at Copper

Dmitry Tokarev has over ten years of experience in software and financial engineering and was most recently CTO and Partner at Dolfin Financial. He is a graduate of Imperial College London, and a passionate believer in the decentralizing role of cryptocurrencies and the opportunities they present to retail and institutional investors alike.

Financial IT: Can you please provide brief information about Copper?

Dmitry Tokarev: Copper designs & develops the award-winning infrastructure which enables institutions to acquire, store, and trade digital assets in a manner which satisfies global investors and regulatory standards. Its multi-signature safeguarding application allows institutions to have complete certainty that their capital is not at risk of theft, whether it be from hackers or bad players in the industry.

Copper was founded in January 2018. At the time, our clients were struggling to find a custodian either in traditional finance or the digital world who could provide the exacting standard of security their investors’ required  So we set out to build it ourselves. Nine months later we released Copper Unlimited, the standalone secure custody application. Our safeguarding and trading infrastructure has grown out from there

Financial IT: What makes Copper unique among its competitors?

Dmitry Tokarev: The infrastructure is unique in the way that it connects secure storage with multiple trading venues. Currently, our Walled Garden clients can use trade API keys to execute at more than 10 exchanges, but because of the way we create and break private keys, use whitelisted addresses and IPs, digital assets can only be moved in a predefined trading ecosystem, including a secure Copper Unlimited wallet. 

We also use an Optical Air-Gap for our cold storage, which provides an added layer of protection that protects your offline machine from the possibility of being infected with malware. Our clients use cold machines which have never interacted with a network and once the custody application is installed never need to be connected to a flash drive.

The safeguarding and trading infrastructure was developed specifically to marry the worlds of holders and those that need constant, quick, and secure access for trading purposes.

Financial IT: What are the issues and challenges you are facing while providing the solution?

Dmitry Tokarev: The biggest hurdle is an age-old problem of logistics and human resource coordination. The technology side is easy, we’ve already built the application and APIs for connecting exchanges with our safeguarding infrastructure. But for institutional clients, some of whom may be new to digital asset trading and storage, we need to make sure fund managers, administrators, solicitors, and account managers are all on the same page and understand the business processes that accompany proper key management. 

This is still a nascent industry, and each month that goes by this gets easier. 

Financial IT:  What is market demand in the present time?

Dmitry Tokarev: Copper exists at a time when there is great demand for this solution among hedge funds and other financial institutions that wish to engage with the digital asset marketplace. However, a lot of the industry is awaiting the biggest players in the financial world to enter the market, and when that happens, it’s going to be solutions like Copper that will allow them to store and trade large volumes of digital assets safely and effectively.

Financial IT: What is next for Copper?

Dmitry Tokarev: Copper is constantly developing market-leading solutions so that our clients can engage with the digital asset market. Our OTC desk is probably the busiest department at the moment, so most of our development efforts are focused on expanding or products and services for OTC clients. 

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