Coinlive: Hi good morning, this is Coinlive at World Blockchain Summit 2022. We’ve Taka with us here from Copper. Hi Taka, good to see you guys.
Taka: Good to see you too.
Coinlive: For our audience who isn’t familiar with you and Copper, could you briefly introduce yourself
as well as what the company does?
Taka: Sure. Hi, my name is Taka, I’m the Head of Sales APAC for Copper. Copper is an institutional custodian for institutional investors. It could also be exchanges, payment processors, neobanks. We cover a lot of different clients and then we provide them with not just safe storage, but access to exchanges staking solutions, DeFi, OTC liquidity. So, we provide all the institutional grade levels of custody for investors that want to have access into this crypto industry.
Coinlive:In the current bear market, how is Copper coping and what is the company focusing on right now?
Taka:Obviously I have to say the market does affect our business and our clients as well, but you know during this downtime and even before that, and if you see other down markets in crypto, it was always a time for building and for us we are doing that as well. So, we are building not just the custodial solutions, but we're building out our prime business which means that we can provide more liquidity for and lending to clients. And in order for them to invest heavily into this space, we find this downtime a quiet time, which is a good time for us to focus on what we really want to do without being bombarded with all these clients that are coming on board and connecting them to different exchanges. Yeah, it’s a good time for us.
Coinlive: I suppose the clients are mostly institutions, so what are the institutions actually looking out for when they reach out to you and ask for your services.
Taka: So institutional investors will by nature need a custodian. The whole premise of crypto is always about self-custody, but for regulated funds, they need custodians so that's why they come to us because we're a regulated custodian. And they can trust us and in order for them to have secure custody and also because we provided the rails into all these different exchanges and DeFi solutions, and staking that they can do a lot more in safe custody rather than sending their funds all over the place in different venues.
Coinlive: What has been the most popular or most requested crypto investment that institutions have been looking for?
Taka: That's a very complicated question because every client of ours has different trading strategies, but one of the things that I can really foresee going into the future is that there are regulated funds that cannot touch crypto as well, so they want the access to the crypto market without having direct exposure to crypto. What we're trying to build out ourselves is a total return swap. Basically, what that means is that clients can send fiat currencies to us, and then we trade on their behalf and give them the returns that they need. These are the things that we are actually thinking will kind of broaden the ecosystem.
Coinlive: What is the next big thing or the next big narrative that you're looking forward to in crypto?
Taka: I think the most important thing is transparency, so all the debacle that we’ve seen very recently is that all these lenders, exchanges, etc, are all operating very opaquely. I think it's totally against the true nature of crypto because crypto was all about transparency, but all these companies are doing very opaque businesses, so what I really am looking forward to is having more transparency in this industry. It can be from DeFi, it can be from centralised exchanges as well and all these companies need to be a lot more transparent than what they're doing with their clients’ funds. If you look at these lenders, what they were doing is borrowing cheap capital from retail investors and then telling them that they can get their money back in a couple of days when they lend it out to institutional investors for a whole year. So that duration mismatch was what created this whole mess. If they told them that actually this is what we're doing, then the customers of theirs would think “okay, then maybe I should not do it”. It gives them knowledge and also the option of whether or not they want to get into this space, so I think honesty, trust, and transparency are what's really needed in this industry.
Coinlive: Speaking about transparency, you know CeFi and DeFi right? Do you feel that in crypto, centralisation is really needed, as well as not everything should be decentralised?
Taka:I don't think it's a matter of decentralising or centralising. Again, it's the same narrative. I think everybody just needs to be more transparent and if you're transparent, then people can trust centralised counterparties. DeFi in true nature is already transparent; you can audit the trails of money; you can audit the smart contracts; so, if they're going to do the same for the decentralised platform, then there's no difference.
Coinlive: So, transparency at the end of the day is key.
Taka: Yeah, I believe so.
Coinlive: What do you feel about crypto regulations around the world
Taka: I think some sort of regulation is always necessary but does it really need to come from the government? It depends because we in the crypto industry understand our industry a lot more than the regulators do, and there's so much change in this industry for people on the outside to keep up with these changes. So, I think the regulation should come directly from our industry and say we're going to self-regulate our industry, then you can go to governments and tell them this is what we're doing and then maybe they can understand a lot better about the crypto industry. If needed, they can come into this space and regulate. So, I think that one step is really necessary.
Coinlive: For your audience who’d like to learn more about Copper, where can we find you to support you?
Taka: Our website is copper.co. There's another competing Copper company out there, but we're not an ICO launch pad; we're a custodian so please look out for copper.co
Coinlive: This is Coinlive at World Blockchain Summit. Do follow us for more content, thank you.
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