On The Brink with Castle Island - Dmitry Tokarev (Copper) on building crypto settlement infrastructure (EP.206)

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Dmitry Tokarev, the cofounder and CEO of Copper joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Dmitry's path to crypto and the pain points that led him to starting Copper How Dmitry sees the competitive landscape and how legacy financial firms are reacting How MPC enables Copper to quickly add support for new blockchain platforms Views on what it's like to hire in a rapidly growing startup Outlook for settlement and custody services in the years to come To learn more about Copper and Clearloop visit: www.copper.co    

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Dimitri Takarev, the co-founder and CEO of Copper. Copper is a digital asset infrastructure company that offers custody, settlement, and execution services for a range of market participants in the crypto asset markets. This conversation touched on the state of custody and trading infrastructure. We talked about the readiness of banks as it relates to the digital asset markets. We talked about what it's like to recruit talent from incumbent financial services firms. This conversation was a lot of fun, so without further ado, here's my conversation with Dimitri Takarov.

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Dmitri, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. Thank you, Matt, for having me. Well, I'm excited to hear people who listen to the podcast will know I'm a huge market infrastructure nerd. And talking about trading and custody is something I love to do. But before we hop into copper, why don't we just start off with a little bit about you and maybe give us your background in the career trajectory that led you to starting copper? Sure, of course.

Well, I'm originally from Siberia. I started software engineering there. dropped out because I started doing quant trading and really wanted to do this professionally. So moved to London, been here for the last 15 years and was a quantum hedge fund. Then I was a CTO at an asset manager. And 2017 started and we kind of request for allocations to crypto started rising and kind of peaked roughly around July, August time. And basically we were tasked to create an infrastructure for the fund, which would be crypto long only funds and would hold bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.

So we did what we did before for fixed income funds for equities, did a nice structure. Bahamas Fund came in manager, pointed trap in the UK, tier one administrator, tier one law firm drafting prospectors, DDQ, subscription, redemptions docs, basically wanted the market to find custodian and a prime broker and was cricket. And even with some place, I've spoken, that's the first time I've discovered a wallet situation, which didn't make any sense to me. I need a custodian. I'm like, well, we're a wallet. Like, I need a custodian. So long story short, we've been the project I split off at that time because we thought that there will be more players in the market trying to build something similar.

And when early 2018, and those are whole like, well, institutions are coming are coming when you're for sure nobody's coming. Like, this is a shit show. So let's build. that. That's basically how we started. We started building the infrastructure coming from the buy side to the by side by side, sort of speak. And that played very well for us, understanding our clients and understanding technology and understanding security equally well. There's been kind of a recurring theme here at Copper. Fast forward now three years. We've got 250 plus clients, several billions of assets, 75 plus people, which are spread across six or seven, seven, cities right now. I don't know if Syrac opened up yet. And yeah, when we started hedge funds ran to

us with open arms because they really needed infrastructure that they can show to their LPs to raise money really because people, I think, don't appreciate enough how much time a hedge fund manager spends raising capital. And you guys from the Visi side, I don't know as well, there are the partner levels who are raising capital and there are partner levels who don't raise capital. and it's quite different. So yeah, and then later we've added, we've upgraded infrastructure. We started eliminating problems that the space has because space was largely retail and still like institutional side of things just getting started.

And people normally would associate institutions with Elon Musk's Bitcoins because that's easy to understand. But in reality, when we talk about institutional clients in the traditional world, we're talking about market neutral arbitrage funds, statistical arbitrage funds, global macro funds, long only funds, long short funds, prop shops, market makers, HFTs. And none of them has the same requirements as Elon Musk. So that's where we fit in. And as well as different platforms, layer ones, et cetera. It's such a common theme to hear people talk about, I was in this other industry and it was, I had an acute pain point. And so I went out and built what I needed. When you were kind of in that

byside role before copper, I'm curious what the over. overarching sort of investment framework was for why crypto was even interesting. So obviously, the infrastructure wasn't built, but what was the impetus for even wanting to hold the assets? Was it more like a trading strategy, more of a kind of a liquid venture? How were you thinking about it? It was a wealth management firm. So largely it was demand from the clients who basically go and put some of my money into crypto. And naturally, they go to their wealth manager and say, could you do that for me? And we were forced essentially by the client base to look into this. So it wasn't a shop.

There were strategies. There are global micro funds within the firm. It wasn't like a decision that was made by CIO to go like, all right, we're going to sell some of the equities and you're going to buy some Bitcoin. When you think about the state of the business today for copper, how do you describe it? I know you've been adding a number of new products and services over the years. Talk a little bit about what you're offering today and the types of customers that you're servicing. Sure.

We do have like three main buckets of the customers. So the first bucket would be funds and trading firms. And the differences between those two would be whether you have external capital or not, because that will dictate what kind of level of infrastructure. You've got what sort of even how you pay, because on some side, you can actually put funds, the fees into NAF and that's kind of natural for the funds. But the trading firms, that's obviously coming out of their P&L. The second bucket would be platforms of all types.

So you've got your payment processes, exchanges, neobanks, financial institutions and the latter's would actually, it's like split 50-50. Some institutions would go and say, like, look, we like what you built. We just want to have it in-house. And that's one conversation. The others would just like, we want to use you as a subcustodian or like quasi, like I don't like the word white label, but more of a platform, omnibus platform, basically like a wholesale type of thing. And then we'll push it towards the end customer on our side. And the last but not least, there would be your buying hold clients. And those would be your foundation, treasuries, investors of those foundations sometimes, if we're talking about like layer ones.

So those would be the large three buckets because at some point people do discover that for the first one, we will solve a massive problem of counterparty risk with one of our products called Clearloop because it's not a minor inconvenience for these guys. It's actually a massive pain in the ass and a headache to explain to the investors that we're going to be trading on an exchange and that exchange might be tomorrow. We hack to investigate it by CFTC, student journalists, freezing assets. What else? Executives extradited.

Just the usual stuff in crypto. Just a regular Wednesday, really, right? So you've got to wake up every morning thinking, like, am I in a very deep trouble or not, basically, just by scrolling through a newsfeet on crypto or your business. part and they're going to be pinged. Did you see that? Did you see that? You're like, it's just not comfortable. And the risk tolerance of people moving into the space is actually getting kind of lower, not higher. Because if in 2019, you kind of go like, okay, so you send $20 million to this company with this reference, and then we're going to give it to you as a balance on the venue.

And then you trade. You kind of went like, what? But then a month later, you realize, well, that's the only way. So you went, okay. So people that's coming into this space right now, they go like, guys, this is, no, this is just not happening. So that's where we come in. And when we like have those conversations with folks that are more from a traditional maybe buy side or sell side and having, they're engaging with traditional prime brokerage firms and custodians in other asset classes, how do you describe the state of the crypto asset markets today in terms of what infrastructure is there and kind of what the evolution has been? Well, to date, it exists. which is a massive point. It wasn't there even in 2019. So there are several attempts of creating

it and different approaches. Some people went after like let's just speed things up, but then you get just a bad counterpart to risk quicker. Then you had like the whole idea of aggregating. But then again, the whole problem of like, I need to have assets and exchanges kicks in and it's like, what exactly are you aggregating if you do not have the balance is there? So all the guys that are coming from the space, they're expecting custody trading to be separate. They're expecting the same level of service that they got in the traditional space. So we're just basically providing just that. But better to certain extent.

So here are some positives. People do prefer to trade with exchanges directly, which is quite a big one because in the traditional world, there is a revenue line called trading clients flow, which is a fancy phrase for front running the clients. and nobody really likes that. So only like massive players can afford going and trading directly. Others have to go through some sort of a PB. And in this space, that actually is absolutely fine. You can ping anybody under the sun in terms of the exchange. You say, I want to have an account.

And that part actually was solved fairly well in terms of the turnaround time because whilst in 2018, it might have taken, or 2017, might have taken your six months to open an account. Right now it's like a weak exercise with all the KYCML supply. them. So big changes have happened, but those are kind of like basic things. Like we were talking about basic hygiene, which has to exist. When you think about this asset class, there are definitely some things about it that are just entirely unique. You have bearer assets that are on exchanges that need to be pre-funded in certain cases. And so there's challenges that don't exist in equity

markets. Maybe talk a little bit about that market structure and what you saw that led you to believe that Clearloop would be something that would help people. And maybe talk about Clearloop. ClearLoop is a clearing network that allows you basically to have assets, like safely locked away, basically in a completely segregated vault. And to have that balance basically available to trades at any connected venue, which is Deribet, BitFinnix, bid.com, Zina diversify, like a few others. And it does require an integration, which is time-consuming. But once it's there, basically, you can trade directly on your account like you would have traded before.

you just, whilst you have a position open, you don't have to worry essentially what happens to your collateral because your collateral is safeguarded here with an MPC vault. So, yeah, it's basically you get the same liquidity and the same tool, same as before, essentially. It would have been the same as if you would have sent the funds to the venue. Just you're not taking any counterparty risk. And the thing is for exchanges as well, it's a little bit of a shitty business to be in like de facto they're a custodian without being paid for it. So you always have a headache of like, oh, what happens like if we're hacked and everything.

But in reality, they're not in the business of safeguarding the assets. They're in the business of providing instruments and tools to the takers, basically, to trade and execute on their strategies. One of the things that's really been fascinating to me is just the lack of traditional, quote unquote, custodians that have seen the opportunity here early and moved in. And now you're starting to finally see it with some of these custodians making venture investments and putting out subcustody RFPs. I'm curious, not asking you to predict the future,

but how do you think about these types of firms entering and how do you think that they'll tackle this market? I mean, will they be looking to lean on existing relationships like the DTCC to do some of these functionalities? Will they build it themselves? Will they partner? How do you see this playing out? It's a good question because you should ask custodians

would be a short answer because I question a lot of things which are happening within the bulge bracket. firms or like other similar sized firms in terms of like the efforts and innovation. But if you think about it, the space was not like massive. You didn't necessarily have to be in this space. When we're talking about like billions and billions, it's not really moving a needle massively when they're talking about trillions and trillions. So having expertise in house in terms of digital assets is absolutely crucial, I believe, for the survival of the business long term. And in a similar fashion, like,

I don't agree with regulators splitting the definition of crypto assets because it's just a form of how assets lives its life. So which technology powers it, whether it would be a SQL database somewhere at a custodian or whether it will be a DLT. It's not relevant. So there's a technology bit and then there is an asset itself. So along the term, I don't see differentiation between assets on blockchain or assets not on blockchain. I completely also, disagree with some of the parts of Brian's letter in Coinbase S1, which is mentioning like, it's like email to a mailbox. So when was the last time you've sent your portfolio company a mail getting an update?

Who sends mail? It's a great analogy where how email completely eliminated traditional mail unless you're sending some physical object. It's not the same. So that's why I think at large, like large players should definitely have. something in-house which allows them to custodize digital assets because today it's Bitcoin and Elon Musk and Tesla tomorrow it's Apple and it's not going to be too far down the road when it's going to be Apple shares and bonds and what do you do that? It's going to take some time.

And so everybody needs to be really gearing up towards that movement that's happening, which is not like an opportunity that you're not going to take. It's not basically an opportunity cost for you. It's basically a threat to the entire existence. And it's coming at them from both sides because you have the fact that you need to build this technology, which would probably take a bulge bracket bank a good couple of years to build some of this internally. Or you go buy someone. There's not that many left on the map, frankly. There's not that many firms out there. And now this is also happening against the backdrop of we're seeing just a new front door to financial services. And so on the other end, you're

losing a lot of customers to the upstart kind of crypto brokerage neobanks that will probably add traditional assets in addition to just crypto bearer assets. They will probably start to diversify into equities. And so I think it's a kind of a two front attack against some of these incumbents. And it's been shocking to me that more of them aren't seeing this. Well, I don't think that people do see that is just when you have 30,000 people organization. It's a little bit hard to make decisions on this pot and fast. And sometimes when you start talking with people, by the time you, on your fifth meeting, they already moved on with their careers and they now across the road. So that's the difficult part. Like people are actually great, like very smart

people. It's just the structure, it doesn't allow for the decisions to be made fast. And in this space, a month is like a year. So it's long coming, but then I also totally get, and trust me, like they are more frustrated about that than anybody else. Because trying to push something internally and not just getting through whilst years of passing by is not really ideal for anyone who's able to think critically and to put something forward. So I totally get it. So it's not surprising, but we also should kind of like cut some flag on that front to people leading those teams because I'll tell you I wouldn't be able to do it. Absolutely not. I would have quit in three months probably, but like I wouldn't be able to do it. Like if you put me in,

any one of the firms. Well, certainly, I mean, pushing a rock up the hill within an internal bureaucracy where risk in compliance is not on board with something. It must be challenging. But I guess that creates opportunity for companies like yours in terms of attracting talent that is really knowledgeable about some of these market structure issues and working on the inside of some of these places. So are you seeing more and more talent coming from traditional into your world? Oh, yeah, definitely. We hired a few people from quite massive institutions, but there's one hire which basically just refused to give up. You're basically, I want to work here.

We're like, when the hierarchy is like, no, I want to work here. That was great. Then you can be just with the same persistence, basically now killing it. So we see people applying with years and years of experience for like even junior roles because the betting on the sector. And then you have just a few options really. You're right. Like they're not that many places.

You got infrastructure, which is like a few firms. And then we got applications, which is God knows who's going to come up on. on top. So from the career choice standpoint, we're definitely seeing more and more inflow into the space from our standpoint. I don't want to take us too far into the weeds on MPC, but I'm curious just how you frame kind of MPC offerings versus the alternatives. And I know that there have been kind of loud voices maybe on both sides, kind of arguing for the benefits of MPC versus approaches that do not use MPC. So maybe how do you frame that to someone who might not be versed in the cryptography aspects of this? I would say that, first of all, from a firm

standpoint, you are reducing your flexibility if you're not using MPC, basically allows you to add more protocols faster because of the differences in signatures that they have. I guess from the standpoint of YMPC, it's not too dissimilar to MTC on Bitcoin, but not all day-a-one protocols have native multisic. And trusting smart contracts that's been in existence for like one week, it's somewhat of a suboptimal decision. If people are familiar with the multi-sig is, it basically resembles roughly the same methodology from the standpoint that you can involve a client

with process of moving their assets, which you can't do in traditional space. Traditional space is an omnibus structure. And what I see as a mistake with some of the service providers in the space is that they are replicating omnibus structure in crypto space. Like in crypto space, for the first time, like ever, you can have assets sitting, being safeguarded by custodian,

but not have the same risk profile as a nominee by structure. Because $10 million, like, you might be not a sweet target, but $10 billion, people can deploy capital and resources if it's all sitting in one pot to go after that pot. So from our standpoint, we don't have that. We basically, every single client has completely segregated environment, which we have provided safeguarding services for, but client is also being involved.

And that's what MPC allows you on every lay one protocol, not just with Bitcoin. Then again, if you dig quite deep on how HSM setups look like, it normally revolves around a bunker or a bank or something similar where there will be John Smith and admin signing things out. And then you can also get surprisingly, you're going to get higher insurance for that because it will be qualified as a specie insurance.

And there are two types of insurance. insurance is on the market. There is a specie insurance and there is a crime. So spece insurance basically goes like, if that vault is not broken into, you're fine. We're not going to pay, basically. But crypto assets are not stolen physically. They're not going to be like X black water, whoever squads, ramming into the mountain and then running away with a server. That's not how you steal crypto assets. So species insurance for that matter is like, yeah, it's there. But crime is actually like that's what covers really like, okay. things go wrong, you get hacked, malware, all of that, basically.

That makes a ton of sense. And on the scalability question, that's something I was going to get your opinion on, is how do you guys think about adding new assets onto the platform? And this is a market that's moving so quickly. And what is that customer demand kind of process from requesting assets to actually getting them on the platform? It's a business-driven decision. We currently support 30 plus layer one protocols, I think 30.

to 33 at this stage, I think the next nearest would be, I think, Coinbase. They support like 15. And then after like 12, 13, 9, 7, etc. So we're doing fairly well on that front. And it's a business driven decision. So if it's an investor or a treasury of a foundation, that basically needs to save guard the assets, because it's not unheard of for us to hear the cases of like, hey, we've got six billionths on the USB stick situation. And we need to solve that problem like yesterday. Because, I mean, I don't really need to explain why on that front. We hear cases like that. In terms of you've got all these new assets being launched, when you're engaging with the types of customers that are quote unquote traditional on the by side, large, long-only asset

managers, my guess is that they're looking first at Bitcoin. But I'm curious what the conversation looks like after Bitcoin and what the thesis is around why you would hold some of these other assets and what that progression is going to look like. It took an awful long time to get a lot of allocators even to Bitcoin. And I would say there's plenty of room to grow just on that one asset. But what does it look like after Bitcoin in terms of the thesis? I'd say there would be like two types of customers. There will be a customer who's like, we're going to allocate and sit on it and then reevaluate it at a later stage, like six months from and I don't think there are a lot of players who basically cross that barrier yet because Bitcoin

is a digital gold and that's the point where they understand. It's actually more interesting to find out like what they think before that because they think, well, today it's Bitcoin. Tomorrow is going to be Ethereum after tomorrow is going to be Tesos. But then the process of figuring out that those are not the same things in terms of like they're not competing against like one and like Bitcoin is not competing with Ethereum. Tesas does and like Polka dot or Salana or whoever basically tries to build the rails for the applications to be launched on. But like Bitcoin doesn't. Bitcoin is Bitcoin. So once they're comfortable with that, they go like, okay, cool. And that's the first step. The second step is then they start digging into the universe of like,

okay, then there are rails and those rails are kind of important because there are projects being launched on those rails and those projects. Some good things are happening. Some crazy things are happening. Some bad things are happening. And that's quite a research. Like it actually goes far, far deeper than understanding what Bitcoin is and how it works. So I don't think we're there yet. And then there will be a second type of customer who goes like, I'm going to do the same stuff I did in traditional space. Those would be your strategies.

So whoever that was, whoever did calendar spreads or bellies like or whatever, like they do that's the same here. Whoever did like we've got this iron condor strategy, yadda, yeah, yeah. Like it's all the same here. So same derodes. It's easier for them, right, to get involved. Exactly, exactly. So for them, there is a scene opportunity. They go like, okay, I buy here, I sell there. I make money. Fairly straightforward. So like these guys, they're basically launching with all guns blazing straight away. And I guess on the first group, the taxonomy is definitely the most important. I mean, that was one of the first things we tried to do at Fidelity is just start to have a characterization of what are these things trying to be and what are they competing against, both within crypto and externally. One of the most amazing things for the past few years has been this category, around decentralized finance and these new exchanges being launched that are community owned,

for lack of a better word. How do you guys think about that in terms of connecting to these venues, how they engage with your business? We do provide connectivity. We do have a defy a connector because, yes, the funds basically leave to go to a smart contract. And yes, that smart contract needs to be robust and not leaking. And those are quite important points there. We actually had a request for a feature, basically, to create a feature which allows you to put the feature. so high that if there is a hack and they can actively monitor so that this hack is happening, they can get their money out and front run essentially the transactions of getting their funds out first on the network. And those are the things you have to think about. The other things you have

to think about is like when you do a trade, it's actually like people can actually also front run your trades, like just by looking into the blockchain, which is then you're in the territory of shielded transactions. It's something where the transaction appears from the miner straight away in the block. And then you're also in the territory of like, will the minor fronts run me because they see what's going on. So it's a fun space from the trading standpoint, from the fund management standpoint. What we provide, though, is when assets do leave, they will come back basically to the address where they're left from more often than that.

So safeguarding that address, even though it wouldn't have assets sitting there physically at that moment at times quite important because if that's just, again, a USB stick or a piece of paper or something that you generated quickly and forgot like, and that's where basically the funds are going to be returned to. And at that point, it was compromised before, then you're not going to see those assets there for very long. You must get a ton of, you're talking about kind of M.EV and some of these unique issues to blockchains, which I find fascinating. The other kind of aspect of this is on the regulatory front. And so you must be having some really interesting conversations with folks that are

coming into this space and just trying to understand, how do I take these frameworks and these things that I need to do in my regular business around knowing the other side of a transaction. And okay, so you're saying I'm trading against a smart contract where I can't get a full KYC on who owns it. Basically, this is just community-owned software. How do you see this playing out? I mean, is this something where the regulators are just going to try to brute force existing frameworks or will we have to have some evolution in terms of how we think about the counterparties here and how we adapt to this new technology? I think it will play. It will play. out in a manner that ultimately down the line, I don't see the, like, again, I wouldn't separate

crypto assets and generally traditional assets because right now we're in this discovery period of this new technology basically becoming this for the likelihood of the better word finance 2.0, but finance 1.0 would need to migrate to that at some point. So that would be a real pickle for a regulator then because you got your Mifert 2. in the UK and Europe and rules to apply by and all of those will have to be. That's why I'm saying like it's a bad idea to have one set of regulations for crypto and one side of regulation for traditional assets. Those should be the same framework and how we deliver like that's basically those requirements, how you address them, wait and see what people can bring to you because

you don't necessarily need to report 84 fields after each trade through some format to unauthorized institution to then be received by a regulator retroactively 30 days later, you can actually see directly through a contract, like the life. So blockchain is basically a blessing in disguise. It's ultimate dream of any regulator. From that standpoint, the issues, some part was like the lack of the infrastructure that we saw at the time where we were like in a traditional space. But the other reason why, like I made a decision to move into the space was also a sheer pain of operating in a traditional space. And not pain from the bureaucracy standpoint

to any of that, but like spending half of the week chasing a bond settlement transaction because somebody mistyped Aison or missed a coma in a swift message. And then it's not T plus two. T plus if you're lucky. It's T plus when the Geneva guy is going to come back

from lunch and not going to leave home. And when a New York guy is going to come into work and not going to go into the meeting. And you actually got them on the phone at the same time. like that's when your shit is going to settle. Like, it's not T plus two. So that's insane. And that's basically the entire planet's financial services infrastructure functioning like that.

So there is tech crunch and there is like a whole like fintech and all of that. It's all bullshit. FinTech didn't even start yet. Look at what happened with Robin Hood. It's basically all of the fintech today is a facade to an infrastructure, which is like 50 plus years old, written on Kabul. and nobody understands how it functions. And literally, I know some institutions that have lost documentation to the core system and they had to write a PHP wrapper around stuff written on Kabul

so that by trial and error, they figure out what the core banking system does. That's like top 20 by assets, institutions in the world. It's mental. So you look at it and you're like, well, that's shit. And obviously, nothing has happened in the last 20 years. since this internet thing started. So unless something new comes along and does, and crypto's best position to do that,

because you can't really go on the side and build something, say like, hey, guys, I build this nice new platform. Like, why don't you migrate your $5 trillion a day clearing onto this? Of course, who would do that? Like, you go away.

But then when you already have, so I don't think, like, general math realizes that the whole, like, oh, I've got this robot advisor that's been in existence for the last like five years. and then it's like how much assets do you have like, well, $2,5 billion, that is like peanuts, drops in the ocean. It's nothing. All the fintech balances today is nothing.

It's like 2%. And then there's 98% of the same. It's like this meme I saw the other day of like Tesla being charged from a station, like electric station, which is powered by diesel. And it goes like millennial neobank bank. It's very well put. I mean, yeah, you're right. I mean, what we're talking about here with these public blockchain networks, it's an order of magnitude improvement versus the legacy system.

I was chuckling as you're talking about the cobal developers. I jokingly said to someone a couple years ago that was in university still, definitely focus on becoming kind of a blockchain developer and get really knowledgeable about that. Or maybe just lean into being a cobal developer because you probably make a million dollars a year and work about 10 hours a week because these banks just have no one to do it anymore. So it's like two and a half to five thousand euros a day is a rate of cobal developer in Germany. Wow. Java is 600 to 800. Wow. That's amazing.

Dimitri, so this has been great. What does the next few months look like for you? You guys are in hypergrowth mode. What are you hiring for? What does the product roadmap look like? We're basically going from this like a scale up stage to kind of like an enterprise stage. So processes are changing with 75 plus people already. And we're going to add another.

75 to 100 by the end of the year. Establishing hubs globally is a priority for us. And then growing with the customers, where the customer demand is. It's been very busy last seven months, pretty much official working hours from six in the morning until two in the morning here. So it's a great space to be in today. And from the competition standpoint, we didn't anticipate that there will be like so little competition.

And there are a few firms out there. but then the market is like so much bigger, which is great, because it's very hard to go into the infrastructure space from day one, like even if you have anything, because it needs to be battle tested. You need to have a few attacks from North Koreans and things like that's basically happening. So you basically need to have battle tested solutions here because obviously there are a lot of state-sponsored actors in the space operating. So yeah, from our standpoint, just continuing the growth, continuing adding people and continuing adding customer base. We were positively surprised in terms of what sort of customers are coming on board. Some people that we would have thought

would never see until like 2025. And they're like, cool, let's do a POC. Let's kick it off like tomorrow. And which is fantastic. And I think great decisions from their side because ultimately, a priest that didn't believe in evolution was killed in Newton by a better fit a priest. So I think a lot of things will change in traditional space in terms of like in a similar fashion, how like top companies look like since like 2000 to 2010, the famous table, and there was like oil and gas, et cetera, and then from 2010 to 2020, I think the financial services space will be changing as well in a very similar fashion. And it will be driven by crypto, but ultimately it will be all digital assets. I agree. It's going to be fascinating to watch. This has been great to be

where can we send people to learn more about copper and to look at some of the open wrecks that you have? Absolutely. Yeah, well, copper.com, ping us a message, submit a forum. And you'll get a reply within an hour. That service. That's 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. service there. We do have people globally now. So for that reason, we actually had to ship some of the engineers on an island in the middle of nowhere

to support basically the hours because account management and technology support, like require 24-7. 24-7 market, right? Exactly. Well, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining us to that podcast. Thank you very much for having me, Matt. Thanks for listening to you.

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