About Copper.co
Copper.co, trading as Copper Markets, was founded in 2018 by Dmitry Tokarev, a software and financial engineering specialist, to address a critical piece of institutional infrastructure that the cryptocurrency industry lacked in its earlier years: secure, professional-grade custody of digital assets combined with the ability to trade those assets across multiple exchanges without needing to physically move funds onto each individual exchange, a structure that historically forced institutional traders to accept significant counterparty risk by pre-funding balances on potentially less secure or less well-capitalized exchanges in order to trade.
The company's core custody technology uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a cryptographic technique that splits the private keys controlling digital asset wallets into multiple parts held separately, rather than storing a complete private key in any single location, substantially reducing the risk that a single point of compromise could result in stolen assets, a security approach that has become an industry standard for institutional-grade crypto custody. Copper's flagship product, ClearLoop, extends this custody technology into a settlement network that lets institutional clients trade on partner cryptocurrency exchanges while their underlying assets remain segregated within Copper's custody infrastructure rather than being transferred onto the exchange itself, significantly reducing the counterparty and exchange-failure risk that became painfully evident to the crypto industry following collapses such as FTX. The company serves more than a thousand institutional counterparties, including hedge funds, trading firms, exchanges, and exchange-traded product providers seeking secure custody as a foundation for their crypto investment products, and reports tens of billions of dollars in monthly notional trading volume flowing through its infrastructure. Copper has raised substantial venture funding across multiple rounds and, as of 2026, was reportedly exploring a sale of the company at a valuation of roughly $500 million, reflecting active consolidation and deal-making activity among institutional crypto infrastructure providers.
