Copper创始人：打造10亿美元公司与修复加密托管
- Dmitry Tokarev称，Copper在ZIRP时代筹集了3亿美元，最新估值达到12.5亿美元，因为仅仅默默建设托管业务已经不够：知名度才能建立信任。 为了做到“在人力所能及的范围内无处不在”，他不得不大举投入，包括拍摄一支有Rebecca Ferguson出演的冰岛广告片，贵到让他刻意不看《Dune: Part Two》，免得想起成本。更难的是，在2021年10月至2022年10月将员工从36人扩张至236人后，如何压低烧钱速度。
- 他对FTX的内部判断是：这家公司并非从一开始就专门为大规模欺诈而设计——随着公司扩张，“他只是失去了控制”。 Copper在2022年7月签署文件，将FTX接入ClearLoop；此后他不断追着Sam Bankman-Fried推进，而FTX团队告诉他，Bankman-Fried有130名直接汇报下属。一个最初可能只有100万至200万美元的客户资金/FTT杠杆问题，最终膨胀到10亿美元、20亿美元和50亿美元，因为没有人能叫停它。
- Bron/Brown是他的“第三代”自托管钱包：采用机构级MPC，不存在单一私钥，并将这套能力普及给个人。 目前钱包约有1,000名用户、10亿美元资产，用户主要是家族办公室、高管和创始人。第一代把密钥留在内存中，第二代把密钥放到设备上，第三代则解决恢复、继承、隐藏钱包和可编程策略等问题，例如24小时累计交易额超过10万美元时要求审批，超过100万美元时设置48小时延迟。
- 这套产品的卖点也包括威胁环境：Tokarev称，实体攻击“据我所知每周都有，可能每天都有”。 社交工程骗局则利用泄露的交易所数据展开攻击。犯罪分子瞄准的是防护较弱的持币者，而不是曝光度高、注重安全的人物。3位朋友曾因客服人员收受贿赂而被骗；其中1人在来电者提供交易细节后，转出10万美元的Bitcoin。他还提到一个他认为名为Operation Atlantic的专案组，由美国特勤局、英国国家犯罪局和安大略省警察厅组成，打击DeFi钓鱼攻击。他认为，密钥丢失也会摧毁供应量，例如Matthew Mellon持有的约5亿美元Ripple资产。
- 该项目没有股权主体，采用固定供应量、100%实用型代币，解锁由KPI驱动、与用户增长挂钩而非按时间推进。 Tokarev预计，首次按时间解锁即使存在，也要到2030年代后期。按他的说法，代币模型能立即产生客户LTV，因为客户已经在那里；怀疑者则可以选择付订阅费。
- AI改变了他的扩张计划：大约3到6周前，团队发现通过Claude Code构建安全工作流已经切实可行，于是停止招聘，团队规模仍低于40人。 他的建议是，在融资前先说服客户用真金白银付费。他还“再次极度看好销售人员”，因为企业买家需要一个能够信赖其判断的人，而他们无法“用Claude替你兜底”。
- Tokarev称，伊朗遭到袭击、Bitcoin小幅上涨时，他买入了两年来的第一笔Bitcoin；他把约5.6万美元的已实现价格以及接近4/100的恐惧与贪婪指数视为与市场底部相关的信号。 他看好Canton，因为华尔街正在编写DAML；他持有一些用于全同态加密的Zama，并在考虑用于永续合约、借贷、交易和期权的去中心化协议组合：Hyperliquid、Aster、Derive、Avax、Camino和Jupiter。他称Hyperliquid可能是最稳健的协议，但不认为市场会赢家通吃。
1. 机构从未拯救加密业——加密业自己铺设了轨道，如今问题再次出现
- Tokarev在DAS的Franklin Templeton展位开场时重新定义了这个行业的叙事：自2019年以来，市场一直在说“机构要来了”；但像Circle、BitGo这样已经上市，或正在准备上市的公司，7年前就已经存在，也曾期待机构来拯救它们。结果是，“它们和我们所有人”一起建设了这个行业。如今，同一个问题又落到了传统资产上链身上。
- 他的规模判断是：加密市场约2.5万亿至3万亿美元的市值，大致相当于Nvidia的市值，而当前整套基础设施服务的也就是这个规模。他希望听众设想，传统资产开始上链后，所有这些资产都必须过一种“区块链生活”。
- 他还观察到行为变化：人们越来越不满足于让基金经理替自己管理资产，或直接购买指数。他们希望理解市场运行机制，并选择单一资产或单一商品敞口，包括钯、黄金或白银。
2. Copper累计募资3亿美元：被迫营销、4家美国竞争对手与36→236人
- Copper最初几年一直在低调建设业务，但在零利率时代，它无法继续保持“既未盈利、又无人知晓”的状态。在托管业务中，“知名度才能建立信任”，因此公司累计募资3亿美元，最新估值达到12.5亿美元。这些资金被用于营销和“在人力所能及的范围内无处不在”；随后竞争对手募得更多，Copper也不得不继续融资、继续支出。
- Tokarev称，Copper流失的交易中有99%最终去了Anchorage、Coinbase Custody、Fireblocks或BitGo。这4家公司全部总部在美国，因此在美国之外的同类交易中，Copper几乎没有同量级对手。
- 真正困难的不是募资或花钱，而是扭转烧钱速度：员工人数从2021年10月的36人增至2022年10月的236人，略低于每天招聘1人。按照这样的速度，公司文化会碎裂成多个小圈子和亚文化，随后彼此发生冲突。
3. FTX复盘：来自交易对手方的视角——增长过快导致失控，而非专为大规模欺诈设计
- Copper在2022年7月签署文件，将FTX接入ClearLoop。此后数月，Tokarev一直试图推动集成落地；他形容自己与Sam Bankman-Fried的通话就像在篮球场上耗时数小时，充斥着“妄想式内容”。FTX员工告诉他，Bankman-Fried有130名直接汇报下属；即便只是改一个按钮颜色，也没人能把事情做完。
- 他的结论经过谨慎限定：FTX的行为“疯狂”且具有欺诈性，但他不认为这家公司从一开始就专门为大规模欺诈而设计。他认为，Bankman-Fried在公司1年内从17人扩张到700人的过程中失去了控制。
- 一个涉及通过FTT和Alameda加杠杆、或挪用客户资金的问题，最初可能只有100万至200万美元。Tokarev称，在公司拥有134名员工时，这个问题可能一路膨胀到10亿美元、20亿美元和50亿美元，直到再也无法叫停。他还记得，Bankman-Fried是他听说的第一个炫耀“小团队”的人；如今在AI时代，这已经成为资本效率的信号。
4. 创始人经验：慢招聘、认清自身超能力，以及CEO交接为何必须由美国人完成
- Tokarev的第一条经验是“慢招聘”。如果每个问题看起来都能靠增加1名员工解决，创始人可能是在逃避搭建可扩展解决方案这一更难的工作。有时，他们需要连续在周六、周日工作，直到找到能够长期成立的答案。他也不认同把“我们正在招聘”自动视为公司健康的信号。
- 他的第二条经验是了解自己：“我是做产品的人。”创始人不应该要求鱼去爬树。如果自己不擅长招聘或行政管理，就应该找擅长这些工作的人，而不是强行覆盖公司的每个职能。
- 谈到离开Copper，Tokarev称自己在2024年12月或2025年1月卸任。把Ammar带到Copper的猎头公司朋友告诉他，这是他们见过最干净的一次交接。他的原则是支持接任CEO，然后退到一边；如果创始人持续阻挡新领导的计划，交接就会失败。Jason Yanowitz补充说，即便是Sam Altman，也可能需要有人补足自己较弱的领域。
- 这是一项地理战略：金融机构和未来可能的退出都预计会在美国，因此Copper需要一位总部在美国的CEO，以及一个以美国为重心的组织。Tokarev称，相比华尔街，欧洲“相形见绌”，未来4到6年内不太可能成为加密和资本市场的中心。
- 监管是另一项约束。产品型创始人只能构建监管机构允许的产品；Tokarev称，他有一些产品和功能已经放在架子上，可能10年内都无法面世，而且他不认为人们有能力理解其中一些产品。
5. Bron/Brown：面向个人的机构级MPC，因为写着助记词的纸巾上放着数十亿美元
- 他的钱包分类有3代。第一代把私钥留在内存中，例如MetaMask、Trust Wallet和Phantom；第二代把私钥放到设备上，例如Ledger和Trezor；第三代则试图解决另外9类问题，包括恢复、继承、防欺诈和胁迫。Tokarev称，机构用户依赖MPC、而不是直接操作私钥，已经有约5到6年；他认为这项技术大约在2020年前后开始可用。
- 这个钱包不会生成单一私钥。1个MPC分片存放在用户的笔记本电脑或手机上，另1个存放在项目方的可编程服务器上。用户可以要求指定人员审批24小时累计超过10万美元的活动，或在金额超过100万美元时启动48小时安全延迟。
- 隐藏钱包可以应对日常胁迫，因为攻击者无法从界面判断它们是否存在；但Tokarev承认，这无法解决持枪有组织犯罪。设备丢失后的恢复需要48小时。继承功能则允许继承人在持有人去世后重新获得访问权限。恢复过程由项目方和受信任的第三方Crypt共同完成；Tokarev称，Crypt采用量子加密。
- Tokarev称，人们去世时没有告诉任何人资产存放在哪里，丢失的密钥正在造成供应量大幅减少。他举例称，Matthew Mellon持有的Ripple资产可能约为5亿美元；其备份分别放在一间后来在洛杉矶山火中烧毁的银行，以及一间被洪水淹没的办公室地下约6英尺处的保险箱里。他说，这类原因已经让数千万美元消失。
- 随着加密资产越来越像数字黄金、波动率下降，他认为持有者需要更低的自托管风险，以及能够恢复的链上资产。
6. 威胁版图：每周发生的扳手攻击、被收买的客服与3国联合专案组
- Tokarev称，实体攻击被严重低估，法国发生了大量此类事件，但全球范围更多，而且漏报严重。他估计攻击频率为“据我所知每周都有，可能每天都有”。他的建议是让自己成为一个不具吸引力的目标：犯罪分子可能更喜欢那些以100美元买入Bitcoin、或公开展示持仓的人，而不是高度警觉、安保严密的公众人物。
- 交易所并不能消除实体攻击或社交工程风险。Tokarev称，3位朋友在客服中心员工收受贿赂、泄露账户数据后被骗。其中1人在来电者提供交易日期等个人细节、并使用令人信服的英国口音后，转出10万美元的Bitcoin。他还建议检查交易所API密钥；Yanowitz曾发现一个与Blockfolio有关、且已开启交易权限的密钥。
- Tokarev称，美国特勤局、英国国家犯罪局和安大略省警察厅成立了一个专门打击DeFi钓鱼攻击的专案组，他认为该组织名为Operation Atlantic。用户可能将钱包连接到一个仿冒Aave或Amino的网站，并在不泄露私钥的情况下签发授权额度，随后资金就会被抽走。他将这一机制与Bybit黑客攻击相提并论。
7. 无股权主体：KPI驱动解锁的纯实用型代币，以及Canton意图
- Tokarev在从Copper转型期间读完Chris Dixon的《Read Write Own》后，设计了一种没有股权主体的结构。他称自己个人只持有代币。与常见的“创始人与VC持有股权、用户持有治理代币”模式不同，这个项目旨在采用100%实用型代币；不想使用代币的人则可以选择订阅。
- 代币供应量固定。Tokarev称，他把Copper的融资历程复制进最终的代币表，而不是股权资本表。解锁由KPI驱动：用户越多，解锁越多；如果没有达到用户目标，就不会解锁。他预计，首次按时间解锁即使存在，也要到2030年代后期。
- 他认为，代币模型可以立即产生LTV，因为客户已经在那里；相比之下，SaaS获客回本周期可能需要数年。项目目前约有1,000名用户和10亿美元资产，用户主要是家族办公室、高管和创始人。理想的口碑传播路径，是这些用户在感恩节期间向亲属介绍这个钱包；与此同时，零售用户评论区还在问，2026年为什么还会有人推出钱包。
- 据该交易所介绍，Canton只能在这个项目上购买。项目构建了一个基于意图的跨链兑换协议，并率先上线Canton交易对，因为Tokarev看好Canton，并称：“当华尔街正在编写DAML时，你其实不需要再知道更多。”
8. 停止招聘、上门销售与加密市场判断
- Tokarev称，大约3到6周前，通过Claude Code与AI模型开展安全工作的条件已经成熟，因此团队停止招聘，目前仍低于40人。他称现阶段的技术是“这项技术未来最愚蠢的形态”，并表示它从早上到下午都在变好。
- 他的融资建议已经从2021年的做法反转：先说服客户用真金白银付费，然后让资金跟上。品牌建设仍然需要金钱、时间和耐心，短期内不太可能产生ROI。
- 他“再次极度看好销售人员”，因为企业买家需要一个能够信赖其判断、且其建议足以为预算提供正当性的销售人员。他们无法完全“用Claude替你兜底”。他还预计，线下活动会发生变化，但人们仍会寻求社交和面对面学习。
- Tokarev称，当前是他的第三次比特币葬礼。6周前在迪拜，一位聪明的加密行业朋友告诉他，某种可怕结果如今有8%的概率发生；Tokarev回应称，以这种方式思考本身就是市场底部的信号。他说，伊朗遭到袭击时，自己买入了两年来的第一笔Bitcoin；此前他预计这条新闻会推动Bitcoin下跌，但Bitcoin反而小幅上涨。
- 他的锚点是约5.6万美元的已实现价格，他称这是全球Bitcoin平均买入价，并表示从历史上看，这一水平没有被大幅跌破。他还跟踪恐惧与贪婪指数，Yanowitz称该指数一度降至约4/100。
- Tokarev看好Bitcoin和Canton，持有一些用于全同态加密的Zama，并在考虑一篮子用于永续合约、借贷、交易和期权的去中心化协议：Hyperliquid、Aster、Derive、Avax、Camino和Jupiter。
- 他称Hyperliquid可能是最稳健的协议，原因在于其韧性、凶猛程度和纪律性。即使它的策略继续奏效、竞争对手也很难追赶，他仍不认为市场会赢家通吃。他预计未来市场更像中心化交易所：Binance约占50%的交易量，同时还有Bybit、OKX、Bitget等平台。
完整逐字稿
Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
Alright folks, back on Empire. Took a little [music] hiatus there. Back on Empire. Very excited about this. We're recording live from DAS, so hopefully the sound's all right. Looks good. We've got the better-looking guy than me, Dmitry Tokarev. What's going on, Dmitry?
Thank you for having me, man.
Yeah. I wanted to have Dmitry on because Dmitry was actually our first sponsor ever at our first DAS in May 2019. Dmitry was the founder of Copper, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars. High valuation and big business, and now building Bron. What's going on? How's life?
Life's been good, man. I think a lot of founders can relate. We were just talking, and we roughly started businesses at the same time. When you have a smaller team, you execute faster; you're closer to clients and the product, so it's been very exciting. I think you're in it now, too—roughly, building Bron. It's been a fantastic experience, and the transition from Copper was also pretty smooth.
1. Blockworks Investor Relations
Yeah, good, man. I want to hear all about it. We've got DAS behind us, and we have 2,900 people here this year. I'd love your macro take on how the industry has evolved. We started Blockworks in December 2017. You started in January 2018.
It was the same thing in May 2019, when we were the sponsors. I remember we put together $10,000 or $20,000 or something in sponsorship fees and thought, “Okay, we've got to make it count,” because everybody was really poor. I hadn't raised hundreds of millions of dollars at that time. The theme was always the same: the institutions are coming, and so on and so forth.
We're sitting in the Franklin Templeton booth right now, so thank you, evidently, right? But I would say that a lot of people and projects that originated in crypto did so much more than they probably anticipated themselves. Some of them already went public, like Circle and BitGo, and others are gearing up to go public.
All of these shops were around 7 years ago, hoping that institutions were going to come and rescue them and save the day. But it was actually them and all of us who built this industry. The next wave people are talking about is traditional assets coming on-chain. Again, the question is: will the institutions come and save the day and bring those assets on-chain, or will players from the crypto industry do that directly and work directly with the consumer?
What do you think?
We're approaching it from both angles. On the Copper side, if institutions are there, they need infrastructure. They need companies like Copper, and there's something good that's going to happen on that front. If it's going to be working directly with the customer itself, then on the Bron side, we're ready to support.
The one thing I would say is that the way people approach investing in the digital asset space—and I would say investing generally—is changing right now. From the behavior of people, we're seeing that they're not really looking for a manager to manage their assets. They're not really looking to buy an index, whether it's an index in crypto or an index in traditional markets.
There's an increasing demand for people to understand the market dynamics themselves and then subsequently take either single-asset exposure or single-commodity exposure, whether it be palladium, gold, or silver. They want to think for themselves.
The second thing I would say is that the market cap of crypto is what? $2.5 trillion, $3 trillion?
Trillion, yeah.
On any given day—I mean, that's the market cap of Nvidia, right? All of this today is servicing a market cap of Nvidia.
Oh, sure.
No, but this is it. It's not that we're trying to hide it, I would say. If this is what it is today—servicing a market cap like this—imagine when traditional assets are going to be here and the infrastructure is going to be here, and all of those things are going to basically have to live, quote-unquote, a blockchain life.
To live a quote-unquote blockchain life, you're going to have to have all of this, essentially. All of these companies are going to have to service that industry. It's super exciting, and we definitely want to play quite a big part of it from the Bron standpoint as well.
2. The Copper Origin Story
Let's talk. I want to hear the Copper story. I want to hear the real Copper story. How much money did you guys raise?
$300 million.
$300 million?
$300 million.
At what valuation?
The latest one—I don't know if it's public. Well, you know, I'll just say: the latest one was $1.25 billion.
Wow.
Yeah. But I'll tell you: for the first couple of years, from the seed round, basically we were building a business. But in the zero-interest-rate era, you can't do that, right? You build a business, you're dipping in and out of profit. You don't really spend much money, but then nobody knows about you.
That became a problem, because when you run a custody business, you want everybody to be aware of you. Awareness creates trust. So we thought, “Okay, we've got to raise.”
You had to raise to spend money on marketing.
Money on marketing, basically. Just to be there. Just to be everywhere that's humanly possible to be. As soon as we raised, our competitors raised more.
Who are the competitors?
Fireblocks, BitGo, and Anchorage, I think. Coinbase Custody, to some extent, became a competitor.
I remember when you started, it was like you guys were an Anchorage or a BitGo, but of Europe.
Yeah. I mean, all 4 competitors—I've lost 99% of deals. Let me rephrase that: 99% of the deals that we've lost went to Anchorage, Coinbase Custody, Fireblocks, or BitGo, basically.
All 4 of these companies are in the U.S., right? So outside of the U.S., we're kind of the only one on those types of deals. Obviously, they raised, they spent, and then you have to raise and spend. Everybody did the same across the tech landscape, really. It wasn't unique to crypto, because capital was essentially cheap and people were looking to allocate more and more and more.
Then 2021 came around, and that's where the valuation insanity began. We grew from there, and there was a lot of stuff that happened in that 2021–2022 period: super-big rounds all across the board, extreme rapid growth of revenue and headcount. Then, when interest rates started increasing, you had to completely change your MO to, “Okay, well, we're now actually back to running a business,” where it actually needs to be in profit.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Which was extremely hard. I think the toughest piece there wasn't so much raising capital and spending capital—it's relatively easy. Harder is cutting the burn, cutting the headcount, essentially. We went from 36 people in October 2021 to 236 people in October 2022. That's slightly less than 1 person per day who got hired, right? Then the whole system changes.
It's—I mean, everything changes, right?
The culture changes, and you can't control it. Now you basically rely on clusters of culture. Those clusters create their subcultures. The subcultures start colliding with each other. It's pretty brutal, but it's not—I mean, I know companies that have done it even faster.
Partially, I think that's what happened to FTX, because they went from 17 people to 700 in a year. I just think they collapsed under the speed of growth.
Would you do anything differently? Maybe update folks: you're out of Copper.
Yeah. I stepped down from Copper in December 2024 or January 2025, and I'm building Bron. We're building Bron with a much smaller team because, these days, different times, you know? It changes every day.
I don't know how you guys are experiencing this whole AI situation in the last 3 months, but we've been using AI since day 0. I think 3 or 4, maybe 6 weeks ago—something like that—there was a full cycle where you can now work very securely with those models. We work through Claude Code, and it changes everything, right? So we actually stopped hiring because of that. We're under 40 people.
If you started Copper over again today, would you do it differently?
Yeah, of course.
Uh, I mean, you live and learn, right? So there were a lot of lessons.
Well, if you're a founder—lots of founders listen to this—what are the lessons?
I'd say hire slow. If you think that every problem you encounter could be solved by just hiring a person, you're wrong. Sometimes it just means that you're going to have to work Saturdays and Sundays and do it yourself until you figure out a scalable solution to it that has longevity, rather than just throwing people at a problem. That's probably the main thing.
Then it's a lot to do with hiring, I would say. It's how you hire people and where you hire people. There's a lot that's being projected from the VC tech scene. For example, when people raise a round and put, “We're hiring,” I'm like, “Why? Why is this a good thing?” “We're not hiring” should be the thing.
The first company that I think changed that narrative—
Mhm. Was actually FTX. Oh, yeah?
There was a point in time when SBF talked about how small they were. He'd brag about how small they were, and I think he was actually the first person I heard brag about how small they were. Now everyone's doing it because it shows how capital-efficient you are, basically.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, they went from 17 to 700 people, right?
Blew it.
At some point, because we were right in the middle, we signed documents with FTX to integrate them into ClearLoop in July 2022.
We announced it, right? There was an article and everything. Since then, I've been chasing Sam. I'm like, “Dude, where is it?” Every time you have a call, it's 4 hours of him sitting somewhere on a basketball court or something and just talking about some nonsense, delusional stuff. And I'm like, “All right, when is the date that we begin writing code to integrate ClearLoop into FTX?” He's like, “Yeah, but this is this and this is that.” Then there's philosophy, and I'm like, “Okay, this is not going anywhere.”
Then basically I talked with his team, and I'm like, “Guys, what was going on?” They're like, “Dude, you don't know what's happening here. He's got 130 direct reports right now. I'm trying to change the color of a button, and it's not happening.”
So I think the whole situation, the way it unraveled—I would say, obviously, all of this stuff that they were doing is crazy and fraudulent, et cetera. I don't think it was exclusively for the purpose of conducting a mass-scale fraud. I think he just lost control over what was happening.
There was a small problem—maybe at that time it was a small problem—of them being able to leverage or take out clients' funds through FTT leverage from Alameda's side. Maybe in the beginning it was a million or 2. Then, with 134 people, you can easily imagine that at some point, when it became $1 billion, $2 billion, $5 billion, you can't stop. You kind of go, “Oh, what's that?” Obviously, having one of your largest competitors own 10% or 20% of that, or however much that was, was a bit of an oversight, one might say.
What would you do differently at Copper, other than not hiring as many people?
We're at that stage now where I would not try to do things that I'm not good at.
You personally?
Yeah. I'm a product person. It took me a while to learn that. I build stuff. That's what I really enjoy.
It depends what kind of scale of the company you want to be running, but some people get a kick out of sales. Some people get a kick out of management. Some people have OCD and really like these admin-y tasks, et cetera. So it's really knowing yourself and not trying to make a fish climb a tree, because you can't be good at everything.
The things that you're good at—and the reason why you're sitting in the seat which you're sitting in—is that piece. It's in spite of all the other stuff that you've done in the business. If you don't know how to hire people, just find somebody who knows, and don't ask them to do other things. Just ask them to do that.
Yeah. It's really playing on each other's superpowers and asking for help in areas where you're not good at. But as a founder, you kind of expect it. You look at other founders and you're like, “Well, Sam Altman might be phenomenal at all of those things.” I guarantee not. I guarantee there's definitely a group of people augmenting something that he's not good at, and he's just doubling down on the things that he's good at.
3. How To Scale a Company
So, you're out of Copper now. Do you think non-founder-led companies can succeed at that scale? Maybe Uber's doing quite well, right? Travis is out of Uber. They've got—what's his name? Dara, isn't it?
Yeah, Dara. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's doing a great job.
But they're already a public company, already at scale. Can you put a non-founder in a Series B, C, or D company and get big?
It's risky. I was just catching up for drinks with my friends from the headhunting firms that basically brought Ammar to Copper. He's like, “Look, from what we're seeing, this has been the cleanest transition we've ever seen, essentially.”
You bring a person in, you need to stay out of their way, right? They're going to create a culture that they think is the best. They will create a plan. You need to back the CEO that you've brought in because there's no other way. Otherwise, it's a recipe for disaster.
When things don't go well in those transitions that we keep hearing about, the majority of it is because the person never actually had a chance to implement what they really wanted to do, because there's always a founder standing in the way going, “No, you should—”
Yeah, yeah.
So it takes a bit of discipline, and it also takes a lot of self-awareness—trying to shove the ego where the sun doesn't shine—and then go, “Okay, we're here to do business. Let's focus on that.” It is weird, and it is difficult, right?
Giving up your baby, in a sense?
I never thought about this as a baby. I have 2 kids. They're my babies, you know? I love the product. I love the people I'm working with.
But you do it while thinking, “Okay, what should Copper's strategy be?” That was our thinking. One, we should be closer to financial institutions, right? Financial institutions are in America, basically. Europe—I'm sorry—is pedestrian in comparison to Wall Street. So let's call a spade a spade.
Two, what would the exit look like for the business? We thought, “Okay, it's probably going to have to be in America too, right?”
An IPO or an acquisition?
No, any exit. Any exit. It has to be West, right? You need to have a US CEO—an American CEO, a US-based CEO—because otherwise, such a core, critical piece of infrastructure just needs to have an American center of gravity. That's what we wanted to achieve with this move, essentially.
When you give up control, you basically know the reasons why you're doing this, because unless Europe or the UK turns around and says, “Okay, we're now going to be the capital of not only crypto but the entire capital markets,” it's not going to happen in the next 4, 5, 6 years. I think that's the main motivation and the main reason.
The other reason is that when you work in a regulated business, the limits of what you can create as a product guy are basically bounded by what regulators will permit you to create. I built stuff that's sitting on the shelf there. That's never going to see the light of day over the next 10 years, and now I'm even more certain of that than I was.
Mhm.
No, I thought it was just going to take them a while to understand it. I think certain things that I've built and shelved—I don't think people are capable of understanding them.
Understand what?
The features, the pieces of the products that we've built, essentially. Because that's what I would do if I were running Copper: I would be building stuff. In terms of building stuff, if you're limited to what regulators permit you to build, there's only so many things you can build.
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What are you doing with Brown?
There was a whole gap that we identified, which was actually shocking to find out. Six or 7 years ago, at one of your events, I remember explicitly that 2 founders of crypto custody companies were having almost a fistfight over whether it would be MPC or HSMs.
Yeah, yeah. I remember. I don’t know who that was.
Exactly. That was the last battle, right? Since then, everyone’s using MPC.
MPC is essentially technology where you don’t have private keys. All of you probably have to write down seed phrases and create private keys, but institutions just haven’t done that for the last 5 or 6 years. No one sitting at BlackRock—or rather, Coinbase servicing BlackRock—is writing a seed phrase for BitGo Vault 1.
Right. That doesn’t exist. We lost the key.
It’s funny, too, but this is how the crypto industry basically functions today when it comes to retail. We’re talking about retail with billions of dollars sitting on napkins with 24 words.
There are 3 generations of wallets. There’s gen 1, which appeared straight out of the gate: it generates your private key, and you write down the seed phrase, like with a software wallet. They still exist because they’re quite convenient. Your private key just lives there in memory, like with MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and Phantom.
Then there’s gen 2. People think, “If this laptop gets hacked and the memory is drained, and there are North Koreans sitting there sniffing everything, it’s easy to steal the private key. Let’s put it on the device.”
Ledger, Trezor, and so on. Let’s put it on the device.
That solved that problem. Then gen 3 solves the other 9 problems that remain. That’s basically what Brown is doing. We’re a gen-three self-custody wallet.
What are those problems?
If you’ve lost everything you’ve ever created on Brown—your devices and so on—we can help you recover. You can’t lose that wallet. If you get hit by a bus, you can appoint successors, and your family and relatives are going to get access to your crypto.
This is probably creating the most supply reduction over the next 10 years. It’s not the protocol itself; it’s people dying and not telling anyone where their stuff is. That’s already happening with Matthew Mellon, I think—the guy who had a bag of Ripple worth about half a billion dollars. That’s gone forever.
There’s another increasing problem that people experience. You need to protect against fraud. You can’t give your lawyer or accountant your seed phrase; that’s crazy. You need to solve for that, and we’ve solved for that.
Weirdly, a lot of that is happening in France, but so much more is happening globally and is underreported: physical attacks.
Physical attacks are very under-discussed, right? It’s insane. I’m part of several groups, and we can turn this into a very sad podcast. I’m of 2 minds about whether to tell people what’s actually going on.
Give me the scoop.
If you have anything anywhere on a wallet with a seed phrase, install Brown and don’t use that wallet. That’s my advice. If somebody rocks up to you and politely asks you to give it up, you’re going to have to give it up, right?
But how frequently are these attacks happening?
Weekly, that I’m aware of. Probably daily.
Is it mostly big public figures, or is it people they identify through something like the Ledger leak?
It’s mostly big public figures. When you talk about physical attacks, the main thing is to make yourself extremely unattractive. You don’t want to be an attractive target.
If you’re a public figure, the risk associated with robbing you is pretty high because people will care. That’s one thing. The second is that you’re potentially thinking about those things and have security in place.
So they’re not really going after public figures?
Yeah, because who are you going to go after—Michael Saylor? That’s crazy. Who do you want to go after? Criminals figure out who the people are who bought Bitcoin for $100.
And they’re 80 years old, they live in Elbe [?], and they don’t have any—
Exactly. Or somebody who’s flashing their portfolio, for example. You can tell from someone’s demeanor who’s serious about their security, who’s paranoid, and who’s not. You don’t want to rob paranoid people because they have processes in place.
What’s the best way to protect your brand-new motorcycle? Park it next to a brand-new Ducati. People are going to try to steal the Ducati first before they get to your bike.
There’s a lot of that happening, and we’re not going to move forward as a space with all of these problems. I’m surprised we actually got to this state with the infrastructure that normal people have.
Yeah, but most people don’t do that. Most people just use Coinbase or Kraken. I mean, most people use centralized exchanges. They all went to the exchanges.
If you’ve got access to those exchanges, you can lose access to those funds during a polite visit by somebody with a machete.
The biggest problem there is actually social-engineering scams. That’s another way to lose your crypto.
Yeah, there’s the text message saying it’s from Coinbase.
The most popular method lately has been bribing a support-center person to leak account data. I had 3 friends who got scammed that way, and these are not stupid people.
One of them was made to transfer $100,000 worth of Bitcoin to a different address. I asked him—because he knows me, and I’m much less reserved when I talk about these things off camera—“This is why we're building Brown. Be paranoid, install everything,” and so on. I asked him, “Did you think for at least 10 seconds during this whole episode that they might be scamming you?”
He said, “Yeah, but they were so convincing. They had a fantastic British accent, and they had all my details.”
So they must have bribed a customer-support person.
They bribed a customer-support person. They basically told him which dates he sent which transactions.
Wow.
Those are the kinds of details they had. If somebody calls you from Amex, they might say, “Let us identify ourselves. On this day, this is the amount that was charged to your card. This is when you created your card, and this is the address where we shipped your card.”
You’re like, “Okay, you can’t really ask for more in terms of identification,” right? It’s the same thing with crypto. People willingly give up their crypto because someone tells them, “Your account isn’t safe. We just need a confirmation code and number.”
Sometimes that’s rarer, but another way you can lose your crypto is by simply generating an API key. People should look at the API keys generated on their accounts, because sometimes, even if there’s whitelisting, there’s a way to steal through the exchange.
What? I just saw an API from Blockfolio that was feeding into Blockfolio and had trading enabled.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, it never—no one took advantage. Yeah, I just found it the other day.
Yeah, so that’s it. The other thing these days is that, if you’re using DeFi services, it’s gotten so bad that the U.S. Secret Service, the U.K. National Crime Agency, and the Ontario Provincial Police formed a task force called Operation Atlantic, I think, which is basically fighting DeFi phishing scams.
You can hook up your wallet and issue an allowance on some website. No private key is revealed, nothing—your funds just get drained straight away. It’s similar to the Bybit hack, actually. You issue an allowance, and that’s all you have to do. It looks like Aave; it looks like Amino.
So why do you guys solve this when someone like Coinbase can’t solve it?
On the Coinbase side, there are a few things—
Or maybe don’t just compare it. On the DeFi phishing side of things?
There are a few things. Bronze doesn’t solve it, so here’s the thing: when we create a wallet for you, there’s no private key that’s created. That’s how institutions do it. You know it, right? That’s basically been the default case for the last 5 years. There are no private keys. Nobody in the institutional space operates private keys, right?
It's a seed phrase wallet. People use MPC, which basically creates key shares, or shards. One share lives on your device, whether it’s a laptop or a mobile phone, and one share lives on a Bronze server, which you program.
You program the server—the share—to do things. For example, you can say, “If my cumulative transaction volume over the last 24 hours exceeds $100,000, I want this person that I added to my account to approve my transaction. Otherwise, don’t sign with me.” Or, for example, “If we exceed $1 million, I want a 48-hour security delay activated on my account.”
Then we have protections against random crime. If somebody on the street asks you to open your wallet, you can basically hide wallets, and from the interface you won’t be able to tell whether they even exist.
That’s my favorite.
Yeah, it’s pretty cool, right? Obviously, it doesn’t help with organized crime because, if people point a gun to your head, you’ll quickly remember all your hidden accounts. But the policy engine does help with that.
If you get hit by a bus, there’s a full recovery mode that could be enabled by your successors. That’s your inheritance feature. People lose devices every single day. They just go through a recovery process, which takes 48 hours, and regain access to their lost key share.
It’s essentially Bronze and a trusted third party appointed on your behalf as a backup.
Yeah, Bronze and that trusted third party—is it like a sibling or a friend or something?
No, no. We work with a company called Crypt. They do quantum encryption. You inform them that you would like to recover your share, and after the security delay, we essentially print back the key.
A three-party multisig?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting. Why are you going after individuals? Isn’t it a worse business model?
Look, I think in order for us to advance as a space, this needs to be solved. We can’t be operating in a space where people are going to lose their 401(k) savings because they forgot where they stored a napkin, or because of some other mistake. I mean, the stories I’ve heard—
One guy had a backup at a bank. The bank burned down in the L.A. fires, right? And the bank was like, “We don’t know where it is.” Gone. Another guy basically had it in a safe 6 feet under his office, essentially in a basement. The floods came, and it was gone.
I’m talking about tens of millions of dollars gone, right? We can’t continue as a space like that. It might have been acceptable when the volatility was so insane that one day you had $1 million, another day you had $100 million, and another day you had $50 million.
But now that it’s dying down more and more—and it will turn into more of a digital gold-type scenario—you would want to have a reduced level of risk associated with self-custody of such assets. It’s extremely important.
Crypto is part of the story of assets that live on the blockchain. We will see other assets moving on-chain, and if you want to hold those assets, you should be able to recover them. You should be able not to give them up that easily.
Is there some new technology that made this possible for you guys?
MPC, essentially. We just took what works in the institutional world. We took what we’ve basically been doing in institutions and applied it here.
And competitors have been using it since 2021?
Yeah, it’s basically been around since 2020.
Exactly. Since 2021, everybody’s been using MPC.
Exactly. Since 2021, everybody’s been using MPC. We just took that and applied it. Why? Because people deal with $20 million, and that’s a lot of money. But $2 million is a lot of money, and $20,000 is a lot of money. It should be accessible to everybody.
5. Why Bron Is Launching a Token
We’re democratizing access to technology that’s been used by institutions for the better part of half a decade.
How’s it going so far? Did you raise money?
Yes. We did something differently. I read a book by Chris Dixon from Andreessen called Read Write Own.
As I was transitioning from Copper, I sent you pictures from the beach. That’s where I was reading the book because I wanted to brush up on what this whole Web3 thing was, right? I didn’t learn much that was new, but it succinctly explained Web3 and gave me an opportunity to explain it to people.
Web3 allows your clients—the people who help you early on in building a business—to grow with you.
Oh, this is where the Bronze token comes in.
Yeah, and then we built the tokenomics, essentially. Here’s what we’ve done differently: we don’t have a company with equity. It doesn’t exist. There’s no equity. There is no entity that has equity.
I know it’s been popular in the blockchain space to have an equity company for founders and VCs, and then a token for governance.
Yeah, great. Now we’re changing that. Obviously, that was the wrong model. I mean, for whom?
For the user.
For the user, exactly. For the users, it sucks.
So we decided it’s just going to be a token. There’s an opportunity to pay a subscription if you don’t want to deal with the token. We’re not shilling the token; it’s an option. It’s a pure, 100% utility token.
There’s no equity in the company. It doesn’t exist. I only have tokens.
Is it a fixed supply or unlimited?
It’s a fixed supply, but here’s another part. What people normally do is time-based unlocks. What we do is KPI-based unlocks. The more users we have, the more unlocks we have. If we don’t reach the user targets, we don’t unlock.
I would think our first time-based unlocks would be somewhere deep in the 2030s.
Why would you have a fixed supply? That model never made sense to me because it’s taken from Bitcoin, right? That’s why everyone does a fixed supply. But Copper didn’t have a fixed supply of equity. You go raise another—
Yeah, totally. It’s actually a good question. I took Copper’s fundraising journey and said, “Okay, before exit, there might be another round. If we do it this way, this is how it would look.”
We literally copy-pasted it and said, “This is the final state of the token table.” It’s not a cap table; it’s a token table. That was the idea.
You’re right—there are definitely ways of doing it where you dilute over time, raise more, and so on. But times change. You don’t optimize the business for infinite fundraising cycles. You build something sustainable that grows in line with the user base you have.
What’s good about this model is that, normally, in a SaaS world, you have customer acquisition cost and lifetime value. You can calculate your LTV over a 5-year period and figure out how many years or months it will take for the customer to pay back the cost of acquiring that customer.
The good thing about the token model is that you get your LTV straight away. You don’t have to wait 5 years to get the LTV because the customer is already there.
Again, it’s all super experimental. It’s 100% utility, but so far it’s been working very well. We’re going to continue improving how we tell the story around it.
Some people say, “Dmitry, I’m not too sure about your token.” No problem. You can just pay a subscription.
How were you guys the only place to buy Canton?
We were. We were. We were.
Canton’s been a great project, and I’m super bullish on it because when Wall Street is writing DAML, you don’t really need to know more.
6. Building Bron: How To Fix Crypto Custody
People’s roots are already going very, very deep on Wall Street. If there are DAML engineers sitting at banks and writing code, right? What we’ve done is look at how the swaps ecosystem evolved and what people are doing in terms of swapping assets—Uniswap, 1inch, and so on. We stumbled upon an intent-based approach, an intent-based protocol, and we really liked it. We thought, “Why don’t we launch intents?” So we launched intents.
It allows you to do cross-chain swaps. The first pairs launched on intents were Canton pairs.
Because you were bullish on Canton?
Well, we added Canton because we know the team. I worked with the team during the Copper days, too. As Brown went into production, it was like, “Okay, what should we focus on?” We were chatting with the team: “What do we launch on Canton?” So, we added Canton.
With pretty much any blockchain we add, we automatically add the ability to do swaps. So, you can do that, and it’s extremely capital-efficient.
How do you track success? Is it AUM? Is it the assets on the platform?
Yeah, we’ve got AUM, but it’s a proxy. We’re yet to determine what our North Star metric is, but it’s the number of users and, in the end, the average amounts that these guys are holding on Brown.
We’re at about 1,000 users at the moment. We’re at about $1 billion of assets.
Wow.
Mostly family offices, executives, and founders. The biggest problem—this is going to be the exercise for the next 9 months—is that one influencer who does the Brown wallet review posted it on YouTube. The comments were, “Who in their sane mind is launching a wallet in 2026? What’s the matter with these people?”
Obviously, retail has no clue who the Copper people are, right? The problem that I’m solving is that the listeners of your podcast probably don’t know what Brown is, or are learning what Copper is. Some do, but the guests on your podcast are Brown users.
Yeah, and that’s exactly it. I mean, that’s why I want to have you on. We usually don’t bring on early-stage people.
It’s all the founders and CEOs. I’m like, “If only…” But again, it’s kind of weird to go and ask them, “Hey, can you tell the whole world where all your stuff is?”
Yeah, and then they’re like, “Dmitry, what’s the matter with you? Just leave me alone.”
Yeah, no one wants to say where their—“Stop texting me.”
It will come with time. Bridging this gap and explaining it to people is important. Word of mouth is pretty strong as well, because probably in your family circle, and definitely in my family circle, when people have a crypto question, they come to me. It’s like, “Dmitry, what do you do with this?”
That was always the objective: to bring in those cool people who are technically savvy, founders of crypto projects, or executives working in digital assets or on Wall Street. Get them as users, so then on Thanksgiving Day, while carving the turkey, they’ll tell people how to set it up, right?
Yeah, exactly.
What did you learn about raising money, and do you think you raised too much money?
Nobody gave you the option to raise less money in 2021 or 2022, because if you raised less money, you didn’t exist. It was as simple as that.
We had a commercial with Rebecca Ferguson touching the waterfall, and there was a 60-person crew that flew to Iceland to film all of this stuff. It was insane, but you had to do it. It cost so much money that I did not watch Dune: Part Two so as not to remind myself how much we spent on that commercial.
[laughter]
So, I’m like—
On that commercial? A lot, man. A lot. Ask Tyler.
Yeah, I will ask Tyler.
[laughter]
7. Lessons Learned From Fundraising
I think there might be some people working on stuff like that who are involved in revealing that side of things. But nobody gave you an option. There’s no option right now with AI stuff, because it seems like you have no option but to raise massive amounts of money if you’re an AI project.
Yeah. Man, AI—Claude has been ruining my life since February. I’ve been deploying stuff. I’m techy, but I’m not normally the person who would set up instances on AWS with S3 buckets and cron jobs.
It can do everything. Exactly, exactly.
So, I’m like, “Wow, this is so cool.” I wish I’d had that at 24 as an entrepreneur. It would have been so amazing.
Right now, if you’re a founder, if you’re 24 and weird, and you just want to build stuff, there’s never been a better time. Somebody said recently, “This is the dumbest that this technology will ever be,” right? At the moment.
You feel it. Every month it gets better.
Dude, every morning to afternoon, you know?
Yeah.
In terms of raising more capital, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a good thing at this day and age. The most important thing is a customer, right? If you raised a lot of capital, it’s easier to convince people to give you money than to convince a customer to pay you money, right?
Yeah, yeah.
The very first thing you should do—and again, it’s just not to waste your time—is convince a customer to pay you real dollars for the product that you’re building or have built. Then the money will follow. I would not start with a fundraise.
Yeah. What did you learn about spending a lot of money on marketing? Other than spending with Blockworks, which is a really, really good idea.
Yeah, of course. One thing I’ve learned is that building a brand costs money. There’s no magic secret where you spend $2 million here and then, all of a sudden, you’ve got a brand.
It takes time, but it’s totally possible. If you’re present and creating value for people, you will build a brand. Patience pays off as well. Nobody knows you, nobody knows you, nobody knows you, and all of a sudden, you’re a household name.
How’s that?
That’s how I feel about Blockworks. Nobody knew us for even 5 or 6 years.
Right. And now it’s crazy.
Exactly. A lot of people are like, “I’ve loved Blockworks since day one.” And I’m like, “No, no, no. It was like, ‘Why did we spend $20,000 on this?’” That’s the type of conversation people were having.
Yeah, totally. Let’s give it a go. Let’s try it, right?
Brand-building on the marketing side takes time. You’re not going to see ROI straight away, and it will look like the dollars you burn.
One thing with this new AI situation, which I think is—let me put it this way—I’m super bullish on salespeople again.
Really?
Yeah. Fast-forward 2 or 3 years, with all the AI, with people going to stop buying like that, people are going to go back. I think we’re going to go back to something almost closer to door-to-door salespeople, because this is going to be such an underappreciated life hack.
Do you think you’ll just go into Claude and be like, “Hey, Claude, what’s the best CRM?”
I don’t know. CRMs are not going to—It’s going to be difficult to continue CRM businesses as they are right now. Where do the salespeople go?
Salespeople are—well, it depends on what kind of buyer you are, right? If you’re buying for a corporation, you can’t point to Claude. Why does McKinsey exist? You pay them to cover your ass.
You won’t be able to cover your ass with Claude. You’re going to jump on a call with Jason or Dmitry, who’s going to be like, “Trust me, this CRM system is going to work,” so that you commit your budget. Then your CTO isn’t going to fire you because you just wasted $2 million on this project, right?
You need a person to tell you that, so you can look them in the eyes and see how convincing those eyes are. I’m super bullish on that.
I think IRL events are also going to change. The whole COVID era was not really nice, and from the Copper standpoint, it bridged us in terms of capital. All of a sudden, it was a level playing field because it was booth-to-booth sales, and you couldn’t go to events, right? We didn’t have the capital to be at events.
That was great, but that was the past. People want to go and talk to people.
People want to hang out together and learn from each other. We’re already way dumber than AI at the moment, so we’re going to have to live with our monkey brain, which requires socialization and a couple of beers.
8. What To Own in 2026?
A couple of beers, exactly. This is great, man. Anything else that you’re thinking about these days?
Well, now that you mentioned it, I’m thinking about a couple of beers.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, look, it’s interesting how the space is going to move. I would say that this is the 3rd Bitcoin funeral I’m at. Last year, we were waiting for it. We knew that this bull market was at some point going to end, and then everybody was going to be like, “Well, told you.” And then there were quantum computers that were going to basically make all of this disappear.
It slightly started to go away, even compared with 6 weeks ago, because 6 weeks ago I was in Dubai with a friend of mine who is a very smart crypto guy. He said, “Listen, I’m worried. There’s now an 8% probability.” And I’m like, “Dude, you realize that this is the bottom of the market? If you were thinking that way, this is the bottom.”
I bought Bitcoin for the first time in 2 years when we attacked Iran, and Bitcoin went up a little.
Yeah.
I thought it should go down because it goes down on terrorist attacks. It kind of has been going down on any bad news.
The realized price right now is about $56,000. So, realized price is basically—look, what’s the average global buying price for Bitcoin?
Oh, across everybody?
Yeah, across everybody, right? And people are just really bad at facing paper losses. Historically, it did not dip anywhere near as low as their realized price. It’s a pretty solid metric. If you look historically, it’s quite interesting.
I’m also tracking the Fear and Greed Index. That’s been quite interesting to watch.
Yeah, it got to, like, 4 out of 100.
Yeah.
Then what do you buy? You buy Bitcoin? Ignore your own token.
You buy Bitcoin. I’m pretty bullish, and, you know, not financial advice or whatever disclaimers I need to make.
Yeah, we’ve got it.
Yeah, but you have it on your website, right? Everything?
We have all the nondisclosures.
So I have the big 3, let’s say. Bitcoin is all. I’m super bullish on Canton because that’s something which I believe Wall Street is integrating, and not just talking about integrating. I just think it’s going to take a little bit of time before those things ship to production and then actually reach proper bank-like, industry-like scale.
The other things which I’m thinking about—so, I got a little bit of Zama.
What is Zama?
Fully homomorphic encryption.
Yeah.
It’s basically on existing rails. On Ethereum, you can just make your USDT disappear and move it around, et cetera. So I think that’s pretty powerful.
At the moment, I’m thinking of potentially accumulating a bag of decentralized protocols for perps, lending, trading, and options, essentially, because I think there are quite a few things that we are working on in that regard. So, a little bit of a teaser.
The decentralized venues—like Hyperliquid?
Like Hyperliquid, Aster, Derive, Avax, Camino, Jupiter—there are quite a few protocols. Some of them, obviously, I think are going to become absolutely massive.
Hyperliquid is already showing what’s possible. These guys are not stopping. They have 3 markets now; they have 4 markets. Who do you think becomes massive there?
At the moment, the most robust is probably Hyperliquid, of course, with the tenacity, ferocity, and discipline that these guys have built. If that continues, if their strategy works—and it looks like it’s pretty solid—it’s definitely going to be hard to catch up, but I don’t think it’s winner-takes-all.
Yeah. It’s going to be the same situation we’ve seen in centralized exchanges. There’s Binance with 50% of all the volume, but there’s Bybit, there’s OKX, and there are Bitget and all the others, which are also seeing their share of the volume.
So that’s basically a trend that I’m super interested in keeping a close track of.
Nice. Awesome, man. Good to see you.
Likewise. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for having me. When are you going to sponsor?
We’re going to discuss this now over those 2 beers that you mentioned, probably.
All right folks. Good to be back on Empire. Missed you guys the last 2 months. And uh Dmitry, congrats, man.
Thank you so much.