Gate Institutional AMA series with Copper

2023-03-03, 04:50

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![](https://gimg2.gateimg.com/image/article/1677818970AMACOPPER.png)
**Gate Institutional Department hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Takatoshi Shibayama, Head of Sales APAC Copper.co, on Gate.io Exchange YouTube channel.**
**Copper Official Website:** [https://copper.co/company/about](https://copper.co/company/about "https://copper.co/company/about")
**Copper Twitter:** [https://twitter.com/CopperHQ](https://twitter.com/CopperHQ "https://twitter.com/CopperHQ")
**Copper Telegram:** [https://t.me/CopperHQ](https://t.me/CopperHQ "https://t.me/CopperHQ")
**Follow Copper.co on Telegram and Twitter**

**Guest**
![](https://gimg2.gateimg.com/image/article/1677819074AMACOPPER1.png)
**Takatoshi Shibayama, Head of Sales APAC Copper.co**

In the fourth episode of Gate Institutional AMA series Takatoshi Shibayama, Head of Sales APAC Copper.co shares his background, his role at Copper, and how he is building best practices in the organization. Gokay and Taka also announce Gate.io's official integration with the ClearLoop network, providing clients with the option to trade on the exchange while keeping their funds with Copper, ensuring the safety of their funds. The conversation highlights the need for the industry to prioritize safety and trust to build a stable business that can provide the best service to clients. They also talk about Copper's experience working with Gate.io, their expectations for 2023 and their focus on building best practices within the organisation.

## Introduction
**Gokay (Host):** Hello everybody! This is Gokay from Gate.io Institutional services. Our team manages a wide range of institutional clients, including: hedge funds, institutional traders, high net worth individuals, and family offices. And I'm excited about hosting our fourth episode of the Gate Institutional AMA series.

Welcome to our stream with Copper – a digital asset technology company. Today we have special guest: Takatoshi Shibayama, Head of Sales APAC at Copper.co. Thank you for joining our stream. Nice to see you! How are you? How do you feel?

**Taka Shiba: **Thank you very much, Gokay, for the invite. I feel very honored to be on this session with you. I feel fantastic. I mean, it's been a good day. The markets in general, and crypto is not that great, but I think we're building out really interesting things that would make the industry much better. And I love to dive into those kinds of topics with you on this session.

**Gokay: **Oh, thank you so much! I know that your colleagues and friends call you Taka Shiba, so may I call you Taka today?

**Taka Shiba:** Yeah, that's good. Thank you.

**Gokay: **And now, dear viewers, before the main part of our AMA session begins we’re delighted to announce that Gate.io has officially integrated with the ClearLoop network and, with that, gives clients an option to trade on the exchange while keeping their funds with Copper.  One of the many steps Gate.io is taking is to ensure the safety of its client’s funds.

So let's move on!

**Q1: Taka, tell us a little about yourself. Who is Taka Shiba? What's your background?**

**Taka Shiba: **Sure, I'm Japanese. Although I don't sound like a Japanese. But I lived in the US for quite some time, so I acquired the accent. But look, I've been in the financial industry for a very long time. About 20 plus years to be exact. I started off in proprietary investment teams across different investment banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. I did that up until the leaning crash. I invested in distress credits and devalued type of investments. And after the leaning crash, a lot of the proprietary teams had to shut down or minimize their exposure using balance sheet. And I moved over to the hedge fund side back in 2009 and moved to Singapore. So I've been here almost 13 years. Although I'd had a little short stint in Hong Kong for 3 years, but generally in southeast Asia for 13 years. It's a very long time.

And I continued investing in distressed and value investing across the APAC region. And in 2015, I launched a hedge fund with a partner of mind. We started with an AUM about 200 million, but at the time I left in 2018, it grew to a billion. And currently my other partner is still working on it. It's now 4 billion. So I guess he's done much better than when I was there. And we were just investing in Japanese equities, looking at them with a little bit of a distressed angle. But during that time, I really got interested in cryptocurrencies, and I thought, this is something that I need to be on.

Back in 2021, when I started working, the whole internet boom was happening and I thought I missed out on that great rally. And moved over to the finance side. And it was pretty much downhill after that, right? I mean, you had the leaving crisis and there were crises before that. And there was more overlay of compliance and complexities around trading, etc. So, it hasn't been like the biggest dream that we all kind of had when going into this industry. And I thought when I was looking at crypto that: How you can revolutionize? How securities can be? Or even how currencies can be transferred across the blockchain network and settled? I thought, this is going to be the next big thing. I have to be on it. So that's why I moved over to this side. I was investing in things with underlying value, and now in this industry where the currency itself has no underlying value. So it's a little bit ironic, but it's been a really fun ride. Very bumpy ride, but fun ride overall.

**Gokay: **That's a great story. I'm really honored to have this AMA with you, Taka.

**Q2: Taka, in your role as Head of Sales APAC Copper, how are you building best practice in the organisation? Where are you focusing?**

**Taka Shiba: **We launched this ClearLoop solution with Gate.io, which is a huge seminal moment for us. However, internally, there's a lot of things that we have to do in order to make our company successful. When I joined copper about 2 years ago, the company was around 30-40 people, and it was a very small company. But now we have over 300 people. So it has transformed into a larger organization. And there's been a lot of internal changes. And we have to adapt to a hyper-growth company. Lot of procedural changes internally: the sales strategy, regulations. A lot of things come into play when you don't really think about it when it's a 30 person company. But you have to think about it when it's 300 and you acquire more than 500 clients globally.

Now one thing I can focus on, it's very common in the crypto industry and also in a startup scene as well, but there's a model of "fake it till you make it". And I despise that kind of idea. Obviously, there is some value to it, I guess, to show that your much bigger than what you actually are. But my motto even since the beginning of my career was to be humble, genuine and honest about what you do. Even with my sales team or even my account management team. I always been telling them to be honest and exactly tell what our facts. And never make assumptions and do not obviously lie. So this has really been something that I've been kind of ingraining into the organization, not just in APAC, but globally as well. I think this is a very important thing that the whole industry, and again, not including crypto, but just in the whole technology startup scene, we should be really conscious about.

**Gokay: **I completely agree with that. Because "fake it until make it" model can take you to some part of level. But afterwards, it shows the real results.

**Taka Shiba: **Of course. We are in the crypto custody business, and we're supposed to be the most stable business in this industry. Where are the picks and shovels to this industry? Right? And we deal with clients assets. Our top priorities - security. So, if you're thinking something or you're just trying to make yourself better than what you actually are, you're actually being very dishonest. We have a fiducial duty to our clients: to make sure that we are always upfront with our clients and be able to tell them what is actually happening at our company. I think that's something that we all do. Even exchange or any company within this crypto industry should take note.

**Gokay: **Yeah, we should build everything based on safety and trust.

**Taka Shiba:** Have you seen too much of these wild things happening in this industry? And I think it's time we all stop this and really make this industry a much safer place to invest.

**Q3: How did Copper come to life and how is it positioned in the market?**

**Taka Shiba:** I am not a founder of the company, but I can tell you the story. The founders were 5 members and started off in a small apartment in shortage, London. And they had a special wall where they were kind of writing all the things that they thought, that was necessary in this crypto industry, to make it a safer place. And initially, I heard that they were looking to create a safer exchange for people to trade on. But obviously, there's so much competition out there. And at the time, this is back into early 2018, there weren't that many competitors in the custody space. And when our founders spoke to our original clients, their most important concern about trading in crypto was not really about the volatility. It was about safe custody of assets. So that's where our founders decided to focus their attention on and build a system where it's not just a box where you hold your private keys, but actually build for institutional investors. So that's the origin of our company.

**Q4: Why is digital asset custody the way forward for crypto?**

**Taka Shiba:** If you look at the traditional finance industry and this industry has been battle tested, and of course they had their crises. But if you look at the traditional financial industry as the infrastructure of how assets are traded, you have various participants. You have the investors, the custodians, the brokers, the exchange, and you have clearing houses. So all these companies are working together to make sure that assets are safe. Obviously, but they can execute the trades and deliver or settle the trades properly.

When the crypto industry was born, there was any of these businesses, right? We had exchanges. Which was originally designed so that you can convert your fir currencies into <a href="/zh/price/bitcoin-btc" target="_blank" class="blog_inner_link">Bitcoin</a>. And it wasn't really for speculation. It was more about payments. That's the original idea of Satoshi Nakamoto. But as the crypto industry matured, the exchanges had to take on a lot of these duties that were in the traditional world.  And I know that crypto industry is trying to disrupt a lot of things in finance, but you don't have to disrupt everything. I mean, there are things that work, and you can take those elements into the crypto industry. So I think the digital asset industry really needs a proper segregation of duties so that there is no concentrated risk on one platform.

I'm not against exchanges doing all these things, but I think that separation of businesses, so that exchanges can focus on product delivery, making your trade engines work. Those things are really essential. And that's for like Nasdaq or any of the exchanges out there. Right? And Copper as a custodian would focus on security of assets. If exchanges didn't need to think about those security elements, then you can focus a lot more attention on product building and matching engines. So I think that's it's not just the custodian part that's really needed, but all the elements around it are just really lacking in the crypto industry. For it to mature to the next level.

**Q5: How do you ensure the security of your clients' assets?**

**Taka Shiba: **Sure. So at Copper, we use this technology called MPC, which is nothing new. It was designed back in 1970s. It's type of a cryptography that splits information into multiple pieces. So that external hackers will find difficulties in piecing them together and formulating one source of information. We apply this technology to what we call sharding or splitting the private key into 3 pieces. And there's a lot of custodians out there nowadays that apply this MPC technology to shard their keys.

However, the configuration of these shards are quite different. At Copper, what we do is we have 3 different parties hold each of these shards. So one will be held with Copper, one with the client, and then one with a trusted 3rd party. And the reason why we actually split the private keys into 3 and have 3 entities hold it, is to mitigate single point of failure risk. Let's say there's one party holding all 3. Even though it's shot it into 3. If that entity has some insolvency issues or financial troubles and the shards go missing, then how can you ensure the client's assets to be safe? So what we do is we have 3 entities, which mitigates that single point of failure risk. On a daily transaction basis, we'll have copper in the clients sign transactions. You using those shards. However, if either the entity has an issue, platform goes down on Copper side, or clients shards get compromised, then we can bring in the trusted 3rd party. Usually in this case, it's a cybersecurity company that holds the shard to recover the assets. So it's always 2 out of 3 shard configuration for Copper.

**Q6: And now, that we have mentioned already about integration with the ClearLoop network, tell us please, so what is ClearLoop? How can clients use this system?**

**Taka Shiba: **ClearLoop concept was designed very early on when Copper was born. But in order to get there, we needed a lot of the technologies to be put into place to make sure that client's assets are safe with custody, and they can trade on various trading venues without having to move their funds onto those venues. So with MPC technology, it enables clients to be able to safeguard their assets and Copper. And let's say, they would say "I have 10 bitcoins. I want to trade on Gate." So we lock those 10 bitcoins inside their wallet. Then through the API connections that we built with Gate, we'll send that information in nanoseconds to Gate, and Gate can confirm that there's collateral or that 10 <a href="/zh/price/bitcoin-btc" target="_blank" class="blog_inner_link">Bitcoin</a> locked inside Copper's wallet. So that the investors can see that 10 <a href="/zh/price/bitcoin-btc" target="_blank" class="blog_inner_link">Bitcoin</a> allocated on Gate. And the clients can trade based on that 10 bitcoins. They could do spot, they could do other types of derivatives, whatever they want to trade. When they need to close their trade, or when the trade needs to settle, Gate also leaves settlement balances with us so that we can net off the trades inside Copper, rather than at the exchange. So basically, you're not using blockchain to move funds from one wallet to another, which reduces the gas fees, obviously, and also the time waiting for the funds to go to another wallet. Most importantly, we mitigate the counterparty risk. The funds are always safe inside Coppers wallets. So you don't have to rely on the exchange as a counterparty risk. But their funds are always safely kept principal balance and settlement balances at comfort.

**Q7: What sets your digital custodian service apart from competitors?**

**Taka Shiba: **I think ClearLoop is clearly our flagship product. And it has been battle tested almost three years that it has been live. And we had few exchanges in financial troubles. But our client's assets were safe within their wallets. I think this is the most important thing that we have to offer to the market. But again, in the beginning, as I mentioned, we are always building our products, so that it suits the institutional investor clients. So that even if they are products missing in the market, we always listen to our clients then to enable or facilitate even better execution of trades and safeguarding their assets. That's something that we really focus on.

Our teams are designed differently as well: the product team, the sales team, most important the risk management team that can see the net exposure of all their clients trading on Gate. For every settlement cycle, there's enough funds for settling trades, compliance and legal. We are working as a proper custodian. We're not a self custody model either. So I think that sets us apart from the other custodians.

**Q8: Now here's a million dollar question... How has Copper's experience been so far working with Gate.io?**

**Taka Shiba: **The experience has been very professional, and I'll explain why. Because each integration with exchanges are very difficult. It's not just creating API endpoints and connected. We have to discuss quite a lot around how we manage to collateral with their clients, how we introduce products to our clients. I think Gate had a lot of ideas around what they want to deliver to Copper's clients. And then the actual reality of what clearly can provide. So there's been a lot of difficult conversations between our teams to get to where we are right now, and I think neither side decided to walk away from this. And we use both of our efforts to make sure that this integration can work and then get to market on time. So I found the conversations throughout the experience with Gate very professional.

**Gokay:** Likewise from our side. We are really happy to integrate with you, and we enjoyed working with your professional team on this integration.

**Q9: Okay, now that we have heard about Copper's business, I assume the viewers would like to know more about the people who are standing behind the firm. So can you tell us more about the team?**

**Taka Shiba:** I could start out with our CEO, Dimitri. Dimitri has been in the traditional finance space as well. He was a CTO at a traditional hedge fund. And here's the mastermind behind all the technology that's been built around Copper's product. And then we have our Chief Revenue Officer, Boris, who's been in the traditional finances as well as a salesperson. Look, I could name a lot of people, but I think that what I want to say is a lot of the people who work for Copper are generally from traditional finance. Last year, we hired a group of senior members and junior members from a bank of America's prime brokerage desk into Copper. So that we can launch products that are suited for prime services. Not prime brokerage, but prime services, which enable us to work with institutional investors a lot more above and beyond custody.

We're trying to bring in various concepts from finance into the crypto world. So that we could mature this industry. We can service our clients much better. Because we see a lot of the traditional finance, hedge funds and trading firms coming into this space, and they expect what they get from the original world that they're from. And they come to crypto and say, well, a lot of things are missing. So we have to build our product to enable that service to our clients. Right now for the Copper team, we call it prime services and custody, because we're bringing those 2 elements into crypto space.

**Q10: We are almost at the end of our AMA series with "Copper", so before we wrap things up, I would like to ask what your expectations are for 2023? **

**Taka Shiba:** That's a very open question, so I'll answer it very openly. So for Copper, we will continue building out our prime services concept into crypto and building that into our platform. So there are a few projects that are running simultaneously that can enhance the experience for institutional investors to facilitate trades better. I won't go into details. You have to wait until they launch. But that is something that we will continue doing. We'll add more exchanges onto ClearLoop as well.

And in general, I think for 2023, it'll be a very quiet market for digital assets and probably in the same bucket. But as any better market, it's a time that we can build industry better. We've seen what doesn't work, so we can do what does work. And that's what we're going to be building as an industry as a whole. That's with Copper, that's with Gate or anybody who's as a professional mindset in this crypto industry.

What I also see, as the Head of Sales in APAC, are the enterprise clients. We have a lot of banks, financial institutions like banks, that are looking to launch custody businesses in around tokonize securities. And pretty much every single institutional client that we speak to are looking at token eye securities as something that they will be building out. And I think right now a lot of it's experimental. We see a lot of pilot programs around.

However, I do still believe that even not just private securities, but even public securities will be transferred across blockchain. And that'll be the future. And we don't have to wait for 2 days for public equities to settle anymore. It'll be instant. And we'll. And not just Copper, but a lot of these financial institutions will continue to build that future where all the securities that we know today can be transferred across blockchain and settled. And this is something that will continuously be built, not just in 2023, but beyond as well.

**Q11: Okay, so now that we have heard about Copper, we heard about the team, so it's time to hear about the community. So which social channels do you have and how can someone reach out and connect with you guys?**

Taka Shiba: We have almost all possible channels of communication:

Twitter - [https://twitter.com/CopperHQ](https://twitter.com/CopperHQ "https://twitter.com/CopperHQ")
Linkedin - [https://www.Linkedin.com/company/copperco/](https://www.Linkedin.com/company/copperco/ "https://www.Linkedin.com/company/copperco/")
Telegram - [https://t.me/CopperHQ](https://t.me/CopperHQ "https://t.me/CopperHQ")
Website - [https://copper.co/company/about](https://copper.co/company/about "https://copper.co/company/about")
Instagram - [https://www.instagram.com/copper.hq/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D](https://www.instagram.com/copper.hq/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D "https://www.instagram.com/copper.hq/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D")

**Q12: And finally, what would you like our audience to take away from today's AMA session?**

**Taka Shiba:** I think that the takeaway is that industry participants like us - Gate, Copper are building a safe environment for people to trade crypto. If anybody is really interested in crypto or people who have been a little bit hesitant to get into crypto, who are institutional investors, we are building a safer environment for clients like yourselves. So don't be afraid, please talk to us and then we'll be there to help with anything that is digital assets related.

## Ending
**Gokay:** Taka, thank you very much for all your time. It's been really informative and I hope our audience, who always watch us, now knows better about you and Copper. It was pleasure to talk with you and learn all details. Now I am more interested in Copper itself. Get in touch with Copper.co, visit their website, read more information, follow their reports and analysis.

Before we end our session, Taka, would you like to add anything else?

**Taka Shiba:** I think I said everything that I wanted to say. Thank you very much!

**Gokay:** Thanks to everyone who joined to watch our AMA series. Follow us on social media, for more information write to our key account managers.

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<div>Author:** Gate Institutional**
<div class="info-tips">\*This article represents only the views of the researcher and does not constitute any investment suggestions.
<div>\*Gate.io reserves all rights to this article. Reposting of the article will be permitted provided Gate.io is referenced. In all cases, legal action will be taken due to copyright infringement.
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