Copper chief executive Amar Kuchinad has left the crypto custody company as a sale process marketed by Cantor Fitzgerald at a reported 500 million USD valuation drags into its fourth month, with potential buyers having submitted offers closer to 200 million USD, according to a CoinDesk report citing two people familiar with the matter.
The departure, reported on September 8, comes less than two years after Kuchinad took over from founder Dmitry Tokarev in October 2024. The report did not name a temporary or permanent replacement, disclose the reason for the exit, or say when he completed his final day. Copper has not commented publicly.
The exit leaves the institutional custody firm negotiating its own sale without a confirmed chief executive, a striking position for a company that was once one of the most richly valued startups in crypto infrastructure.
## A valuation collapsed across two cycles
The gap between asking price and reported bids tells the story of the last market cycle in miniature. During funding discussions in 2021, Copper sought to raise as much as 500 million USD at a valuation of about 2.5 billion USD, and the company was valued at more than 2 billion USD at its peak.
The current 500 million USD asking price represents less than a quarter of that level. Reported offers near 200 million USD would cut roughly 300 million USD off the asking price and sit around 90 percent below the valuation Copper reached during the previous cycle.
Copper began exploring a sale by at least May, when Cantor Fitzgerald’s mandate was first reported. The company had received acquisition interest before appointing the financial services firm, though no interested parties were identified. By August, potential buyers had emerged with bids near 200 million USD, but no buyer has been identified publicly, no agreement has been announced, and Copper’s ownership has not released financial information explaining how it arrived at the asking valuation.
## What a buyer would actually get
Founded in 2018, Copper provides custody, collateral management and settlement services for institutional clients trading digital assets. Its flagship ClearLoop network allows clients to settle trades with participating exchanges while keeping assets under custody rather than transferring them onto an exchange before every transaction, directly addressing the counterparty exposure that has burned institutions before.
Coinbase, Bitfinex and Kraken are among the companies listed as ClearLoop clients, and that off-exchange settlement network could form part of any bidder’s assessment of the business.
The competitive context explains both why buyers are circling and why bids may be lagging. Banks and crypto-native firms are fighting over the same institutional clients, with Coinbase Custody, BitGo and Fireblocks serving the existing digital asset market while BNY Mellon, State Street and Standard Chartered have built or acquired their own infrastructure. Standard Chartered agreed in May to acquire the crypto custody operations of Zodia Custody, a company it had helped establish, a template in which a traditional bank absorbs a specialist rather than paying a startup premium.
In the United States, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted conditional national trust bank approvals to Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo and Fidelity Digital Assets since December 2025, and Comptroller Jonathan Gould has said OCC digital asset approval activity increased eightfold under the current administration. In South Korea, BitGo Korea obtained virtual asset service provider registration in August, with Hana Financial Group holding 25 percent and SK Telecom 10 percent. Growing bank participation gives prospective buyers a commercial rationale for custody assets, but it also arms independent providers’ competitors.
## Leadership churn at a delicate moment
Kuchinad brought a regulatory pedigree to the role, having worked at Goldman Sachs and served as an adviser to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before joining Copper, experience relevant at a time when custody rules became a central issue for institutional crypto services. The sources did not say whether his departure was connected to the sale process, the valuation gap, operations, or any regulatory matter.
Alongside the exit, Copper recently named Elin Cherry as chief compliance officer and Sean Bowen as chief operating officer, according to announcements on its LinkedIn page. The company has not said whether either executive will absorb additional responsibilities, who is leading negotiations with Cantor, or whether the board has appointed an interim chief executive. No deadline for final bids, due diligence completion, or a decision to abandon the sale has been disclosed.
Until a deal is signed or the process is shelved, Copper operates in limbo: a once-2.5-billion-USD infrastructure provider asking a quarter of its peak price, fielding bids at less than half of that, now without the chief executive hired to guide it through American regulation, and competing against the same banks that could buy it.
As of the latest market snapshot, Bitcoin trades near 78,600 USD, Ethereum near 2,493 USD and Solana near 104 USD.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
ceo walks mid-sale with no replacement named. asking 500, bids near 200, peak valuation was 2.5b in 2021. cantor fitzgerald must love running this book
cantor running the book is the only thing holding the 500 ask together imo. once buyers smelled 200 the whole process became a waiting game
agree cantor is holding the 500 ask together, but the waiting game ends the moment cash runway becomes the headline. fourth month already, someone inside copper is doing that math every morning
runway math is the whole game here. four months of diligence burn with no ceo salary story settled and cantor still anchoring 500. every week that passes the 200 bids look less like lowballs and more like the real price
tokarev handpicked kuchinad in october 2024 to steady the ship. under two years later he exits mid-sale with nobody named. the board room there must be fun
and the 300 million gap between the 500 ask and the 200 bids isnt a negotiation. its a 2021 headline number no underwriter takes seriously anymore
2.5 billion valuation in 2021, bids closer to 200 million now. that is a 90 percent haircut on the company itself, poetic
worse, cantor is still asking 500. someone blinks first and it wont be the buyers
someone always blinks. cantor fee disappears if the book dies, they will whisper 300 eventually
300 is optimistic imo. custody tech without a ceo to face the regulators gets valued like spare parts, and spare parts dont go for 60 percent of the ask
spare parts pricing cuts both ways though. at 200 some bank picks up custody rails that survived two cycles for less than the money copper burned on compliance. that is a bargain if the licenses transfer
licenses transferring is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. copper ran across UK and US regimes, any buyer at 200 still has to re-clear half of that paperwork
300 feels generous tbh. every buyer read the same CoinDesk story, they know a board whose ceo just walked has zero leverage here
Selling a custody firm without a confirmed chief executive is a rough pitch. Buyers will read the departure as a distress signal and the 200 million offers suddenly look generous.
the 90 percent haircut from peak says more about 2021 fundraising mania than about copper’s actual tech tbh
you nailed it with distress signal. any buyer reading the CoinDesk piece just circled 200 and stopped listening to Cantor
four months, no comment from copper, no interim ceo named. silence like that usually means the lawyers told everyone to stop talking during diligence. deal is probably alive, just nowhere near 500
negotiating your own sale with no confirmed ceo. kuchinad saw the term sheet and picked the exit door first lol
or the board wanted the founder era fully gone before a new owner walked in. either way, walking out with no successor named four months into a sale says the process is colder than the 500 ask suggests
saw the term sheet is exactly it. nobody walks mid-diligence over money, they walk when the cap table math starts looking ugly
Kuchinad lasted under two years after taking over from Tokarev. that kind of churn during a sale process usually means the board already has a preferred buyer lined up
a board running a sale with no ceo is basically admitting the buyer wants the tech and licenses, clean slate sells easier
Tokarev hands over in Oct 2024, Kuchinad out by Sep 2026 mid-sale. two CEOs in under two years reads less like a preferred buyer and more like everyone wanting their name off the paperwork
two years is barely enough time to learn where the compliance budget leaks are. kuchinad leaving with no successor named and copper staying silent tells you more than any cantor deck ever will
no ceo during fourth month of diligence is a distressed sale in all but name. expect the next round of bids to come in even lower