Cryptocurrency custodian company Copper has been out shopping itself, looking for a buyer willing to pay about $500 million for the platform, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald has been appointed to help sell copper, the people said.
Copper and Cantor did not respond to requests for comment.
The jewel in Copper’s crown is the ClearLoop settlement system, which enables network participants to perform delivery for payment (DvP) from within the repository without bringing assets onchain, thereby eliminating settlement risk.
Copper closed its corporate custody business in 2023 to focus on ClearLoop, which caters to many institutional businesses. The firm boasts more than 1,000 active counterparties and over $50 billion in monthly notional trading volume, according to its website.
Copper was reportedly weighing an IPO earlier this year, potentially following in the footsteps of crypto custodian Bitgo, which Copper partnered with on the ClearLoop application. But with bitcoin trading below $80,000 and artificial intelligence soaking up most of the capital, the crypto IPO market has been in a holding pattern this year.
Meanwhile, dealmaking in the crypto market has been active this year as crypto-native, traditional and fintech companies look to expand their digital asset capabilities through acquisitions.
Earlier this year, Mastercard agreed to buy British stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for as much as $1.8 billion. Kraken’s parent Payward agreed to acquire derivatives platform Bitnomial, while Bullish, owner of CoinDesk, announced a $4.2 billion deal to buy Equiniti, which aims to combine transfer agency services with tokenization infrastructure.
And just this week, London-based bank Standard Chartered said it will buy the remaining shares in Zodia Custody, its cryptocurrency custody subsidiary, that it does not already own. The deal came just weeks after the bank’s venture capital arm reportedly took a stake in crypto trading firm GSR worth more than $1 billion.
