“What China does in its own backyard is an opportunity for the rest of the world and I hope the US regulators take advantage of it.”
Glenn Barber is the Head of Sales & Business Development, Americas at Copper.co.–a pioneering digital assets custody and settlement provider. Prior to joining Copper, Glenn led sales as a consultant at FalconX, an institutional digital asset brokerage, and he was also the Chief Institutional Officer at Voyager Digital, a publicly-traded holding company whose subsidiaries operate a crypto-asset platform to trade crypto assets. Glenn also has over 25 year’s experience in global capital markets, and was a Managing Director in Equities at Deutsche Bank and Barclays.
Glenn Barber explains Copper’s design architecture that helps ensure customers’ custody protection of their private crypto keys and the ways the company plans to work with exchanges. Following China’s crypto crackdowns, Barber lays out the opportunity available to the US in filling that void and emphasizes the importance of smart, fair regulatory frameworks from the SEC. He then discusses the future of crypto and some of the most exciting areas of growth.
MODERATOR
SPEAKER
Glenn Barber
Head of Sales & Business Development
Copper
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers and our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our SALT Conferences, which we were excited to host today's guest at our most recent SALT Conference in New York in September, where he did a fantastic job talking about the opportunities and obstacles toward institutional adoption of digital assets, some of which his company, Copper, are helping to tackle, but we're very excited today to welcome Glenn Barber to SALT Talks. Glenn is the head of sales and business development for the Americas at Copper, a pioneering digital assets custody and settlement provider.
John Darsie: (01:00)
Prior to joining Copper, Glenn led sales as the consultant at Falcon X, which is another institutional digital asset brokerage. He was also the chief institutional officer a Voyager Digital, a publicly-traded holding company whose subsidiaries operate a crypto-asset platform to trade crypto assets. Glenn has over 25 years of experience in global capital markets, and he was a managing director and equities prior to that at Deutsche Bank and Barclays. Glenn holds a master's in international management and finance from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, go Tar Heels, with a business degree in business administration and management as well.
John Darsie: (01:42)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci who's the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, which is a global alternative investment firm that also has significant investments in the digital asset space. So, I know we are looking forward the conversations with Copper about supporting our own businesses and also helping the industry sort of bring institutional-grade infrastructure to the masses, which we think will really help adoption. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT, and with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:10)
Glenn, it's a pleasure to have you on salt talks. Tell us about your professional journey. How did you get into crypto?
Glenn Barber: (02:19)
Well, Anthony, thanks very much for having me. My bit of background is that I have about 30 years capital markets experience. I have worked for broker-dealers and investment banks around the world, have run sales organizations and trading desks. My journey to crypto came about because I just felt like I was working way too hard for not as much reward in the banks and really wanted to do something different. I started doing some research. I heard about Bitcoin. It was fascinating. It was grabbing some attention, not nearly as much as we had today, and in a serendipitous moment, a friend of mine who I worked with 20 years ago at the same broker-dealer said that another colleague of ours at the same broker-dealer, not long ago was running a crypto business. That happened to be Steve Ehrlich at Voyager Digital. So, Steve and I, we got together, had a couple beers and he's like, "Look, I'm really getting a lot of inquiries from institute and I don't really have anyone running my business. Would you come join us?" And that was my entry into crypto.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:27)
I love the word. I love the name Copper. Tell us where the name came from, and then tell us more about Copper itself.
Glenn Barber: (03:35)
Sure. Well, according to Dmitry Tokarev, our CEO, Copper is really just a name that comes from the metal itself. Right? It is extremely durable. It's extremely sturdy yet it does conduct electricity. It can be pliable. As far as I understand, he just felt that that was a really, really good analogy for what we're trying to do here at Copper as a digital asset custodian. We provide custody. We provide settlement and clearing. We provide execution. We provide staking. Generally speaking, with a base layer custody offering, we aim to make investing and safekeeping in digital assets extremely easy for global investors.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:22)
So, additional layers of insurance. Tell us how you make a cryptocurrency safekeeping. Tell me what, is it called storage? What's the protocols that you guys are using to make this stuff safe?
Glenn Barber: (04:35)
Well, we use MPC technology, which is very good for encryption purposes and keeps assets safe, but I think the real genius in the way-
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:44)
Let me stop you though because we got a lot of young people that wouldn't know what that means. So, what is MPC technology? We have some old people that doesn't know what that means as well, by the way, but...
Glenn Barber: (04:55)
Look, I'll be fair. I'm not very technical in my background either, but MPC is multi-party computational technology and what it allows is key sharding, to the best of my knowledge. Key sharding is simply saying, "Look, in crypto, generally speaking, you have a public key which is akin to sort of your email address and a private key which is sort of akin to your password." You need the public key to represent, to the blockchain and to the rest of the world, who you are and how to communicate with you as sort of an identifier. You need the private key to sign off on any transactions and like your password, this is something that only you should know because you want to keep things under your control.
Glenn Barber: (05:37)
If someone gets access to a private key in crypto, they control the assets. So, if I have a private key and you find out what it is, you can literally dip your hands into my digital wallet, take my assets, and run away really quickly with them. What MPC does is say, "Look, why don't we break that private key, which is nothing more than alphanumerical symbols, and break it up into shards or pieces and distribute them in different locations, so it's much harder for people to get access to that key because you have to find all the pieces to start with?" Does that make sense?
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:16)
No. It totally makes sense. I just wanted you to explain it because I think it's helpful to people. What do you think about barriers to institutional investing in crypto? One of the barriers for me frankly was storage because I was worried, God forbid to your point, someone gets a hold of my keys, we've got $700 million in Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin disappears, and then I'm out of luck. So, I'm storing with Copper. Let's say somebody does, then that happens to me, is there any insurance? Is there any protocol of safety to protect me or do I lose my crypto investment?
Glenn Barber: (06:55)
There is insurance, but I think I'd like have to step back because what I alluded to earlier on, the MPC technology is obviously a very secure way of doing things, but I think the genius of the way Copper is structured is in its architecture. By that, I mean that when the key and when the private key is sharded or broken up into three pieces, usually a more traditional crypto custodian or some of our competitors, they wind up holding all those shards anyway. So, what there is, are nonzero risk of single point of failure. It's just a complicated way of saying that "Look, someone or some group of people in that same entity can try and take your assets." With Copper, that's not possible because Copper will hold one piece of the key. The client will hold another piece. And then, a trusted third party has another. So, if SkyBridge was a client-
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:49)
You got some circuit breakers in there that would prevent somebody from grabbing hold of the whole thing.
Glenn Barber: (07:54)
Right. So, the bottom line is, if Copper were to get hacked, they only get one shard, and with two of the three shards needed to sign and validate these transactions, it's a bad outcome, but it's not cataclysmic. In the same vein, SkyBridge can represent to its investors that no one or no group of people at SkyBridge can dip their hands into the company wallet and take investors' funds and assets.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:19)
Yeah, it makes sense to me. I like that and I think that's the future of this stuff. How are you differentiating yourself, custody solutions, exchange, et cetera, from the other vendors that are out there?
Glenn Barber: (08:35)
Well, as I mentioned, having the three shards in different locations is a big deal because that's unique in the marketplace. What we're also trying to do is build out clearing and settlement layers because what people don't realize is that there's a lot of counterparty risk in the digital asset markets. If you buy some Bitcoin, generally speaking, you as the client of a broker-dealer or market participant have to then pay the money upfront, right? And you are relying on nothing but your counterparty's market reputation that they're actually going to give you the digital asset in exchange. And that can be hours later. So, there's not many transactions in the world in sort of the traditional space where someone say, "Hey, you're going to buy a million dollars of stuff from me, and you're going to pay me my million dollars, and you're just going to rely on me coming back to you with that stuff."
Glenn Barber: (09:25)
So, we are trying to allow our clients to avoid that counterparty risk by allowing their assets to sit with Copper in a cold wallet that has no risk of hacking, and still trade with market participants without having to move those assets. That product is called ClearLoop.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:44)
Yep. Just to be clear, a cold wallet, for those of you listening in at home, is basically unplugged from the internet. So, you don't have hackers trying to intercede in there and break through to your custody. Fair to say?
Glenn Barber: (09:57)
Exactly right.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:58)
Okay. Let's go to ClearLoop. What is ClearLoop? Why is it valuable from a crypto trading perspective?
Glenn Barber: (10:08)
I actually think ClearLoop is just valuable from a clearing and settlement perspective and trading perspective, regardless of what asset class you're talking about because what it does is allow a client to have their funds sit in custody at Copper, in cold storage or in a cold wallet, and then trade with either exchanges or other counterparties without those funds leaving that wallet. What that means is, is that those other counterparties that are integrated into the ClearLoop solution, also keep pools of assets with Copper. So, what does that let us do? It means that settlement between the two market participants, the client and the other market participant, happens on a net real-time basis where only the difference in value moves.
Glenn Barber: (10:57)
That's a big deal because if you trade a million dollars worth of Bitcoin and you sell it and you realize a gain of a thousand dollars, only the thousand dollars moves in that net settlement process, not the core principal of the million. It always stays in cold storage. That is a very different mechanism, even when compared to traditional asset, right? We have a lot of layers of protection that people take for granted, such as Depository Trust Corporation, where equities and stock trades are netted at the end of the day by the broker-dealers that execute them. And then, this big warehouse, the DTCC, then allocates trades and values between those institutions. If we didn't have this, no one would be able to trade stocks as efficiently as they can through the online brokers or through institutions.
Anthony Scaramucci: (11:48)
Okay. I mean, this is super exciting. I want to talk about different currencies other than Bitcoin. You can settle them all. You can store them all. I have an Algorand fund that we're launching. I can custody it with you?
Glenn Barber: (12:05)
Absolutely. One of Copper's basic value propositions is that we understand that blockchain technology is going to make the world more scalable and efficient. Therefore, there are going to be any number of blockchains that are representative of projects or initiatives across many different industries, and Copper as the custodian has the duty to integrate with as many blockchains as possible, knowing that investors like yourselves are going to want to take part in those opportunities. So, for people that are looking to custody coins outside of Bitcoin and Ether, Copper, loosely speaking, has more than 150 coins available for custody and it is our mission to make sure that we have the widest broadest offering.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:48)
Okay. I want to go to China for a second. It's in the news again. Every couple of months, China bashes cryptocurrencies and bashes Bitcoin. I'm not exactly sure if there's any new information about the China banning cryptocurrency in its society, but what are your thoughts there?
Glenn Barber: (13:09)
Well, first of all, China banning crypto is not always new news, right? It's sort of been a way of life for several years now, but up until now, in my mind, it really has been geared towards retail investors and ostensibly trying to protect them from gambling their life savings away. I think what really happened with today's announcement was they specifically said that crypto transactions involving sort of USDT, which is called Tether, and Bitcoin are illegal. I really believe that this is the way for them to clamp down on capital flight because I think, over the last couple of decades, we're all familiar with the fact that owners of Chinese wealth from the mainland would buy a lot of property in London and New York and Vancouver site unseen, simply as a way to get their hard-earned money out of China, so that it would not be subject to government confiscation if that were to come to pass. Right? And they just put it into hard assets in different currency denominations that they felt would be governed by rule of law.
Glenn Barber: (14:12)
When China, through their currency restrictions and their additional laws, closed that sort of loophole, Chinese mainlanders then found Bitcoin, Tether, stablecoins, and other digital assets as the way to get their assets out of China and safely secured somewhere else. I think China obviously is very smart and in their way to protect against capital flight. This is the newest initiative where they said, "This has gone on long enough. We know that people are spiriting their assets and money out of Chinese yuan and renminbi. Enough is enough. We're clamping down the gap."
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:51)
So, you're not super concerned about it?
Glenn Barber: (14:55)
Look, the market is suffering a decline today and there's always going to be a short-term dip because that's simply the way things go. People expect bad news and they trade off of it, but no, I'm not super concerned because what happens is that blockchain and digital currencies are a global permissionless borderless system.
Glenn Barber: (15:16)
What China does in its own backyard is an opportunity for the rest of the world and I hope that the US regulators take advantage of it. So, just because China might ban Bitcoin or Tether, it doesn't mean it's going away. It simply means that it's going to be used in other jurisdictions, whether it's the United States, the European Union, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and the like, and it just gives all these other countries a better opportunity to embrace this new technology that is going to really help and scale businesses around the world. Therefore, they should welcome it with open arms, subject to applicable rules and regulations.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:54)
Okay. Glenn, how much do you think there will be a synthesis or potential merger or integration of traditional exchanges with crypto exchanges, if at all?
Glenn Barber: (16:08)
Look, I think there's going to be a substantial integration. I mean, let's face it, I'm going to call a spade a spade. If I'm the New York Stock Exchange or I'm the Nasdaq, I want this to happen as quickly as possible, right? I want to see if I can buy an exchange or merge with Coinbase or something that would then provide sort of the most comprehensive ubiquitous exchange platform out there, but they can't do it, simply because the US government and the associated regulatory bodies haven't created a framework that allows them the air cover to do so. Right?
Glenn Barber: (16:41)
That's one of the simple problems is that the US really needs to get a little bit faster moving regulation down the pipe, even if it's sort of a "Here's the framework of what we're thinking about. Here is, over the next two years, what we're going to be trying to accomplish. Here are things that we might consider as securities and what they may not be." Here's how various market participants including traditional exchanges can then tie their businesses to this new asset class in a way that, let's face it, would be profitable to them.
Anthony Scaramucci: (17:15)
So, that begs the question of regulation. What's your thoughts there, including the potential ETF approvals for both the spot, cash ETF for Bitcoin let's say, and the derivative ETFs, Bitcoin futures or other currency futures?
Glenn Barber: (17:34)
Look, I think we need a regulatory framework. Excuse me. I mean, not that this is unknown, but Canada already has three regulated ETFs on the Bitcoin side, and has a number of pending approvals if not completed approvals, for Ether ETFs. I'm not sure what the SEC is waiting for. I'm sure they have their reasons, in terms of their investor protection mandate, but I really do believe that there's enough liquidity, both in physically settled transactions and also cash-settled transactions, that the ETF should be warranted. I think, once again, whether it's some kind of sandbox environment, whether it's a slow rollout limited to certain investors, at the risk of obviously excluding others, but I think that there's a common ground that the SEC should find, where they should be able to roll it out quicker and allow it to happen, in a way that they can then gauge over a short period of time, whether or not it's fully available to every single investor as a normal ETF should be.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:35)
So, 2021 event seems unlikely, right?
Glenn Barber: (18:40)
Right.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:41)
2022?
Glenn Barber: (18:43)
I would be very surprised if it didn't happen in 2022. And I think one of the things that the SEC knows and realizes but has to act upon, is that, once again, similar to what we were talking about with China, Bitcoin and digital assets are not going to stop. They are just going to continue and if the US does not take a view that this is actually as much technology that the new global economy is going to be built on, as opposed to new speculative instruments that people are going to trade either going to zero or a million of something, then that's the wrong attitude. Right? Because I think what gets lost a lot of times is that people just look at the digital currencies and say, "Well, there's no value. There's no intrinsic basis for me to understand how to invest." And that's not true because digital currencies are nothing more than the grease that make the blockchain wheels go around.
Glenn Barber: (19:39)
If you believe in the underlying blockchain value prop that it's going to revolutionize healthcare, or make property more efficient, or it'll be able to track things from a logistical or transportation standpoint due to its benefits, then there is definitely going to be value accrual to those digital currencies associated with that particular blockchain. It's not going to be as standard or as one to one in terms of correlation between inequity in a corporation, but the analogy still holds some water. And I think that people are overlooking that we really need to understand the usefulness and the utility of the underlying blockchain, before we dismiss the digital currency as being purely speculative.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:21)
Okay. I think that's a fair assessment. I want to go to the Lightning Network for a second, but I want, for the benefit again of some of our listeners and viewers that don't know a lot about this area, but they're beaming in to learn about it, what's the difference between a layer 1 and a layer 2 protocol?
Glenn Barber: (20:41)
Sure. A layer 1 protocol is simply what we know to be as a fairly standard blockchain that is peer-to-peer in nature, right? The blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger that allows transactions to be done between one counterparty and another counterparty, through software code and their computers. Sometimes, when you build software code in a peer-to-peer way, not everything can be accounted for. So, you have code for Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network, for example, that's been around for 12 years, but blocks are generally only processed to the blockchain, which means transactions are recorded and posted to the software network approximately every 10 minutes, and every single transaction that's included in that block has to wait for the block to be posted.
Glenn Barber: (21:34)
So, what does that mean in practice? Well, if I went to the grocery store and the grocery store allowed me to pay for my groceries in Bitcoin, there's a very good chance that when I got to the cash register and I said, "Okay. I'm paying you Bitcoin and my Bitcoin transaction is going to be recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain," I might have to wait for 10 minutes. Right? The practical application is that everyone in line will soon be looking at me and hating me because I'm not moving along with my groceries after I paid for them.
Glenn Barber: (22:04)
A layer 2 simply says, "You know what? If that's the way that it was first coded in the layer 1 solution, how do we make it more efficient?" It could be, we could get more transactions posted more efficiently and they could be faster. The real-world analogy in my grocery shopping example is how can we get to the speed of a credit card, where I literally just swipe or tap, it records my balance, my transactions approved, and I move on, and the line continues. A layer 2 is basically something that says, "Let's get from point A to B quicker, faster, or more efficient in some way, shape, or form."
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:44)
So, this is an exciting development that twitter is using Jack Mallers' firm Strike. They're integrating it into Twitter to create that ability. Yes-
Glenn Barber: (22:59)
It is awesome. I just posted or I just retweeted Jack's video. I would encourage every single person that sees this recording to go find Jack's video that was posted yesterday, which was what, the 23rd of September, where he records himself in Chicago, literally sending $10 via the Lightning Network, which is a layer 2 protocol that helps make the blockchain and Bitcoin much faster and much proficient, to someone in San Salvador in the country of El Salvador, within a matter of seconds. Right? [crosstalk 00:23:37] People are going and saying, this is the end of Western Union, which it could be because why would I take days to send money or US dollars in remittances to someone back home, if they also then have to take the bus to a shopping center, pay money in the black market, and then pay transaction fees of 3% to 4% or 5% on top of that, when I could send that exact same remittance from the luxury of my own home to my person in El Salvador or the Philippines or any other country in the world and it goes right to their smartphone? The future is here and it is absolutely phenomenal to see.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:21)
Glenn, when I hear you talk about that though, I'm going to put the hat on of a money center bank, a regional bank, even Mastercard or Visa, and I don't like it. I'm not happy. I almost feel like I'm the Pac Bell executive that's producing yellow pages and Jerry Yang showing up with Yahoo to show me how I can get phone numbers without needing a four-pound brick known as a yellow page. So, what am I going to do to stop you and can I stop you?
Glenn Barber: (24:55)
No. There is nothing you can do to stop this. What you can do is buy it. What you can do is cooperate with it. To your point, yes, all these firms should feel like they are AOL with a dial-up modem, whereas you're now getting a hundred megabit speed from your cable provider. Absolutely, that's a perfect comparison. That's the beauty/difficult part of digital assets to really understand because it is based on technology. For the first time in human history, at least, and I'm by no means a historian, we have stuff that comes on the scene in the blockchain and digital asset world from every part of the globe. Right? So, Jack Mallers can be doing this from Chicago to El Salvador, and there's other people doing it from Japan to Australia, or from Germany to Brazil.
Glenn Barber: (25:50)
So, what we don't always take into account is that we look at things from either an American perspective, the way that our country operates, and we don't realize that there's a whole bunch of other people doing exactly the same thing. We're developing solutions to the exact same problems in every corner of the globe simultaneously, and it's just a numbers game, and an inevitability that, that's just going to leak into the global economy. I would be extremely afraid if I'm these corporations. I would be moving really quickly. Given this pace of development within digital assets, it's going to be extremely hard for them to do it organically. The most logical solutions are to purchase or to partner.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:35)
Okay. I mean, I think that's really the biggest message. So, let's go to the NFT markets for a second. How much do you expect to see greater institutional acceptance of NFTs and growth in things like NFT gaming?
Glenn Barber: (26:52)
Institutional acceptance is a difficult thing to predict, right? Because I will tell you that I am in my 50s and I have three teenagers. My teenagers will understand NFTs a lot better than I do. There are portions and pockets of NFTs that I'll go into in just a second that I can easily get my head around, and there's portions that I can't. What I think is missing from NFT understanding, and it's so new that it is difficult to get your head around, is the sense of belonging and a sense of psychology. Right? Many, many NFTs are about fear of missing out, which is called FOMO, or identifying with a certain celebrity or a certain creator and wanting to belong to that sort of social ecosystem.
Glenn Barber: (27:39)
There are other NFTs that I do understand such as some of the sports-related things, especially soccer, right? There are firms that are using tokens to support fan engagement. You don't really need to know too much other than soccer, for example, is the world's most popular sport. It's got a rabid fan base, and they have not been able to participate or go to stadiums and watch their favorite teams for two years. So, anything, whether virtual or not, that gets that fan base energized and engaged is probably going to be fairly successful. Right?
Glenn Barber: (28:14)
But I think generally speaking, the concept of NFTs is pretty straightforward, where it allows content and the creators of that content to own a piece of their content forever. Right? Because what you do is you think about a prototypical example, that a music artist sells their music to a record label, and that record label then owns the stream of royalties from that point on up until infinity, and the artist doesn't get any piece of that going forward. What NFTs can allow people, whether it's art, music, or other content is to say, "I'm the original creator. I will have and maintain a piece of that royalty stream of the stuff that I produced in a way that's legitimate and ongoing for me." And I think that's a huge deal. So, I think institutional acceptance of this will be when they understand that concept and then say, "This is a huge investment opportunity and I can promote these original idea generators in a way that will then scale and become institutionally relevant."
Anthony Scaramucci: (29:19)
So, you're bringing up something that I want to extend a little and get your reaction to. What I'm hearing... I'm going to take us back because you mentioned that you're in your 50s. Of course, I'm closing in on 60. So, I was a little bit of shot underneath the belt when you mentioned that, but when we were kids in this business, the mortgage-backed security market was in full bloom. What they basically did was banks were issuing mortgages, and then Lew Ranieri said, "Let's bundle them all up and they can be institutional class securities." Of course, that improved the liquidity and then made the mortgages easier. It helped the housing market lower the prices. It was a great thing.
Anthony Scaramucci: (30:00)
Do NFTs have the ability to do that with almost anything, an insurance book, an insurance premium, the digitization of the physical world, meaning I can fractionalize a painting and each person can have an NFT related to that painting and a piece of ownership in that painting, or a sports memorabilia, or a property for that matter, real property? Are we going into a place that we never thought that we could go to because of the blockchain and NFTs?
Glenn Barber: (30:33)
Absolutely. I would break that into two different components. One is, I think what I would consider you to be referring to is tokenization, right? That means that there's a lot of things that were done in the capital market cycle over decades, and to your point, mortgages, and then being packaged and sold and making capital more efficient and free-flowing is a great example. But there are assets like wine, art, forestry, buildings, real estate that are illiquid. The provenance of the wealthy are connected. That can be tokenized and brought back to the average investor. Right? I'm not saying it's going to happen every day, but there's a building right behind me and if that building was redeveloped for a hundred million dollars, it would be kind of interesting if I could invest $100 or $50 into it via a token that represented an interest in that redevelopment, and then was subject to dividends or cash flow as that product was hopefully successful going forward. Right? That's really interesting and basically will bring illiquid assets to the average investor if done correctly.
Glenn Barber: (31:40)
The corresponding thing that I think we should address from the NFT perspective is that from a pure non-fungible token perspective, as we are seeing today, and I think your son is probably starting to get involved with them as well, this is a groundswell from the bottom up. Right? This is about the younger generations saying, "I want to own my property. I am creating stuff of value. It may have some value now. It may have greater value now, but all I care about and what's most important to me is I own it and I get rewarded for it." And I think the difference in this, from a generational concept, is that this is not a top-down, bring it to the masses, institutionalize it, and then trickle-down theory sort of thing. This is starting with the actual individual and it's a wave that is going to just get bigger, faster, and stronger, and influence the way that normal transactions are done.
Glenn Barber: (32:43)
And then, you brought up another great point, which is the gamification of everything. People don't realize that. I have three teenagers, right? My teenagers can ostensibly make a living already from gaming. The fact that you might have a career and it's not esports sponsorship career. It is literally that you could get paid for building something as part of these metaverses that are being created online. It's an intriguing concept that I have not been able to spend a lot of time on.
Anthony Scaramucci: (33:17)
You may end up getting paid for your social media presence at some point. That could break the walled garden of these businesses. You could have a blockchain-created social media presence. It's decentralized. So, it's governed not by Facebook or some media like that, but it's governed by the people that are using it.
Glenn Barber: (33:37)
Yes. That's the democratic aspect of it is that the individual user actually gets to be a part of the governance mechanism and control the ownership of their own asset. That's obviously the benefits of blockchain itself.
Anthony Scaramucci: (33:52)
All right. So, before I let you go, Glenn, where is Copper in five years?
Glenn Barber: (34:00)
I think there's a place from the roadmap that we'd like to go and there's a place from the roadmap that we may not expect to go. So, the places that we're actively trying to go are... I'm going to use words that I don't like to use because I think that's thrown around a little bit too loosely, but prime brokerage. Right. What I mean by that is saying that we want our customers to have the safest securest custody layer in the marketplace, through our existing architecture at Copper.
Glenn Barber: (34:27)
However, we also want to make it seamless and easy for them to trade digital assets, to earn yield by staking their digital assets, to eliminate counterparty risk by using our ClearLoop clearing and settlement mechanism, to have governance layers that allow people like yourselves to represent to their investors that digital assets are not going to be stolen. And essentially bring lending, borrowing, and financing into the mix, so that it's a one-stop-shop type of transaction house.
Glenn Barber: (34:59)
What I don't know is obviously crypto rails. By that, I mean fiat money to crypto transactions can be used for just about anything and I think that there's a much bigger application that allows the free flow of capital across borders, between nations, between corporations, that will then have a much bigger application. I would assume that Copper will be a part of that ecosystem. It's just very difficult to see exactly how.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:28)
Well, I'm looking forward to watching the growth. Congratulations on all your success. I appreciate you coming to the SALT Conference and it's been a lot of fun to have you on SALT Talks.
Glenn Barber: (35:38)
Thanks so much and we'll obviously speak soon.
John Darsie: (35:41)
Thank you again to Glenn for joining SALT Talks, and thank you to Anthony for a great interview, and thank you to everybody who tuned in to today's SALT Talk with Glenn Barber from Copper. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this episode or any of our previous episodes, they're all available on demand on our website, salt.org/talks, or on our YouTube channel, which is called SALT Tube. Again, you can watch those all on demand. We've also posted all of our content or in the process of posting all of our content from the recent SALT Conference in New York, where you can watch Glenn's panel again on the opportunities and obstacles to institutional crypto adoption, many of which Copper is helping to solve with their fantastic technology. We're also on social media. Twitter is where we're most active, @SALTConference. So, I definitely recommend you follow us there. We're posting clips and commentary from a lot of those SALT panels, as well as our SALT Talks, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook as well.
John Darsie: (36:36)
Please spread the word of about these SALT Talks. Again, we love educating our audience around digital assets. We sort of like to be that bridge, SkyBridge if you will, between the traditional finance world, the institutional world, and this emerging technology and asset class that is crypto and digital assets. But on behalf of Anthony and the entire SALT team, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT Talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.