CopperCasts

CopperCasts is Copper's interview podcast about the systems behind institutional crypto: custody, liquidity, derivatives, staking and privacy. Fadi Aboualfa, Copper's Head of Research, hosts. His guests come from trading desks, protocols and infrastructure firms, and each conversation is built around specific claims. The show calls its own subject somewhat technical, which is fair. Perp funding, OTC options, liquid staking and fully homomorphic encryption are all part of the everyday vocabulary. One thread runs through infrastructure and privacy. Rand Hindi, CEO at Zama, argues that privacy is the layer public blockchains have been missing and that without composability there is no reason to use a blockchain at all. His example is identity. Today it needs a separate integration for every country, but it could become one on-chain standard, the way tokens already are. Eric Saraniecki, co-founder at Digital Asset, turns to market design. He holds that private blockchains were a dead end, that anonymity suits money but not stablecoins, treasuries or unregulated real-world assets, and that decentralization matters at the network layer, not for every asset. His episode also makes a point about adoption: a chain having a feature counts for little until the whole ecosystem, oracles included, has been built around it. A second thread is trading. Anestis Arampatzis is co-head of Centaur Markets, the structured products and derivatives desk within DV Trading. He discusses Bitcoin's slide below 100,000, the deleveraging behind it, and why TradFi investors are behaving differently from crypto natives. As he describes it, his desk's edge is finding fair value for options on markets that have no underlying derivatives market. Pedro Birmann of Quadra, the team behind Coinmatch, and Gideon Hyams of STS Digital describe moving crypto options away from chat-based dealing toward multi-dealer RFQ, with Copper working alongside them. That episode also takes a clear view on altcoins: there are too many tokens, consolidation is coming, and healthy options markets can only form where spot and perpetual markets are already solid. Staking gets its own conversation with Kean Gilbert, Head of Institutional Relations at Lido. It covers how staked ETH is being brought into ETPs, ETFs and custody workflows, and whether a three percent yield matters when federal debt pays four or five. Not every episode has the same host. Ep023, with Bitstamp CEO Julian Sawyer, is hosted by Tyler Kenyon and follows Sawyer's path into crypto from Starling Bank, which he describes as a technology project much like crypto itself. For the big structural arguments, start with the Digital Asset or Zama conversations. For how a derivatives desk reads the market, start with the Centaur Markets episode. The sign-offs point to Copper's newsletters, including Opening Bell, a reminder that this is a firm's own podcast.