Ex-Goldman Sachs Exec: This is the Next Big Crypto Infrastructure Shift! | Amar Kuchinad

**Amar Kuchinad** (0:00)
1010, last October, momentous day in crypto, not in a good way. The market drops by about 25%. Collateral calls go out.
At the CME, you still can't move collateral on Saturday, Sunday. So they had a large collateral call outstanding from Friday night until Tuesday morning. We moved a billion dollars worth of collateral for our clients over the course of Friday afternoon until Saturday morning when the market sort of settled out at a new price, and no exposures.

**Tony Edward** (0:34)
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Link will be in the description. Hey folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and we're recording at Station 3 in New York's financial district. And joining me is Amar Kuchinad, who's the CEO of Copper, which builds blockchain-based infrastructure for secure and efficient collateral mobility across capital markets.
Amar has extensive experience in the TradFi markets. He spent a lot of time at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and more. And he was also a Senior Policy Advisor for the SEC.
Amar, great to have you.

**Amar Kuchinad** (3:26)
Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

**Tony Edward** (3:28)
I'm so excited to chat with you because I've covered Copper's news updates over the years. So it's great to be able to speak to someone at Copper and learn about all the great things you guys are doing and much more.
Let's start with your background. Where do you heal from and how do you make your way into TradFi?

**Amar Kuchinad** (3:45)
Well, yeah, I find it's a long story which I'll try to shorten since I'm 52 years old. So we'll say that I grew up in the Midwest in St. Louis and then wound my way to the East Coast.
Came into finance by accident. I was at school. I was actually a physics major who had to drop out of physics. Quantum mechanics is way too hard to all of your listeners. They should know that before they head into that topic as a subject.
But then I ended up being a math major.
All the investment banks came on the campus, recruited and I wound up at Credit Suisse largely because a friend of mine was a year older and pulled my resume. I had no idea when I showed up at the training program, IPO, no idea what that stood for. I thought when people were saying MNA, they were saying a word that was E-M-E-N-A-Y, MNA. I didn't know what that was. So I eventually learned this whole investment banking world, moved into sales and trading, and spent the next 12 years of my career, actually more, 15 years of my career, trading equity and credit derivatives and fixed income swaps for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. Wound up leaving Goldman to take a job at the SEC. It was just after the financial crisis, and the SEC was looking for people to help implement Dodd-Frank. And it was a really remarkable experience there in DC. Left that to start a corporate bond trading platform. A lot of people have been coming down talking about how regulations were ruining American capital markets. And while it wasn't the SEC's fault, it looked like there was a solution that technology could bring to how buyers and sellers meet. We built that, a company called Electronify, up for three years, sold it to a competitor that's still running, and running a lot of that technology and client base. And then I moved into real estate private equity. None of this sounds like crypto. But here, about two years ago, I took a phone call from a friend who I worked with at Goldman, and he's an advisor to Copper, and he was talking about this company. And quite frankly, I'm a little bit of a crypto skeptic, so I was asking him, why are you involved? This thing doesn't, like crypto doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, is it really a thing? Especially here in the US, we had a different administration that was very anti-crypto.