Digital assets custodian Copper adds staking support for MINA

Mina Protocol has announced that digital assets custody and management firm Copper has added support for its native token MINA.

The platform announced the development in a press release on Wednesday, with Mina Foundation highlighting that Copper now supports institutional custody and staking of the Mina Protocol token.

“This strategic collaboration is aimed at accelerating the growth of zero knowledge technology with increased liquidity from institutions to help secure the Mina network,” Mina Foundation CEO Kurt Hemecker said.

What does this mean?

Support for MINA expands Copper’s crypto custody and staking products. It adds to recently announced support for Hedera (HBAR) and Internet Computer (ICP).

Copper said in its news report that expansion gives investors more options to gain exposure to the crypto investment market.

“The addition of Copper’s custody solution gives professional and institutional entities more options to diversify their crypto participation with MINA. We hope that it will also raise awareness of institutional use cases for ZK technology, such as zk-KYC credentials that help address compliance without sacrificing user privacy,” Hemecker added.

Copper launched in 2018 and has increasingly grown its presence in the digital assets custody, prime brokerage and collateral management space. The company’s unveiling of the multi-exchange settlement solution ClearLoop in 2020 has contributed to this growth.

Users are also able to tap into Copper Connect and the MPC wallet solution.

Institutional interest in crypto rising

According to Copper CEO and co-founder Dmitry Tokarev, the past few months have proved critical to the increased adoption of crypto by institutional investors. The market is at a key moment in this growth trajectory, Tokarev noted.

“Following the Ethereum ETF approval this year, we are witnessing increased interest for reliable tools to gain exposure in this space. The integration with Mina Protocol represents another step forward in advancing opportunities for institutional adoption.”

The SEC approved spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds for trading last month. BlackRock, Fidelity, and Bitwise are among those to add Ether spot ETFs to spot Bitcoin ETFs that received the SEC nod in January.

Institutional adoption of the funds has surged despite the market’s suffering a massive sell-off amid multiple downward catalysts.

Despite this, and notably, sectors such as asset tokenization are on the ascendancy in terms of market players and adoption.

BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are among those spearheading this growth, with the launch of tokenized products seeing the real-world assets sector become one of the hottest trends in 2024.

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