Said Gutseriev Sells Crypto Exchange Stakes to Viktor Prokopenya

February 20, 2023

Said Gutseriev who have entered the crypto market with investments of less than $30 million in a couple of years, sold his shares in cryptocurrency exchanges on the wave of the “bullish” market, earning from $150 million to $300 million, according to different data.

Russian billionaire Said Gutseriev has sold his stakes in three cryptocurrency exchanges — Currency.com, Capital.com and Zubr.io. As we have learned, the businessman started negotiations on selling his stakes in cryptocurrency exchanges at the beginning of last year.

Auditing the companies by the regulators of the UK and Cyprus, whose license to provide investment services Currency.com and Capital.com had, took about a year.

In May 2021, all the deals were finalized. Sources familiar with the terms of the deals estimate the businessman’s earnings from the sale of crypto projects to be up to $300 million.

Currency.com and Capital.com

Shares in the cryptocurrency exchanges Currency.com and Capital.com were bought by UK businessman Viktor Prokopenya, who owned these platforms with Gutseriev. According to our sources, the idea of launching regulated cryptocurrency platforms and developing their technological infrastructure belonged to Prokopenya, who realized it through his investment company, VP Capital.

Viktor Prokopenya, Investor

Said Gutseriev and Viktor Prokopenya invested $25 million on a parity basis in the launch of Capital.com in 2016. The purchase of the Capital.com domain cost the businessmen a million dollars. Development of technologies for the launch of the project was carried out through exp(capital), a company owned by Prokopenya.

Capital.com is among the top European premium CFD brokers and has a CySEC license to provide investment services in 23 EU countries out of 27. The company provides its services in more than 190 countries. Capital.com’s auditor is Deloitte, one of the “Big Four” members, which includes four of the world’s largest networks of companies specializing in consulting and audit services.

In 2018, Capital.com and exp(capital) started developing AI technologies for the cryptocurrency exchange of tokenized assets Currency.com. The project was launched in 2019, first in test mode, and a few months later, its full-fledged release took place. The crypto exchange was another joint project of Gutseriev and Prokopenya, who also invested about $10 million in its opening on a parity basis.

Currency.com became the world’s first fully licensed cryptocurrency exchange of tokenized assets for goods, commodities, indices, and securities linked to traditional financial assets’ underlying value. The tokenized assets are quoted and backed by Capital.com by purchasing their underlying assets.

Both companies are financial and fully regulated. Currency.com is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission GFSC, authorized by the GFSC as a DLT Provider, and registered with FINTRAC (Canada) and FinCEN (USA) as a Money Services Business. FCA, CySEC, BAH, and ASIC regulate Capital.com.

According to a representative of VP Capital, “negotiations on the sale have been underway since the beginning of 2020. It took more than a year to finalize the transactions. Since Currency.com and Capital.com are regulated financial companies, the transactions required the approval of several regulators to close.”

Completion of the deal between Prokopenya and Gutseriev. The amount of the deal remained undisclosed.

In addition to Said Gutseriev’s sale of stakes in Currency.com and Capital.com to Viktor Prokopenya, Gutseriev also retired from the startup Banuba, in which he had invested together with Prokopenya. His stake in Banuba was bought out by private investors, including the company’s top management. At the moment, the business partnership between Said Gutseriev and Viktor Prokopenya is over. The businessmen have no more joint projects.

Zubr.io

Said Gutseriev invested in the digital derivatives platform Zubr.io in 2018 through Zubr Exchange Limited, which he opened in Gibraltar the same year. The GFSC authorized the company to provide DLT service. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. It is known from open sources that Gutseriev invested an additional €4 million in the project in 2019.

According to our sources close to Gutseriev, after the decision to exit the cryptocurrency business in early 2020, the businessman offered his stake to Viktor Prokopenya. Still, the latter refused this investment, and the exchange was interested in the international cryptocurrency exchange FTX, owned and founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. FTX is expanding its team of infrastructure developers and products by acquiring small, promising companies.