Russian billionaire Said Gutseriev exited from three cryptocurrency projects at once. We are talking about crypto exchanges Currency.com, Capital.com and Zubr.io.
In 2016, it became known that Said Gutseriev, a member of the board of directors of Safmar Financial Investments and M.Video, invested in the international CFD broker Capital.com. This blockchain-based fintech company uses proprietary developments and AI technologies through its investment fund Larnabel. Capital.com develops trading software and training applications in this area.
The second investor in the startup was technology entrepreneur Viktor Prokopenya, who owns the investment company VP Capital. Gutseriev and Prokopenya invested $25 million in the project on a parity basis. They paid more than $1 million for the domain for the trading platform. Capital.com is owned by Cyprus-based Capital Com SV Investments Ltd, which has a CySEC license to provide investment services in 23 EU countries.
At the end of 2018, Capital.com provided infrastructure for a crypto platform offering tokenized assets. Based on its developments, in early 2019, the crypto exchange Currency.com was launched with offices in Belarus, the UK and Gibraltar. The crypto exchange became another joint project of Gutseriev and Prokopenya, who invested about $10 million in its launch on a parity basis.
The startup became the first fully regulated crypto exchange in Eastern Europe and the CIS. Currency.com offers tokenized securities, indices, raw materials and metals assets, which are linked to the underlying value of traditional financial assets. Capital.com provides quotations of tokenized assets by the underlying.
In 2018, Said Gutseriev registered Zubr Exchange Limited in Gibraltar, which became the digital cryptocurrency exchange Zubr.io operator. In 2019, he invested more than €4 million in the project. The company has received authorization from the GFSC (Gibraltar Financial Services Commission) for the DLT provider service.
Having entered the cryptocurrency market in 2016 on the wave of its decline, Gutseriev began selling his stakes in cryptocurrency projects in 2020 on the wave of its rise.
Gutseriev’s shares in Currency.com and Capital.com were bought out by Viktor Prokopenya, who became the sole owner of these two crypto exchanges after these transactions. At the same time, Gutseriev exited from other joint projects with Prokopenya. Through Larnabel, he also had a stake in Banuba, which he launched in 2016 as a startup working in computer vision and augmented reality. Gutseriev sold it to private investors. Thus, Larnabel and VP Capital no longer have any joint projects.
As we learned, Prokopenya was not interested in Zubr.io shares. Gutseriev sold his stake in Zubr.io to cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which thus expanded its development team to work to improve the underlying technology, infrastructure, and products FTX offers. FTX management announced plans to maintain Zubr.io’s operational autonomy as required by the DLT provider license.
Gutseriev began negotiating the sale of his stakes in Zubr.io, Currency.com and Capital.com in early 2020. It took over a year to finalize the deals and have Currency.com and Capital.com inspected by auditors and several regulators (British and Cypriot), as financial companies regulated these projects. By May 2021, the deals were finalized.
The amount of the deals was not disclosed. Still, as we learned from sources close to the businessman, Gutseriev could earn from $150 million to $300 million on the sale of his stakes, given that he entered the cryptocurrency market with minimal investment and exited it at the time of its maximum growth. Currency.com and Capital.com had by then taken leading positions in the market of regulated cryptocurrency exchanges and investment applications.
After withdrawing investments from the cryptocurrency market, Said Gutseriev focused on traditional financial institutions — in April 2020, he acquired 99.83% of the Belarusian state-owned bank Paritetbank shares.
According to the representative of VP Capital, Said Gutseriev’s former partner Viktor Prokopenya does not plan on getting rid of projects related to cryptocurrencies and continues to invest in them actively.