Crypto.com has secured a $100 million direct insurance policy provided by Arch Underwriting at Lloyd’s Syndicate 2012.
Per a May 11 announcement, the new policy brings Crypto.com’s total coverage to $360 million — with the firm claiming to now have the largest insurance coverage within the entire cryptocurrency sector.
With Crypto.com also reporting that its userbase has doubled over six months to tag $2 million, Cointelegraph spoke with the firm’s chief executive, Kris Marszalek, to find out more about the firm’s new coverage and spike in users.
Crypto.com secures $100 million direct coverage
Marszalek stated that the new $100 million policy is the largest direct policy secured by Crypto.com, noting that other coverage has come “indirectly via our custodial partner Ledger Vault.”
“The insurance policy covers loss attributable to various events such as physical damage or destruction (including natural disasters), third-party theft and more, against the cold storage assets on custodial partner Ledger Vault,” he stated, adding that Crypto.com “were able to ensure the coverage terms suit our specific needs.”
When asked whether insurers were hesitant to work with a crypto firm, Marszalek stated:
“The insurance industry is still very new to the crypto space, and between the rare players which endeavour to cover crypto assets, the requirements imposed on the insured companies are often higher than those on traditional companies due the limited understanding of the technology and perceived higher risk of crypto assets.”
“For Crypto.com, the whole process took over six months and involved enhanced due diligence exercise on the entire company processes, and in particular on the storage and access of our multisig hardware signing devices and physical back-up keys.”
Transaction volumes spike
Crypto.com also announced that it has surpassed the 2 million customer milestone — with its user base doubling in half a year despite the coronavirus pandemic.
“In Q1 2020 we saw a record-breaking quarter with new users and trading volume. From the Fall of 2019 to Spring of 2020, we doubled our user base from 1 million to 2 million in under 6 months and saw transaction volumes triple between December and April,” Marszalek said.
“We definitely saw spikes right after the announcement of stimulus packages by the U.S. government. The growing distrust of the monetary policy over quantitative easing turned out to be the perfect build-up for this month’s Bitcoin halving and for the past two weeks we’ve seen a significant increase of new users.”
Marszalek said that Crypto.com’s debit card is the most popular product among new users, noting significant interest from European users after launching in the region.
“We are just around the corner from rolling out MCO Visa Card across Europe, where our team has successfully built momentum, especially for markets where localization is necessary,” he said.
“The Crypto.com App has reached top 50 in the Finance category in the U.K., France, Italy and Spain — markets where our team has spent hard work launching local communities and doubling effort on local language support,” he added.
