The Profile · Founder & CEO, Soter Insure
Henson Orser
He insures bitcoin in bitcoin. After thirty years selling rates and running markets desks, he built an insurance carrier that pays claims in the same coin it covers.
He insures bitcoin in bitcoin. After thirty years selling rates and running markets desks, he built an insurance carrier that pays claims in the same coin it covers.
Most insurers measure the world in dollars. Henson Orser noticed the problem with that the moment a client holds bitcoin. Insure a crypto vault in fiat, and a payout arrives in the wrong currency at the worst possible moment - after the asset moved. Soter Insure, the company he founded, writes Asset Loss, Directors & Officers, and Smart Contract Failure coverage denominated in dollars, bitcoin and ether. Lose the coin, get indemnified in the coin.
That single design choice - close the asset-liability mismatch instead of papering over it - is the thesis of the whole company. It is also the kind of detail that only occurs to someone who spent decades on the other side of the trade.
Soter is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, runs its underwriting out of Bermuda, and keeps offices in London, New York and Dubai. It was incubated by Further Ventures and WebN Group. The name comes from the Greek figure of the protector - the spirit invoked for safety and deliverance - which is about as on-the-nose as an insurance brand gets, and Orser seems fine with that.
The regulatory path tells you what he prioritizes. Soter took initial approval from the Bermuda Monetary Authority in September 2024 and a full license in January 2025. The funding followed: a Series A led by Galaxy in February 2025, with Brevan Howard Digital, Karatage, Token Bay and Pharsalus alongside. License first, then capital. Banker instincts.
It is a quiet sentence for a loud industry. No promises to disrupt, no manifestos. The ambition is narrow and exact: make crypto risk boring enough to insure properly. For a market built on volatility, boring is the radical pitch.
Protection against the theft or loss of digital assets, payable in fiat or in the native asset itself.
Coverage for failures and bugs in the code that moves money - the risk traditional policies never named.
Directors & officers liability tailored to crypto-native firms and their boards.
Before crypto, there was a trading floor. Orser spent more than seventeen years in the Markets division at The Royal Bank of Scotland, where he was Head of USD Rates Sales and, from 2001 to 2009, ran the San Francisco branch. Then came Nomura Securities International: Global Head of Wholesale SRM, Co-Head of Global Markets Americas, Head of Global Markets Sales Americas, with seats on the Wholesale and Global Markets executive committees. The resume of a lifer.
Lifers do not usually leave. In 2020 he did, taking the president's role at Komainu, the institutional digital asset custodian, and later serving as its acting CEO. Custody is the on-ramp - the safe where institutions park their crypto. From inside it, Orser could see the next gap clearly: a safe is only as good as the promise that backs it when something goes wrong. That promise is insurance, and almost nobody was writing it properly.
"He spent his career pricing risk for the world's biggest banks. Then he walked into a market where the risk had no price yet - and started writing the menu."
So he left custody to build the cover. Soter is the answer to a question he had been circling for years: who insures the insurers of crypto, and in what currency do they pay?
Orser read economics at Princeton with a minor in politics - a fitting double major for someone who would spend a career at the intersection of markets and the rules that govern them. The politics minor reads differently now that his company's fortunes turn on getting a national regulator to say yes.
Away from finance he has served on the boards of Autism Speaks and Winston Preparatory School, the kind of commitments that do not show up in a funding announcement. They round out a profile that is otherwise all balance sheets and trading floors: a man comfortable with long horizons, whether the timeline is a child's education or a regulatory license that takes years to land.
It is tempting to read his whole crypto chapter as a contrarian bet. It is closer to the opposite. Orser did not arrive to tear down the old rules of insurance and banking - he arrived to apply them, faithfully, to a market that had been operating without them. The novelty is the asset class. The discipline is borrowed straight from thirty years of doing this the regulated way.