Save for retirement with crypto? BitcoinIRA COO explains the appeal
00:00 Speaker A
Bitcoin IRA is what it sounds like. It’s an IRA for Bitcoin and some other um crypto.
00:09 Speaker A
And at times when crypto goes down and gets more volatile, like do you get calls, like how I mean, and and what allocation of people’s, I mean because it’s retirement funds. So what allocation are people putting towards a Bitcoin IRA?
00:26 Speaker B
That’s shifted over the years too. You know, early on the believers, we had guys throwing everything in. Like they were we had a guy that actually left his job at Intel to liberate his 401K so that he could put it
00:46 Speaker A
Liberate their 401K.
00:47 Speaker B
Yeah, liberate because you know it’s like locked up until you leave or turn 59 and a half. And so he put it all in there and of course he’s thrilled. This is 2016, 2017 levels. Um what you asked if we’re getting a bunch of calls.
01:05 Speaker B
What I I see at this nice crossroads of long-term capital mentality, which is retirees and crypto and they’re taking this as an opportunity. They’ve seen in the in the volatility is an embedded an opportunity.
01:21 Speaker B
I’m they’re also have a somewhat of a bias and skew because it’s tax season. You have until April 15th to put your contributions in for your Roth, trad, SEP, simples. So people are putting those in because they intended to do it anyways and looking at it and saying, hey, it’s Macy’s red tag day. I get it I got a nice discount on my Bitcoin. I’m going to take an opportunity of this volatility and I have the certainty I’m into this. I believe in this. So they’re almost doubling down their efforts on that front.
01:52 Speaker B
Um, there’s a resilience and a permanence to long-term capital and to just Bitcoiners in general. Once you go down that rabbit hole, which I know you haven’t taken the orange pill. One of these days we’ll get you to do it. But what once once you go down that,
02:05 Speaker A
You still haven’t gotten me.
02:05 Speaker B
there is some belief as a libertarian and an independent saying, you know, this there’s something to this madness. It may not could be completely logical, but there’s something to having a new type of digital currency. To me, it’s the the ultimate democratization of money, it’s the people’s currency. And growing up in an era of watching what we’ve done printing and printing and printing and how we have having effects, it just makes sense to some folks.
02:37 Speaker B
Now for not for everybody though, it’s not for everybody’s flavor.
02:40 Speaker A
Um, I also wanted to ask you, um, you know, there are a lot of uh different choices now in terms of how people can invest their Bit, you know, with crypto. There are other IRA options obviously. Um, some of them just you can only do ETFs, but some of them you can do directly.
02:59 Speaker B
Into Bitcoin.
03:00 Speaker A
You guys are I was looking at the fee structure, relatively high on the on the scale. Yep. So what’s sort of your differentiation that that you can convince people to to pay those higher fees?
03:10 Speaker B
Yeah, so obviously you mentioned the ETF, you can always go buy Coinbase stock, you can buy the ETF, you can get that kind of paper exposure from it. Having a direct investment into it, sitting in a segregated secure wallet for yourself is is what people are really interested in. Also, they love the fact that, and you joked about Pomp, he’s never going to sell his Bitcoin, neither will his grandkids. When you reach that age of retirement and distribution, you can take out the crypto in kind instead of having to sell it off and get dollars or other assets for it.
03:41 Speaker B
Um for us, I think what we’ve done really well is real crypto, real people. You go to any other site out there and it’s uh if you’re going to the fidelities and e-trades, they’re just getting into this space, so it’s like a sidecar for them. We specialize in it and we have real human beings that retirement’s not a one-size fits all strategy that walk you through the process, help you roll over, transfer, add funds and we’re constantly pushing the innovation.
03:59 Speaker B
So we started with just Bitcoin IRA because that was the only one around when we were there at the beginning of the time in 2016. Now we have over 85 different cryptocurrencies available, driven by the demand of consumers.
04:14 Speaker A
I mean
04:15 Speaker B
And it’s crazy. Yes, some of them.
04:16 Speaker A
I mean, really? People are putting people are putting their retirement funds in
04:22 Speaker B
I hold all of them in Bitcoin.
04:23 Speaker B
Ethereum, XRP, uh Litecoin and Solana are probably in the top five alongside Bitcoin, but we’re still 65% Bitcoin in a book of 12 billion dollars of business.
