The Wolf Of All Streets - Retiring With Digital Gold: Ryan Radloff, CEO of Kingdom Trust

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Ryan Radloff, CEO of Kingdom Trust built his name in the crypto space as the CEO and Co-Founder of CoinShares. Now he is revolutionizing the way millions of Americans are preparing to retire. With over 13 billion dollars in assets under management, he is working to connect a multi-trillion-dollar retirement market to the Bitcoin ecosystem.  Ryan Radloff and Scott Melker further discuss having Bitcoin in your retirement account, zombie mutual funds, the Fed rat trap, cattle and firetrucks in your IRA, beating crusty old Wall Streeters, Bitcoin outcompeting every other asset, targeting 28 trillion in retirement money, a massive community and investment awakening and more. --- CHOICE IRA by KINGDOM TRUST Don’t be part of the 7.1M Bitcoiners who have bitcoin and a retirement account but don’t have bitcoin in their retirement account. With Choice IRA by Kingdom Trust you can hold bitcoin in your retirement account. The first 1,000 users to open a Choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free BTC - visit RetireWithChoice.com/WOLF to join the waitlist and secure free BTC. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

Today's episode is brought to you by Choice, by Kingdom Trust, and Voyager. We'll learn more about them later on in the episode. What is up, everybody? This is Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week we talk to your favorite personalities in Bitcoin, crypto, finance, sports, politics, art, and basically anyone else with a story to tell. This show is powered by BlockWorks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. If you like the podcast and you follow me on Twitter, then you should definitely check out my website, thewolfofallstreets.io. That's

where I basically share everything that's coming out of my ADHD riddled mind and where you can also sign up for my newsletter, The Wolf Den. So now that we're done with that, we get on to the important stuff and that is that today's guest with that, we'll get on to the important stuff. And that is that today's guest. And today's guest is revolutionizing the way that Americans are able to prepare and save for retirement. As a CEO of Kingdom Trust, who I'm very proud to say is one of our amazing sponsors, Ryan and his company are at the intersection of professional investing and cryptocurrency technology with over 13 billion in assets under custody. That was a billion with a B. And it is at this intersection where Ryan plans to bridge a trillion dollar market into the Bitcoin and crypto market. So Ryan, man,

thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to have you. Scott, likewise. Thanks so much for having me on. I look forward to talking. So I just found out that you like to hit people really hard. You played football at Duke, right? I did. Yeah. Yeah. I like to hit Florida Gators really hard. That's, that's, that's the only one I can actually put an extra. That's because they hit back. Yeah. So people will know is that right before we started, Ryan told me that his dad played football at the University of Georgia, which is the Gators biggest rival. And then I found out that Ryan himself played at Duke. But actually, it's interesting because every time I talk to someone who has a background in sports, it seems that they've learned a lot

of lessons from, you know, being on a team or being a leader in that regard that have carried them through. And clearly, I mean, as I also joked before, you're quite a bit younger than me, but you've had quite a bit of success. So how much do you think that what you learn from playing sports has contributed to, you know, your ability to lead? I mean, you know, I think probably especially playing football at Duke, we were we were really bad. And, you know, when I was there, we didn't win very many games. And, you know, part of the issue with Duke is you have to have such a high test scores to get in. And then you combine that with the football. It's tricky.

But, you know, we learn. When I was there, you really learn. What are you saying about football players, Dan? When I was there, you know, you really learn. So, like, the difference between winning and losing and how small the margin can actually be. And I think that, like, you get that taste in your mouth of working as hard as you do without that extra inch that it takes to win. And, you know, that to me, I think, understanding that and going through that helps me like when I'm up at night thinking about the

next day, like what that little inch is the difference between winning and losing. So that part is my probably the biggest thing that made a difference on it. Other than that, I think it's, you know, sports, military, school, all those things you kind of pull from in your early life to grab, to use and leverage in the professional life. So the biggest thing, though, was learning the sting of losing and not want to continue that into the other parts of my life, that's for sure. But it wouldn't have replaced my experience there playing football

at Duke for anything. Oh, I'm sure. I actually went to Duke University in like middle school and high school every summer for a program called the Talent Identification Program. It was called the TIP Program. And I went and took like college level courses there each summer. So I'm, I have a certain love for, for Duke and for the Raleigh-Durham area and everything. It's really just beautiful there. Do you spend a lot of time there still? You know, I, I, now, so now that I've, um, I'm no longer, I was in London the last five years, uh, building coin shares. And now that I'm back in the United States, I'm, I'm,

what was looking forward to going to some, some football games this fall, but you know, I don't really know that right now, but, um, you know, I try to get there as much as I can, not as much as I should right now. Do you think they're going to play? I just saw UConn announce they're canceling the season. And, you know, I would not be surprised to see this kind of trigger its way through some of the bigger conferences. I think everyone's looking at like what the SEC and some of the big schools are doing first. But I don't think they're going to play. I don't see how. And if they do, I think it'll be temporary. You know, I live in Gainesville,

Florida, obviously with the university of Florida and COVID is pretty bad here. You know, people kind of don't pay attention, but per capita, it's probably worse than New York city was at its peak. You know, a few hundred cases here a day is like tens of thousands in other places. And now they're bringing back, you know, 60,000 students who probably are not the demographic that cares so deeply about it. So I can't see how that, whether I'm not saying everyone will die, I'm not trying to be an alarmist. I'm just saying for the sake of football and those things, I can't see how it doesn't continue to spread. And, you know, yeah, we'll see. It's sad because who doesn't love a football season? I don't know what I'm going to do without fantasy football. I don't either. So you touched on coin chairs and being in London.

I'd love to hear like your whole background, basically post-college. You left Duke and what happened and how did you arrive where you are today? Yeah. So I left. Interestingly enough, I was at Duke playing football like we talked about. And during that time was actually the financial crisis. And that molded me and shaped me quite a bit. I remember I was studying law at the time and all of a sudden saw what my parents were going through, like so many of us did during that time, and the financial collapse. And I remember having this horrible feeling that I couldn't explain

what was going on. It really just pivoted my whole life and career to saying, okay, what is happening over in this bond market that can impact Main Street and houses? So that really, when I left Duke, it was 2009. And when I was there, I got this like deep rooted hate for the legacy financial system that ended up putting my parents effectively on the street. Oddly enough, when I left Duke, the only one that was hiring at the time were banks, believe it or not. So, you know, it was either pre-law, pre-med, or you went and worked for a bank. So I did that, unfortunately. And actually, fortunately, because it taught me what I needed to know early on. So I

left there, got into banking a bit, went to Wells Fargo and some other places. But really around that time, I started getting this deep-rooted Austrian basis that's kind of like Austrian economics, which is the antithesis of Keynesian economics, which is what most of our financial system is built on. And, you know, from there, I was really struggling right out of school to figure out, okay, how do I make an impact? And, you know, this was 2009, 2013, 14, and boom, comes this white paper, like probably like the same story as most of us, where you got this Bitcoin peer-to-peer electronic cash story. And what caught my eye was not the tech. It wasn't anything like that. What it was, was the monetary policy of how this digital asset approached a systematic, programmatic issuance of new currency. And that hit me like a ton of bolts. And from that point, I decided that, you know, I was going to dedicate everything I had in my life to advancing this because it was really this kind of thing

that I've been looking for and studied while at school. And that was all shaped from that, from the last financial crisis that we went through. So one thing led to another. I got to solve what the Winklevosses and what the Solidex team was doing in New York. No one was trying to do a Bitcoin exchange traded product over in Europe. So went to London, boom, we took off. And a few years later, CoinShares became a multi-billion dollar asset manager.

And besides Grayscale, really the second largest Bitcoin exchange traded vehicle out there in the market. So that's how I got there. Obviously, this is before Kingdom time. Interesting. You kind of trivialized the, we did coin shares and boom, a billion dollars. But I have a feeling there was a lot of hard work and interesting stories that happened in that process. I mean, you guys were effectively the first fund of that size, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, really what happened was, so CoinShares was created in 2016. And we ended up merging and acquiring the vehicle that enabled us to list all these products on the NASDAQ.

So the Bitcoin, the Ethereum, the Litecoin, the rest on the NASDAQ European market. And what the difference was is that from January 2017 to about end of July, we sold about $130 million in dollar terms of Bitcoin into these products to institutions, to European retirement accounts. And then what happened, everyone remembers in 2017, right after the fork in August, we saw the Bitcoin price just straight vertical through to the end of the year. And we started CoinShare as the beginning of that year. We started with about $3 million in assets in the beginning of January. We ended the year in 2017 with $2 billion.

Magic internet money. Magic internet money really did its magic for you guys. It did. But, you know, and the next, you know, you go through as a CEO, you learn the hard part about running a Bitcoin business back then, which was, you know, you think this, you think everything's going up in perpetuity and you get this kind of FOMO and all of the memes that take over and this looks like it's going to go on forever. You equip, you hire, and then we all know what happened the next year, 2018. And we saw the

decimation in this. I don't remember. Yeah, I tried to forget. Completely blocked out. But what we built though was very important because we started building these regulatory or regulated rails effectively to help fiat money transform itself into our world. And that was what we felt was our mission. And we did that effectively and it's still kicking butt today.

I mean, CoinShares is booming mission. And we did that effectively. And it's still kicking butt today. I mean, coin shares is booming still. And I think, you know, at the time, there were not a lot of really good regulated rails. I call financial rails, like a technology rail, to migrate that capital. And, you know, that was a big moment. And I think, you know, there's other areas now that are expanding. But back then, it was really about building that regulated framework and you know fortunately we were in the right place the right time sometimes it better be lucky than smart um but the always better to be both yeah well that in the case i'm glad i learned about bitcoin early when i did and then of course i'm glad that we

got there um uh when we did as well so you, you know, in that case, we were. So, but all this time, though, what was interesting about it is I, you know, I'm in, I'm obviously not European. I'm very much American, as you can tell from my accent. But, you know, we're having this big growth and I'm watching what's going back in the U.S., watching what's happening with Grayscale, you know, obviously with Coinbase and the others. And I've just kept seeing this big booming market back here. And it was like, man, I've really got to figure out how to go make an impact there as well. And that's what ultimately

led me to the next chapter, which was Kingdom Trust. What do you make of the reports about the quantity of Bitcoin and Ethereum that Grayscale is buying at this point? I think, well, what has happened, you know if I've studied financial markets now for 13 years, 15 years, and the grayscale products are an anomaly, they're unbelievable. Um, but actually net net, they get a lot of negative press, um, because of the premium. But net net is a very positive thing for Bitcoin and Ethereum. The reason why these are permanent capital vehicles. So fiat goes in, it never comes out. So Bitcoin are locked in there forever. And the SEC is almost, you know, without commenting on any of their policies directly, they basically have created this monster in that without an ETF

that's redeemable and creatable. They've created this permanent capital structure that is ballooning into these monsters. And net-net, it's very positive for Bitcoin because you've got dollars that are coming in. And again, they don't go out. They stay in this permanent capital vehicle. So I think it's a very, you know, it's performed what it said it would.

It's giving people the ability to express a view and a capacity right out of their brokerage accounts for the last five, six years. There is a premium, but you know what? There's worse things that happen. The premium ends up giving you an extra lift. So from someone that's trying to advance Bitcoin, I look at it as, okay, is it the best thing for investors? Well, it's probably not as good as a pure physical Bitcoin ETF. You know, I'll give that. But is it good for Bitcoin? Absolutely. You know, we have permanent capital vehicle that has emerged. So I'm happy that it exists. And do you think that its success and size is signaling that, you know, we always sort of hear like, is institutional money here? Are they coming? Do you think that that's a sign that clearly institutional money is here and interested? Or do you think it's a bunch of retail that's buying GBTC?

I think it's, you know, look, I think it's a bunch, I still think it's a bunch of retail. And, you know, there are some institutions that are certainly expressing a view. You know, for the U.S., it's definitely one of the best ways to do so. But, you know, we also have the CME cash, cash settled futures that are where a lot of these institutions are playing. But I still think it's, you know, it's mostly if you look at what's happening in session, the secondary market of these grayscale shares, it's mostly retail. And you look at, for example, Charles Schwab, their top five millennium, millennial holdings. Oh, yeah.'s like tesla and yeah yeah tesla yeah yeah exactly and so you know i that is um that's good i mean i'm not i'm different than

maybe some other people that you might have on the on the show here where i i'm i don't really think that we even need institutions and you, you know, it's Bitcoin's grassroots movement. And, you know, the structures that help institutions get in, like the coin shares and the Grayscale and the CME products are great. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, we don't need them. There's enough. Bitcoin is a savings vehicle. And, you know, the grassroots movement is enough for us to to to exist on and to keep thriving. So you say Bitcoin is a savings vehicle, which means you view it as a store of value. Right. And that maybe that's incorrect.

Well, you know, here's it's it's a it's a tricky it's a tricky Bitcoin. People like myself get slammed over, you know, putting boxes on on Bitcoin. In fact, of course, you know, you know this as well as anyone. I mean, you know, some people, I can say the word store of value, and then an economist over here in left field will say, well, technically, you know, on a annualized volatility basis, Bitcoin, you know, da da da da is not a store of value. But, you know, I look at what the community is, you know, if you look at the core nucleus of Bitcoin holdings and Bitcoin days destroyed and how it's being used, there's no question it's being used as a savings mechanism. You know, there's a such a, it's a larger and larger percent of our community that

I don't even look at this as speculation. It's like, okay, this is my savings. You know, you can call it whatever you want. You know, it on an inflation adjusted basis, it keeps going like this. Keep arguing whether it's, it keeps going like this. Keep arguing whether it's a store of value or not. I don't really care. It's a scarce asset. Yeah, yeah. So that brings us, obviously, to you pivoting from CoinShares to Kingdom Trust.

It's funny. When we first talked about working together on the podcast, we had this like a conversation, you know, where we got on the phone and we wanted to make sure that our sort of visions were aligned and stuff. And you're just like, I mean, you blew my mind. You were just like pounding it. What's wrong with the system and the way that we invest for retirement and all those things. So clearly you have a passion for it. I'll let you do that here now, but like why Kingdom Trust, how did that happen? And then I guess tell everyone exactly what it is. Yeah, sure. I mean, at the end of the day, what's amazing to me, and this really came, this was like grounded in that story I told you about back when I was at Duke, when, you know, I'm learning about economics, I'm learning about this whole concept of,

you know, a Keynesian root. So right, if you study for those that don't know economics, you have this kind of two primary schools of thought, Austrian and Keynesian roots. So, right, if you study, for those that don't know economics, you have this kind of two primary schools of thought, Austrian and Keynesian economics. And a lot of, you know, the post-1970, you know, removal of the gold standard has been built around this kind of Keynesian philosophy. And, you know, with that, you have these kind of legacy financial players that, you know, really are anti anything that isn't bought into that system because anyone that opts out of that makes the Keynesian model more fragile. So what's interesting about it is that I'm looking at, all right, I've heard for the last eight years, Bitcoin's been around for 10 years, and I've listened to the legacy financial system tell me that it's dangerous. It's not OK.

You know, it's it's this speculative vehicle. And then at the same time, saying that the only thing that you are allowed to participate in our products are this legacy system. And, you know, what's interesting to me is that, you know, we have we have now crossed that chasm where it's not a debate whether Bitcoin should or shouldn't be here anymore. It is here. And there's 7.1 million Americans that already own Bitcoin. They have Bitcoin today through Coinbase, through Kraken, whatever it is.

They own Bitcoin. They also have a retirement account. But they are not allowed to own Bitcoin in a retirement account because some bank out there, whether it's Schwab or whoever else, some wall street bank is telling them that it's not okay for their savings, uh, to be in Bitcoin. And I got sick of that. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm tired of listening to that while at the same time, they keep you in this kind of fed rat trap of stocks, quantitative easing, rotational program that you're supposed to just obey. And I was sick of it. So, you know, as I was transitioning to come back to the U.S. from

coin shares, I looked around and I said, okay, where can I make the biggest impact? How can I advance Bitcoin the most into the U.S. retirement market? Because it's a $28 trillion plus market in the U.S. retirement market. And I studied all like $28 trillion plus market in the U S retirement market. And I studied all the players. And if you, what's interesting, uh, what I found is that kingdom trust is this, you know, we're here in Murray, Kentucky, and then South Dakota, and it's this middle America, you know, 80 person company that was the first qualified custodian of Bitcoin ever. So it's like the most OG Bitcoin custodian out there. And, you know, I saw this platform like, oh my gosh, we have 150,000 retirement accounts and only 2,800 of them own Bitcoin.

What an amazing opportunity to go in there and explain to people that this isn't some magic internet monopoly. This is like an actual ideological savings mechanism for retirement. And I was like, this is the platform that I can do it from. So for me, it was, it was, it was between starting another company from scratch, like coin shares, or you're taking up like what's best for Bitcoin. It's taking this platform and, and, and advancing Bitcoin from that with a, with a 10 year track record and good standing with regulators already. And I think what's also most appealing is we, you said 13, we're actually at close to 16 billion now. We've exploded in the last three months. And I'm sure, of course, you know, it's, it's, I love, we also have several hundred million dollars in physical gold. We have several hundred million dollars in silver. We have a multi-billion dollar

land portfolio. So, you know, I'm just as interested over the next, my goal right now is to advance Bitcoin, obviously, but I, you know, Bitcoiners should also have other, Bitcoin should not be your only position, right? It should not be the only portfolio. And, you know, there's a lot of merit to gold. I mean, gold gets hated on so much by Bitcoiners, but you know, you should have some diversification. And what I love about this is that we custody 20,000 different assets, 20,000. So it's not just Bitcoin. We custody all of these and the ability to go back and forth from your phone or from your desktop to trade these and own these, I think is really important. And it's about, you know, for our journey in Bitcoin, it's not about like, okay, let's be the biggest. It's about integrating with everything else, with Bitcoin as a basis, and also having other assets eventually priced in Bitcoin, but ultimately back in Bitcoin as a savings. And I think that mentality,

I'm not, that's not an original thought of mine. It's people that have been on your show before, Pomp, et cetera. You know, there's a big growing number of Americans that believe that. And I'm going to cater to them, right? I'm not going, and you don't have to obey the old crusty financial systems anymore that are telling you that it's, you know,

the speculative thing is, oh, retirement, good grief. You know, and that's, we're knocking that down. And it's in doing what's in the best interest of Bitcoiners, quite frankly. And that goes beyond just Bitcoin. It goes to land, physical gold, these other kind of assets that eventually should be in a part of your financial picture. Right. So for people who don't know, it's a self-directed IRA, which basically means that you actually can custody these other assets and invest in other things with the tax benefits and deferment that you get from another IRA. So what does that mean for someone who works at a company and has a 401k and doesn't have an IRA or can't have an IRA? What does it mean for someone who has an old Roth IRA that they've been sitting

in forever and just dollar cost averaging into some mutual Vanguard mutual fund or whatever everyone does? Maybe people here don't quite understand what an IRA is or what the implications of our investment account and then why a self-directed IRA is different. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, to take that and almost take a step back from it, the retirement market is basically, you've got two major kind of structures in how people set up their retirement accounts. You have an employer-sponsored plan, which is called a 401k. And that will be, you go to work, you maybe contribute a little bit of your paycheck to it your employer does some matching maybe and that is this 401k structure um the second structure

that's known is called an ira an individual retirement account and anyone in america can have an ira whether you have a job or not you can just open one up uh and what happens actually is when you if you ever leave a company what actually ends up happening is your 401k, let's say you have a job and you go to the next one, that 401k actually rolls into an IRA. And it's sad because most of my peers, we do all this work like stacking sats and signing up for like Fold and Lolly and doing all this stuff to make sure we accumulate as much coin as possible. But no one in our industry is really talking about tax advantage savings of Bitcoin and tax advantage accumulating. So effectively what a retirement account enables you to do is buy, hold, and trade on an either tax-free or tax-deferred basis until you're old, fat, and gray. So basically you can accumulate and trade your coin in

one of these retirement wrappers, whether it's a 401k or an IRA, we offer both. Um, and you can buy anything that any stock, any, any type of legacy asset and, um, all of the crypto assets that we offer 40 plus, um, on in the same account from one account. And the idea is that we're unlocking that. So if you have some legacy old thing with, you know, four zombie mutual funds, that's, you don't know what they're doing, but you're also stacking sats. Yeah. And so, so the idea is that the self-directed gives you the power of saying, you know what, uh, I'm on a self-directed basis. I want to put some of my money in coin,

some money in Tesla and, and some other stuff that I, that I want. And you can also roll over. So what you can do is you can roll over that zombie IRA or 401k into a kingdom choice account, and you can direct it however you want, whether you want to put it in crypto, keep it in Tesla or whatever else you own, or those, those zombie mutual funds that, that you may or may not like. So we hold it all. But the idea is unlocking the concept of choice, which is back to our brand. So Kingdom launched Choice by Kingdom Trust, which is choice is the actual platform that is the product that enables you to buy all these assets from one account.

So, and that's what we, that's the real big breakthrough here is that, you know, before you could only do legacy, you have to obey the old crusty, you know, financial guys and gals, or you have to go completely crypto land and can't have anything in any of the other markets. You know, we, the idea with choice is that've got access to both and you're in control. And that's what we're aiming to unlock. Isn't there like, isn't this indicative of sort of a bigger problem in that? I mean, I always talk about kind of how absurd accreditation is. And in this country, basically, Big Brother tells you how you can and can't invest your money.

And so this is like one even small aspect of maybe a larger systematic issue, which kind of, you know, doesn't, it's theoretically designed to protect people, but actually eliminates all of their options and somewhat makes it so that only the wealthiest people have the opportunity to really grow? I mean, do you think that this is, is that true? I mean, there's no doubt that that's true. I mean, you've got these rules that are put in place that may have good intentions at origin. But then the way that capitalism and financial markets work out is that you end up building these walls and fortresses of financial instruments and assets that only the rich can get access to and the poor don't have the ability to. And when I was looking at this opportunity to get a bit into the details here, this is why the power of this self-directed retirement account market is because it enables you to break free of a lot of those restrictions. And there's not a lot of Americans that own these

self-directed accounts yet. I mean, they're an IRS regulated vehicle and, you know, they allow you the ability to do some really flexible stuff. You know, for example, you can own your own keys in a retirement account through these structures. And, you know, and that's, you know, it's a major breakthrough. And the reason you're allowed to is because the IRS put in place rules that allowed you to own your own gold, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And we are simply just taking those rules and adjusting them for a digital era where you have double key cryptography instead of kind of like analog physical asset that either I hold or I don't really, it's not really mine.

In our world, it's Mike, not your keys, not your coin. We're taking the framework of these self-directed accounts and it's a massive platform. Well, out of the entire retirement market, the self-directed market is only $1 trillion out of the $28 trillion. And that's mainly because you've got these kind of... The UI and UX and features of them are these kind of stale... It's crazy. Yeah. Websites from the 1980s. I mean, not that there were... But that's what it looks like. They were websites that were built in the late 80s or early 90s. I've seen it. It's yeah.

Yeah. And they're there. And then the, you know, they kind of feel gross. Like the marketing of them are all like, you know, kind of this same kind of banner ad marketing things as well as not only the, the tech is bad. And, you know, I'm looking at this and like, Oh my gosh, like this is a, this is like probably what Bear Stearns thought of the, the junk bond and high-yield bond market before they turned into something sexy. It's the same kind of concept.

I'm like, wait a second. You can own digital assets, legacy assets, own your own keys from one of these structures. And really, the only thing wrong is that people don't know about it. And the UI, UX, these things are awful. So I think it's a big moment, not just for Bitcoin, but for alternative assets in general, because Bitcoin is a part of the alternative asset movement that's going on right now. Investors are trying to diversify outside of stocks and outside of this kind of the Fed rat trap that exists. Don't be a part of the 7.1

million Bitcoiners in the United States who have Bitcoin and a retirement account, but don't have Bitcoin in their retirement account. Seriously, you can hold Bitcoin in your retirement account and not just GBTC. How can you do this? Through a self-directed choice IRA by Kingdom Trust. The first thousand,000 users to open a Choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free Bitcoin. Visit retirewithchoice.com slash wolf. That's R-E-T-I-R-E-W-I-T-H-C-H-O-I-C-E dot C-O-M slash W-O-L-F. Podcast listeners receive extra points to move up the waitlist and get their Choice IRA first. Do it right now. It's time to take control of your financial future and free yourself from the restrictions of classic retirement accounts.

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or search for Voyager on the iTunes or Google Play Store and get $25 in free Bitcoin when you use the promo code SCOTT25. That's investvoyager.com, promo code SCOTT25 for $25 in free Bitcoin and start trading today. Do you think that a part of the reason that they're not as popular is because people fear taking full responsibility for their financial decisions? I mean, I think that as bad as they are, probably people have just heard, hey, 401k is what you're supposed to do. A Roth IRA is what you're supposed to do. I'm supposed to just buy these things. Nobody knows how a mutual fund works any better than they know how Bitcoin works, right? I mean, it's a funny criticism of Bitcoin when you ask anyone how the things that they buy

in their IRAs are constructed and they also have no idea. But I think that maybe they just have this idea that they can trust these large institutions, or it's too difficult to do it themselves. I mean, well, yeah, I think I mean, that's look, part of it is the lack of knowledge about the structures themselves and the UI stuff we just talked about. The other part is if you actually look at where US wealth is exists. So there's $28 trillion in retirement money. but in all money, in terms of investable assets, the registered investment advisor community, the RIAs. So these are people that advise your, you know, the, the, the different, you know, different families on their wealth.

They have a hundred trillion dollars that are of investable assets that are under advisory. And they certainly have a responsibility and are gatekeepers to a lot of that. And you're seeing a lot of money that is moving away from that. And also, you're seeing a lot of good work being done with registered investment advisors around digital assets as well. And I think just as much as promoting these structures of giving people more power and choice, there's a lot of work that's good work that's being done. You know, Bitwise is probably in the US, Bitwise and CoinShares and some of the others, Grayscale too, are doing probably some of the most work on educating RIAs. Galaxy and Fidelity digital assets are too.

Fidelity is amazing. I mean, they're amazing. And, you know, I think that, I think just as much as those like gross websites that we talked about in bad UI UX, you also have a gatekeeper structure that exists and it's not a bad thing. I think investment advisors are, are, have a good purpose, right? Because most people just don't care. They want to go, you know, do their normal jobs, be with their families. They want to talk to their money guy and hear that it's okay. Um the same way that a lot of people that use internet couldn't tell you how email works, for example. So, you know, I think that just as important as like highlighting these structures and advancing them for Bitcoin, also the work of

educating these investment advisors is massive. And I, you know, you look at specifically galaxy did a big deal with an advisor education firm earlier this year. You know, I know that the bit wise team is spending millions of dollars a year on education, fidelity, digital assets. It's happening.

And it is. And what we like this year, probably, I think what's the biggest game changer for all of these advisors is a lot of them look at these macro managers like Paul Tudor Jones. And his investment thesis on Bitcoin changed, I think, a lot of tone for these advisors. And you're just now starting to see that really manifest itself where advisors are now looking at different options to be able to park this. And that's, we are sitting in a very good position for that because advisors have to park their clients' advisory assets, whether it's

an IRA or not, like a brokerage account, they have to park them at a custodian per regulation. So we have a network of 700 advisors that use our kingdom. And, you know, our phones are ringing off the hook right now. It's not because of anything that we've done. It's. And, you know, our phones are ringing off the hook right now. It's not because of anything that we've done. It's because of, you know, the general education of these advisors is increasing right now. So we're one of only a few custodians in the country right now that allow them to hold these client assets in a regulated way. And so that's, it's building. It's been very exciting. And with these guys, I mean, you would imagine that an RIA would understand risk, right? And trying to manage it and almost everything that you're allowed, almost everything they look at and certainly everything that you're allowed to put in an IRA or a retirement fund has systematic risk, right? I mean, they all dump together, they rise together, whatever. And so like, this should be like the holy grail for them to have Bitcoin and crypto. I mean,

it's idiosyncratic, like it's generally uncorrelated over time. So do you think that they understand that? Are they starting to? I mean, this educational process, it sounds like it's just a matter of time and it's somewhat inevitable. But like, even if they get outside of the box of like viewing Bitcoin as a scam or this or that, the very fact that they can invest in something that will move separately, even if it goes down, at least it moves separately. Right. Isn't that, I mean, isn't that really like finding a unicorn? Yeah. I, you know, I mean, look, I'm, I'm obviously biased and I think that, um, it's, you know, Bitcoin is the, one of the greatest assets that we've ever seen. I'm actually learning, like I've talked to these advisors a lot because it's a good way of keeping pulse on it.

As much as I'd like to say that it's the advisor's mentality change, it's actually, it's coming from their clients. It is coming from... The bulk of the calls that we're getting are, look, my client's been asking about Bitcoin since the last bubble. They all refer to the last bubble, which is fine. And now I get it, is what they're saying. So we're ready to do this. What's the best way of doing it? And this time around, it isn't just like, hey, send your money to Coinbase. It's like, okay, we have Fidelity Digital Assets as an option. You got CME futures, you got all of these different structures. So the level of counterparty risk is improving, while the general interest is also increasing. And that is what I'm most bullish about is that you've got different optionalities where you have improved counterparty risk for these people to get into with quality names that is really sparking.

So, yes, the advisors are improving in their knowledge, but I think inherently the advisor community should be a little bit lagging of of new trends i mean right of course the example that a lot of them interestingly enough i told me on the phones is that they said yeah you know what ryan like my client wants this they also everyone also talked about crowdfunding uh back four you know eight six seven years ago and you know that was like cool for a bit and then it wasn't the difference here is that this you know everyone kind of of links Bitcoin digital assets to that crowdfunding crave. These advisors in 2017. Well, then all of a sudden it went away. Right.

Like, right. Yeah. But guess what? We're back. And not only did we not go away, we've improved our our total infrastructure, counterparty risk and everything else. We never went anywhere. You know, we've improved, we went to work. This is the cycle of how our markets work in these kind of boom busts. And now that they're coming back, they're realizing, wait a second, this isn't just

some fad. This is like, this is happening. And now I think that's really important. And I'm excited to hear that. Like there are a lot of more delineating and differentiating between these, the crowdfunding kind of hot air. Not that there's not great opportunities there, but... In 2017, it wasn't a lot of hot air to be fair. So yeah. True, true.

Yeah. So it sounds like their hand is being forced, basically. Your client calls and says, I'm interested in Bitcoin. You better figure it out. Right. That's right. Your client calls and says, I'm interested in Bitcoin. You better figure it out. Right. That's right. And before it was like, OK, this is scary. Now it's like, wait a second.

I've got seven to eight options. This is great. And there's household names that are involved. And it's a totally different ballgame. And most specifically, this OCC announcement that came out of nowhere that allowed national banks to be able to hold Bitcoin, I don't think really this is priced in. To me, it's the most legitimizing news that I've seen in the eight years that I've been in Bitcoin. It's massive. And we can talk about that here in a bit. Yeah, because I mean, it overcomes the major security fears. And it just, I mean, it's incredibly, we'll talk about that in a second, like you said, because I'm actually really curious. So a self-directed IRA, you can effectively invest in anything, right?

Yes. What are the craziest things that you're seeing people hold in their IRAs? So I've been CEO for about four months now. And when I got on board, I'm like, wait a second, we have 20,000 assets? Okay, what's in this thing? So you look under the hood. We have fire trucks. I've just recently bought physical cattle.

So my Bitcoin carnivory is now like peak toxicity. You know, so now I have Bitcoin and I have physical cattle in a retirement account. I just bought a cow, but it's not in a retirement account because we're going to eat it. Well, I don't know. I bought this a little bit to see what it's like. But we got, you know, it's pretty interesting. You know, there's also, you know, fire trucks is probably the most bizarre thing that i've seen so random yeah so right so but what okay the cow dies what happens uh well the it's actually you

own physical you own you own the physical there's more than one cow you have like a physical exposure to these cow etf directly yeah directly directly directly at some of these farms. And where does the cow, so the cow lives on some farm somewhere and there's a collection of cattle and you can invest in that. That's right. You have like fishing rights. Yeah, fishing rights. Although I, you know, I was more shocked. There's fishing, there's fishing, like actual amount of fish that you can pull out of different regions by fish, by type.

But that goes back to this structure where, back to that RIA discussion, is that you'll have investors that will have an asset that they push their advisors to own. And that's really been kind of a reactive basis of these self-directed accounts. I'm flipping it on its head and I'm not going to be reactive anymore. I'm going to say, hey, Bitcoiners, that's all we need to live in right now. You can do this now here in this structure. This is how you do it. You can have Bitcoin, you can have any stock, you can have bond, you can have any of these weird things we're talking about. But the nature of it has been reactionary for the last 10 years. Now, without getting an ETF on the market and all this other stuff, the self-directed vehicle

is actually can do everything we want. And, you know, if you look at the 7.1 million of us that own Bitcoin already and have some zombie retirement account, it's, you know, that gives us the conduit vehicle to do both. Huge base. Huge. Yeah, it's massive. And, you know, now it's just about saying, look, here it is. This is the structure. This is how you do it. And for our, you know, the middle of our community or the center of it, the biggest hang up in all this stuff is that, well, you have a lot of people like the, like the Jameson Lops or whoever that, you know, if you don't own your own keys, they're not doing it. And now with this structure, you can, and that is a big deal, you know, and I think that it was, we were able to do that

because of the work that was done by the gold community 10, 15 years ago. And now we're reaching the rewards from that. Thank you, Peter Schiff and friends. Yeah, exactly. So, and one thing that you touched on really like briefly earlier that I want to like clarify and talk about how important it is, too, because most people don't even think about this. And most people have IRAs. I have always actively traded in my IRA for the tax benefit. Right. And the longer, obviously, that like, you know, used to be fifty five five thousand fifty five hundred six thousand a year you put in there. And so eventually you acquire this pretty large stack that you can trade with and you can do that completely tax-free. So it eliminates all the short-term capital gains concerns. So for like a day trader, right, having a normal equity

account and paying 35, 40% gains on a swing trade that was less than a year, that's completely eliminated inside an IRA. So flip back to trading Bitcoin with the insane tax structure that we have. Yeah. It's just so important. You can trade Bitcoin completely tax-free, a hundred transactions a day in one of these IRAs, right? Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, and it's the whole point. And I'm just like, I'm looking at this, I'm like, wait a second here. I mean, we all remember what happened and how many people lost their shirt when end

of Q4 2017 to April 15th of 2018, cap gains get locked in. All of a sudden, you keep deploying your strategy. You have this huge tax bill, but your positions have all deteriorated and you know in in a retirement account in one of these tax advantage wrappers that doesn't exist until you're 59 and a half and ready to take withdrawal so the the accumulating has the advantages but the trading is unbelievable because you you know it's a either tax-free or tax-deferred, depending on whether it's a Roth or not a Roth money. And so I think, again, it's fascinating to me how little is discussed in our community because we spend all this time studying charts, technicals, looking for patterns, stacking sats,

finding different coins that are the next thing. But we aren't thinking about how do you optimize tax for it? And it's, you know, having a piece of this in your retirement account, it accumulates over time. And then all of a sudden, you know, think about where that becomes in the next 10 years. If you eliminate short-term taxes, you go five years of trading without short-term cap gains. What does your portfolio look like at the end of that? It's insane. And that is like the great awakening. People kind of knock on me for talking about the retirement market being the largest addressable market for crypto right now.

And I'm looking at the amount of traders that exist that don't know about this. And I'm like, I still stand by it. It's amazing because- Nobody talks about it. Yeah. And what's interesting about it too, let's not forget this. For my people that really study the stock to flow analysis, when you cover a trading position, right, and you're effectively dumping coin, whether it's a crypto, into dollars, effectively, to pay taxes. In this situation, you can keep it in crypto. And that in itself is really positive for industry, too. So I'm not saying that you're not going to trade in and out, but that money is not exiting the system. It's staying in the system.

And, you know, that's you look at what we're all trying to do here, advancing our industry over the next 10, 15 years. And you look at this $28 trillion and you do the math on 7.1 million Americans that own crypto. I'm not trying to sell Bitcoin to anyone. People that already own Bitcoin, I'm trying to say, hey, think about this from a tax standpoint. Look at what you can do. And I still think it's the biggest adjustable market on planet Earth for our industry. And the taxes, it's so funny because in like 2016, 2017, when you got into Bitcoin, like one of the huge selling points, everyone was like, it's the wild west. I don't even have to pay taxes. Like nobody knows what's happening but then they addressed it yeah it actually became like

absurdly complicated and disadvantageous to traders right because especially if you're trading altcoins you you buy an altcoin that means you sold your bitcoin you go back you basically get taxed three or four times on what should just be a simple trade before you've even taken a dollar out. I mean, if you buy coffee, it's a taxable transaction because you're selling your Bitcoin to buy coffee with Bitcoin. So, yeah, like, you know, and you're exactly right. And as you go, you know, the money, you know, going from altcoin to Bitcoin and, you know, that is itself as a taxable event based off that code. And, you know, having it in this qualified wrapper, you wrapper enables, as long as you don't take it out.

So if you take it out before you're 59 and a half, then you're taxed. Only the profits. Right. See your own. Again, this is not tax advice. You can take your principal out and not be penalized, which is another thing that people. Yeah. You can take your principal out and not be penalized, which is another thing that people, yeah. So, you know, I think the, you know, as over the next few years, like this is a big, it will be a big part of our community's like awakening of, okay, you know, we're in this,

we're expanding our interests, we're expanding our portfolios, we're growing, we're accumulating more wealth, you know, and now we're starting to think about taxation of this and how do we optimize the wealth that we've built by hodling, by trading. And, you know, you'll see this become more and more popular. And I think, you know, this is why eventually you're going to see the exchanges offer retirement products. You're going to see, obviously, where, you know, Fidelity Digital Assets has started as an institutional product. Who knows what will happen there? And I think that the more we can get the words crypto, Bitcoin, and retirement tax advantage structures, the better it's going to be for our whole industry. You have a deal with, I mean, you have a partnership with Fidelity, right?

Yes. And what does that look like? Can you talk about that? So we announced this, I think it was about two weeks ago, three weeks ago. And I, so again, keep in mind, like my mission is to advance Bitcoin. I wake up every day and I think about what is best for Bitcoin and how can we win? And how do we defeat this Keynesian experiments of debt-based money and a debt-based economy. And I looked at, you know, right now, as you just heard, I genuinely believe that the retirement market is the area that I can make the most impact for Bitcoin right now. And if you look at what is in the best interest for Bitcoin and Bitcoin in the retirement account market, we had a very unique opportunity to leverage Fidelity's digital asset teams and their infrastructure

that they built and leverage that as a custodian and provide that institutional grade service into our retail retirement accounts. So what we actually did with Fidelity, we're the only ones in the country that you can do this with. So if you have a Fidelity retirement account, you can't own Bitcoin in that yet, or maybe ever, we don't know. But what we've done is we've actually leveraged Fidelity as a sub-custodian for our Bitcoin so that you can actually own Bitcoin in your retirement account with us that's held with Fidelity Digital Assets. And that, you know, and really, again, as we're advancing Bitcoin, you look at their team, their institutional, you know, capacity and capabilities that they built. Obviously, there's a brand component to that as we're trying to advance Bitcoin and grow. And the

combination of those three things we felt was one of the best things that we can do to advance Bitcoin in the U.S. retirement market. And ultimately, you know, we're thrilled and we've seen, you know, we are now since we've announced that we've gone. We went from a few thousand people on our wait list to we're now well over 20,000. We need the names you trust. Right. I mean, people, your average Joe wants to see a name like Fidelity because it's instant credibility, right? Which leads to, I mean, we'll talk about the banks again, which we talked to before, but like it just came out that like Cash App did like 7x quarterly over the previous quarter on Bitcoin sales. And that when you kind of dig into their numbers, they literally advanced 0% on anything

else. Like their whole business is basically Bitcoin now, Square, Cash App. And then that has forced the hand of PayPal and Venmo. And we're seeing that that's 320 million more people. To me, you talk about the bank being the most bullish event. To me, very close second, if not first, is PayPal and Venmo. That's 320 million people who will be able to buy Bitcoin on a platform that they trust, right? So it gives them credibility. They don't think it's a scam. They're not going to worry about the security. And fidelity is very simple. So add to that now what you were talking about with the OCC and custody. Can you talk about why that's so important? Yeah. So here's something that I don't know if there's be a large percent of Bitcoiners and

people that are of your viewers that are probably may or may not agree with this. But here's how I see the industry bifurcating. I think that you're going to see over the next five years, two things happen. I think that you are going to either own your own keys or you are going to be paid on the risk of not owning your own keys. Now, if you look at what's happened and where do we get that model from? Well, let's look at history. You have cash, right? You either have the dollars under your mattress or your bank supposedly is supposed to be giving you an interest rate to be holding that cash for you. Now, what are they doing? They're lending that out to other regulated financial institutions. And then there's this dollar money market that's emerged over the

last, you know, fiat money market over the last several hundred years. Now, what has happened to our industry is that we've, over the last really four years, we've seen this really interesting capital markets layer emerge in what I call a Bitcoin money market of fully collateralized positions that are earning you interest. And, you know, what's fascinating about this is that, you know, there's a percentage of my Bitcoin that will never leave, you know, air gap, cold storage, multi-sig, between a few different places, the combination of those two. But then I've got a percentage of my coin that I don't want to sell, but I want working for me in motion. Yeah. And you look at the commercial interest

rates. Because Bitcoin and the digital asset interest rates are not manipulated on the short end of the yield curve, like the legacy financial market is because of these nine regional central banks like the Fed, you have these booming interest rates of 10, 15, 20% annualized. So all of a sudden now, what the banks have realized is that, oh my gosh, right now I'm trying to hold no cash because it costs me money to do it because of how much the Federal Reserve is manipulating these interest rates. I can hold Bitcoin and lend that out and get 15% a year and pass through to 3% on my customer. So what's I think going to start occurring here over the next three to five years, now that it's legal at a federal level to own Bitcoin and have that in a capacity where you can lend out,

you're going to see massive names that are like household names that are giving you with big balance sheets, right? Investment grade balance sheets that are giving you 6, 7, 8, 10% yield on your dollars and Bitcoin. And so then all of a sudden for the people that are out there charging you money to own your own Bitcoin, who's going to do that if it's not your keys? So the importance here is that I believe where you'll see the industry go is either you have your own keys, which there is no substitute for that full stop, or your Bitcoins are held with an intermediary that you trust. And, and those intermediaries, now that it's legal at a federal level to, to hold Bitcoin, they can then put those with other big prime brokerage houses and the money

market systems of Bitcoin, like we've seen in the dollar markets for so many years. And you're going to have this massive explosion of yield and interest that emerges on top of these, of these, of these scarce digital money and savings assets like Bitcoin and others. So it becomes DeFi on steroids. I mean, it's... You know, it does, but you'll actually, from my standpoint, I actually think here's how it will go. You will see before the banks go full DeFi, and DeFi is going to happen, like no doubt,

and it's booming right now and it's super exciting. But what you'll see is banks will go to other big regulated banks and they'll do fully collateralized Bitcoin loans to the other big banks. And then they're making their spreads on that of matching these different borrowers and lenders. And these interest rates are huge. They're 10%. So you're going to see first just basic vanilla, fully collateralized Bitcoin and partial collateralized Bitcoin lending. Then as they build the rails to that, these banks, then they're going to dip their toes into the world of DeFi

and the worlds of these other types of yielding assets where they can offer a plethora. And, you know, there's nothing stopping them from jumping into some of the, you know, far crypto corner yield and staking markets today. But I think what you'll see first happen is we'll first start with just basic collateralized lending of your coins. And their interest rates are going to be so big that you're like, wait a second, I can keep it. You can't even get 1% on your money in a bank anymore. When I was a kid, it was like 14% when I opened my first bank account or something. Yeah, and don't forget, don't forget,

banks are going to start lending out dollars into the digital asset space too. So you can keep your dollars at a bank and they're going to take those dollars and lend them out to other places in the digital asset arena. And now your dollars are going to earn more interest. So it won't just be your Bitcoin. This is a big moment for us. So I look at this as this massive infrastructure. I don't even know if banks have a clue of what I'm talking about right now. They're not ready yet. A lot of them don't. But what I'm watching, and I've obviously gotten a few calls now from some banks,

but there's a lot of these. You look at what's going to happen towards the end of the year. There's a lot of these kind of anemic loan growth portfolio banks where you've got some middle market publicly listed bank that's saying, wait a second, you're telling me that I can go acquire some custodian or some tech company and I can basically offer this to customers. You're going to see a lot of enterprise value and shareholder value created by the first couple of banks that move. But all in all, I think that it's having a licensing to do that lending is massive for us. I think it will change the idea and the concept of custody.

It will go from, I'm charging you to hold your coin, to you should own your coins, but if you're not, you should be paid on the risk. And that is where I see the industry heading towards. And this OCC announcement is like rocket fuel for that movement. So where is the risk? What is your risk? I mean, is it greater than them holding your money? Well, the challenge that we've got, again, anything, if you don't, it's not your gold, not your, or if you don't own your gold, it's not your gold. If you don't own your keys, it's not, it's not your coin. With anything above that, now the discussion of risk comes into play. The challenge that we've got in a decentralized monetary-based economy is that we have no FDIC construct that exists in our money market like the dollar does. Because the dollar has the Federal Reserve.

Over here, you've got Treasury. Over here, you've got the regulators. And they're kind of all in this game. In Bitcoin, as we're moving up, you have this natively bearer money that exists digitally. There is no central authority to Bitcoin, as we know and love. But the challenge that that presents as we migrate and evolve into this kind of money market, capital markets layer is what's the appropriate body of managing that risk without an FDIC. And as a reminder to everyone, the FDIC is the entity, like the bank's insurance company, right? If it's a federal program that if the bank goes under X amount of your savings, you can get back through this program.

Because banks can't go under. Yes, and we saw what happened. And so can the FDIC, by the way. So, you know, I think that that part in that conversation, the risk conversation is still to be, you know, we are writing this book, same thing with Bitcoin without lending it out. We're writing, you know, the book is being written. And, you know, there is no substitute for owning your own keys. But what's the bullish news is that the degree of counterparty risk and the quality of counterparties

that we can get now in this market and in the interest rate and capital market layer is exploding. And you look at these, you know, Saskahanna, Virtue, Flow Traders, then the crypto companies, CoinShares, BitGo, Genesis. We've got so many different, you know, amazing counterparties here that are flourishing with huge balance sheets. And there's lots of great companies that are providing exposure to risk. So it's still to be determined though.

I mean, we still have, without an FDIC present, and you know, as an industry, we need to think through what's the best way of moving, transitioning into that world. And it's interesting, I mean, it's the irony and you keep touching on it, but like to a true, true, true maximalist, a bank custodying your Bitcoin is a literal nightmare, right? It's the 180 degree of the, you know, intended purpose. But if we want mainstream adoption, that's the route that's going to have to travel.

Well, I think Max, look, I think, Max, look, I could not be a bigger flag bearer of Bitcoin. And I am completely anti the legacy financial system and will, for the rest of my days, will not do anything when I wake up other than advance Bitcoin. But Bitcoiners need to realize that capital markets exist even with a gold Bitcoin standard-based monetary system. And when you introduce a capitalist system, risk and mitigation of risk and counterparty risk is going to emerge. And you're going to have interest rates, commercial interest rates that are going to be with us, whether we get rid of the dollar or a debt-based system or not. And I think that Bitcoiners need to also expand their minds a little bit.

And, you know, personally, I, like I said, we'll have a portion of my coin that will, I'll never sell. I'll hand down to my grandkids or on my deathbed, but then I'm going to have another portion of my wealth and savings that I'm going to put in motion and earn yield on it or interest on it. And that is not a sign of weakness. That's a sign of capitalism. I want to expand my optionality as a saver and as someone that's looking to build wealth and retire. Do you think that I collect old fiat money. I've got thousands and thousands of different kind of old paper money.

And every single debt-based money system, sovereign-based money system has failed. There hasn't been a single one. Yep, that's true. You know what's interesting, though? What struck me back in 2011, 2012, when I read the white paper is that back when I was at Duke, I looked at like the Peter Schiff's and the Austrian economists, and they spent all of their time complaining about the legacy system and saying it's going to fail. You should own gold because it's going to fail one day. And you know what? I don't spend my time thinking about, is it going to fail? We now have a gladiator in the arena. We have an Austrian digital-based money system that I don't care whether it fails or not, we're going to out-compete.

You know, Austrian economics, the idea of a scarce money system now has the ability to out-compete. So to me, where Austrian economics has been, where Austrian economics has lost over the last 100, 200 years because gold couldn't keep up with a fast-moving civilization and economy, we now have a natively intrinsic digital money system that can literally outcompete that old system. So our grandparents can debate on whether the dollar will fail all day long. We're over here out-competing it. And I don't spend as much time thinking about, you know, will the dollar fail or not as I'm thinking about, holy crap, we're out-competing you. And the better we do, obviously, the more fragile legacy system gets, which is why the old crusty Wall Streeters don't want us to kind of evolve and grow up and be mature. But what I do know is that we are not just sitting here waiting for the

old system to fail as Bitcoiners. We are out competing. And that needs to be our focus rather than, you know, the gold bugs who sit there and complain and yell at the cloud about how the system's going to fail. And I think that, to me, that's the most important distinction to make, is that it isn't just about seeing it fail, it's about literally out-competing. That's how we're going to win, not the other system failing. You got to be fired up. I mean, it doesn't need to fail. That's the bottom line. You know, that used to be the dream was that, you know, it would inflate itself away. There'd be hyperinflation and all of a sudden we'd be left with our Bitcoin in the nuclear wasteland that would be left of the earth if that happened, which is really not an ideal scenario. So for us, it's kind of better if we, as you said, you just win.

We just win. I mean, and that's the thing. It's like and what what I think you'll see happen is, you know, there's, there's this generation here of this 7.1 million that is winning right now. Like the people that are keeping savings in Bitcoin are winning and they have been winning for 10 years. The next 10 years will be the same thing. And then that grassroots movement definitely is going to start maturing into institutions as it started to over the last four years. The next step up from that is sovereigns. And when you start to see sovereigns take a positional view on their balance sheets, you'll start to see those sovereigns win. And it is not about necessarily, you know, abandoning the legacy system. It's about doing what's best for a balance sheet, building wealth.

And I think as we continue to build the UI, the UX layer, this capital markets layer that we spent time talking about is super important too. We're just going to keep out competing. And when you study the economics of it, we have a superior base to this financial system being a scarce asset rather than an inflatable, manipulable base, which is the issue with the Keynesian dollar system. So you look at those two, as long as we can solve the issue of being able to make payments when we're not in the same room, which gold couldn't do, we. We have her ever. We have a gladiator. And, you know, it's not, it's like, it is worth getting an iron pumps and it's, it's worth getting excited about. It's not, um, it's not our Austrian economics and it is going to have its moment over

the next 20 years where it isn't this kind of let's yell at the clouds and wait for the old system to collapse. It is this, you know, we've got something that is really meaningful here. It's amazing. I'm telling you, man, you got me fired up. So I know we're kind of up against it here. So I love, you know, what can we look forward to from Kingdom Trust, from you moving forward? You know, what can we be excited about? Well, I think, you know, I think the biggest thing you're going to see, first of all, you know, we're excited. I'm excited to be back in the U.S. You know, we're excited to launch this choice, the ability to access any asset from one account. You know, for us, it's going after the 7.1 million of us that are doing, that are trading, that are stacking sats.

You know, that's what we're focused on. And, you know And we are going to evolve with this community over the next 30, 40 years, not going anywhere. And we are listening to what people want. People want to own their own keys. They want to put it in motion. And we're listening to what Bitcoiners and crypto and people that are in our industry want, not what you're forced to do with your wealth and savings. And I think we, I don't know where this will go in 10, 15 years. It's, it's, it's what I do know is that we have a basis of something of a new economy that is worth fighting for.

And what we're committed to doing is to growing with our industry, with our savers and the people that are in that 7.1 million and evolving products to meet the needs industry, with our savers and the people that are in that 7.1 million and evolving products to meet the needs of our generation's retirees and wealth builders and savers. So I actually hope we are boring in that capacity where we are in the middle of what our community needs. And I think the evolution of that will be, you know, I want to start staking my assets to earn interest in retirement. I want to lend my Bitcoin out. Those are things, but not lose access to buying Tesla and IBM and these other kinds of things. I think that for us, the integration of the two worlds is important. It is not about destroying the old

world and rebuilding it from scratch. It's about out-competing and making sure that the best of both worlds are available. And I think that is where we're going to live and hope that we can grow with the Bitcoin and the larger crypto community over the next 20, 30 years. I'm a believer. So where can people follow you? And then more importantly, also, where can people sign up and actually be a part of this? Yeah. So retirewithchoice.com is where you can sign up. Follow me at Ryan time and for believing in this podcast and making the choice to support us. It's honestly, man, it's so flattering and thrilling because like this is what I believe in. You know what I mean? And it's nice to have other people that are so passionate about it.

So I'm really glad we finally got to have this conversation. Definitely. You do a lot for our industry and we're honored to support it and we hope to continue to support it. And thank you for all you're doing to professionalize and advance our industry and educate traders and people that are looking at all these types of assets. And I think it's important to have voices like yours and we're proud to be involved with you. Thank you, man. We're going to do this again in a few months and get an update. All right. Sounds you, man. We're going to do this again in a few months and get an update.

All right. Sounds good. Thanks.