Unchained - Financial Advisors Control $5 Trillion in Investor Wealth. Are They Buying Bitcoin? - Ep.222

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Ric Edelman, founder of Edelman Financial Engines, and Matthew Kolesky, president at Arbor Capital, discuss the state of Bitcoin adoption amongst financial advisors, who control $5 trillion in investor wealth. In this episode, they talk about: their background and why they got into crypto (1:25) how most RIAs (registered investment advisors) view digital assets and the hassle of buying crypto on a client’s behalf (8:59) what percentage of financial advisors have already invested in bitcoin and how many more will come into the space by next year (18:20) how RIADAC -- the RIA Digital Assets Council -- is educating financial advisors about crypto (21:59) their favorite methods to explain Bitcoin and other digital assets (25:22) the different ways financial advisors are getting bitcoin/crypto exposure for their clients (35:32) why RIAs use investment vehicles to purchase Bitcoin rather than spot-buying the actual asset (39:58) why GBTC is trading at a deficit to the bitcoin price and their thoughts on a bitcoin ETF (44:40) the percent allocation to crypto they feel comfortable with for their clients (54:26) how they rebalance crypto holdings, whether they use yield-bearing crypto products yet, and projections for 2021 (57:35)   Thank you to our sponsors!  Download the Crypto.com app and get $25 with the code “Laura”: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unchainedcardearnfeb2    Indexed Finance: https://indexed.finance/    Episode links: Ric Edelman Twitter: https://twitter.com/ricedelman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor RIADAC: https://riadac.com/   Matt Kolesky Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkolesky  Arbor Capital: https://www.acminc.com/ + https://digital.arbor.capital/    Helpful Links: Bitwise ETF Trends + Survey of Financial Advisors https://static.bitwiseinvestments.com/Research/Bitwise-2021-Benchmark-Survey-Financial-Advisor-Attitudes-Toward-Cryptoassets.pdf Fidelity’s Bitcoin Investment Thesis https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/bin-public/060_www_fidelity_com/documents/FDAS/bitcoin-alternative-investment.pdf  RIADAC’s 12 Predictions for 2021 https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/01/07/ric-edelman-12-predictions-for-bitcoin-other-cryptos-in-2021/ RIADAC 1% Allocation strategy https://riadac.com/digital-assets-are-now-mainstream/its-still-early-with-tremendous-upside-potential/ Arbor Capital’s “True Digital Asset SMA” https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/arbor-digital-and-blockchange-partner-on-digital-asset-sma-for-registered-investment-advisors-301219459.html  Grayscale BTC Premium Flips Negative https://www.coindesk.com/grayscale-negative-premium-bitcoin Blockchange https://blockchange.ai/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto five years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. Subscribe to Unchained on YouTube, where you can watch the videos of me and my guests. Go to YouTube.com slash C slash Unchained podcast and subscribe today. The crypto.com app lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto all in one place. Earn up to 8.5% interest on your Bitcoin and 14% interest on your stable coins, paid weekly. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. The link is in the description. Indexed finance allows you to buy passively managed indices for crypto and DFI's hottest markets. Passive portfolios at your fingertips.

I-N-D-E-X-E-D-D-D-FINance. Today's topic is personal finance and crypto. Here to discuss are Rick Edelman, founder of Edelman Financial Engines and founder of the RAA Digital Assets Council, and Matt Kaleski, president of Arbor Capital. Welcome, Rick and Matt. Great to be with you, Laura. Thank you, Laura.

Rick, let's start with you. Why don't you tell us about yourself and how you got into crypto? Well, I've been a financial advisor for 36 years now, and I've always been looking forward, like we all do as financial planners. What's coming? Where do our clients need to be planning for the future as opposed to focusing on the past? And so in 2012, with the help of Ray Kurzweil, who's the co-founder of Singularity University, he encouraged me to go to Singularity's executive program, which I did. And that was where I first heard about Bitcoin, along with all the other exponential technologies of AI and robotics, 3D printing, big data, nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics, fintech, ed tech,

all that kind of great stuff that is just revolutionary in their designs and innovations. And when I heard about Bitcoin and the blockchain, I didn't get it, but it really intrigued me. I didn't dismiss it out of hand. I decided to learn more about it. And so I spent 2013 doing that and then began investing in Bitcoin in 2014, largely as an experiment, just to understand the environment, what's involved in opening an account and buying it and wallets and keys and all that kind of good stuff. And the more I spent time with technologists and experts in the field, I began to realize that there's a there, that this technology is revolutionary and has the potential to transform. commerce on a global scale. Not only did I realize that, I realized something else. The vast majority of financial advisors don't understand this. Because when you first look at Bitcoin, it violates

all the stuff we've been taught as financial planners, all the education we have, all the professional designations, all of our years of experience of investment management, Bitcoin violates all those rules. So it's easy to dismiss Bitcoin out of hand as a fad or a fraud. Tulip babies or Tulip bulbs or Beanie Babies. Or tulip babies. Or tulip babies or beanie bulbs. And it's just easy to throw it away is silly. And that's a big mistake.

And so what I realize is that financial advisors need to understand this. Because the crypto community, even though they're doing really cool stuff, they're building really nifty whizbank products and services that are of value to advisors and their clients. The crypto community, Laura, is not very good at explaining this to financial advisors. They don't understand the advisors. community. Many of them didn't even realize that there was an advisory community. They're trying to sell their investment products and other services direct to investors, not even realizing that advisors serve as a gatekeeper. We control $5 trillion in investor dollars. So I created RADAC, the RAA Digital Assets Council, to serve as an educational forum for financial advisors, to teach them about blockchain and digital

assets, to help them understand the space and learn how to talk about it with their clients, Whether they want to say yay or nay, understand what you're talking about, as opposed to just a wave of the hand dismissal. Oh, it's a fraud. It's a, it's a, it's a fat. And so we're launching our certificate in blockchain and digital assets, a 10 module online self-study course for financial advisors so they can learn what they need to know about this new space and understand how to incorporate it into portfolio management for their clients. Yeah, this is an area I'm very interested in. I don't know if all the listeners are aware, but I covered personal finance for, oh, shoot, I think maybe four or five years before I got into crypto.

So, yeah, quite a while. And I agree with you about how the crypto community and the personal finance community are sort of like oil and water. They don't really talk well to each other. And so it's interesting to me to see that you are trying to bring the two together. All right. So, Matt, tell us about you as well and how you got into crypto. I first got into Bitcoin back in 2010.

I was reading about it online and just became very fascinated by it. I'll say it, right? I fell down the rabbit hole early. And to Rick's point, and even your point, there is, but there is no way to bridge the worlds. I started as a financial advisor in 2000 at Charles Schwab. So me back up there. and then left Schwab in 2004 and joined Arbor.

So fast forward to 2010 and was just super excited about this. But like Rick, I wanted to learn about it. I wanted to see what this was about. I was like, well, this is really cool. We can send money and value instantly, right? We've been communicating instantly for years and years. And so I just spent time learning about it. I downloaded some mining software.

I actually was mining Bitcoin on my home computer back when you could do that. And then took a break from it. I did have Mount Gox account. So I experienced that. That was certainly a personal experience that I carry with me to this day as the compliance officer. And then followed Ethereum's launch. And of course, Lightcoin was in there and just was really excited about the asset class.

as it continues to grow and mature. But as I said before, there was no bridge, right? As a financial advisor, I felt really strongly that, hey, I really want to get clients' exposure to this, but there's no way to do it. In hindsight, I probably could have custody it myself on a thumb drive, but if the auditors came in and said, what are you doing? Where's your Bitcoin? So what's on this little thumb drive here? Here's the private keys. What is that?

So that really wasn't a good solution for my firm. And then in 2018, we started to really craft our investment thesis around this. And there's a launch. You know, gray scale came out with their products, obviously in that time frame. And we started to say, well, let's really look and see what this would look like if we got our clients' exposure to this asset class. And we did it through our alternative sleeve, which is where we feel that this fits. We did about two years ago purchase the gray scale product on the open market, not through the private placement. We wanted it.

We wanted all of our clients to have exposure to this. I feel that's kind of a reflection of the culture of Bitcoin or blockchain itself. You know, yeah, there's lots of hedge funds doing this, but we have qualified and accredited investors, but we wanted to bring this to all of our clients. And so that was about two years ago. And then in last in 2020, I started, I talked to Coinbase and Fidelity and everybody looking for a solution where we could own digital assets in a client. in a sub-account for them that we could professionally manage.

And I ran across an article about a tech platform called blockchain that was interfacing with Gemini and was immediately taken by that. So that's exactly what I'm looking for. And so we started onboarding our own clients several months after that. There was definitely a lot of compliance work that needed to get done. And then we successfully began onboarding our clients in Q4 and then pivoted to launch an SMA or another advisory product to other advisors. We quickly realized that like Rick said, a lot of advisors are excited about this. They want to have exposure to it, but they may

not know how to access it. So now we've created some portfolios. I know you're going to talk about that in a bit, but that's kind of been my journey with digital assets. So I was really excited when my professional world and when my personal passions finally came together. Okay. Yeah. And for listeners who don't know, an SMA stands for a separately managed account, which we'll dive into those issues later. But I actually just want to fuller dive into kind of what the problem is. We've kind of talked about it in various ways. You've touched on a number of different things just in the brief time that we've been talking. But let's maybe even just take a step back and just talk about perception. So what would you say is generally the opinion that most

registered investment advisors or any kind of personal finance advisor like a C. FP certified financial planner or whoever, what attitude do they typically have of digital assets? And then on the flip side of that, how easy is it for everyday investors to invest in crypto and have that managed by their financial advisor? Well, I can tackle the first part. Matt can do the second part probably better than May. Advisors, first and foremost, Laura, are concerned about reputation. I don't want to do anything that's going to damage my reputation.

I certainly don't want to do anything that will get me in trouble with the right. regulators. And I don't want to do anything that might harm a client. So we've got the fact that most advisors have been doing this for more than 30 years. The average CFP in this country is 62 years or older and been doing this for more than 20 years, most more than 30 years. So we go back a long way and we've been through it all. You know, everybody remembers the crash of 87. We remember the dot-com bubble. We remember 9-11. We remember 08. We remember the receipts. sessions of the 70s. We remember the recession in the 90s. We've been there, done that. And of course, this past year with the pandemic. And in the midst of all that, we've seen fads come and go.

A lot of us remember portfolio insurance of the 80s. We remember all the promises of hedge funds, and many of them not having delivered on those promises. We've seen annuity products come and go. We've seen non-traded reits. We've seen it all. And throughout it all, If you had just focused on a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds and held it for the long term, rebalancing it along the way, your clients would have done just fine. Use low cost, long-term investment strategy. It'll all work out. Why do the exotic?

Why do the new thing on the block? Why play a game? All that might do is get you in trouble with either your client or the regulators. Why take the risk? You've got a good practice. You've got a lot of happy clients. You've got assets that are constantly rising. Life's good.

You're playing golf a day or two a week. Why mess it up? So what's the incentive for the advisor to turn to this newfangled thing called Bitcoin when it is rife with stories like Mount Gox and Silk Road, where you've got four crashes of very, you know, huge in the news where it rises to $20,000 in 2017 and then crashes to about three or four grand within a year of that. Why would you want to subject yourself and your clients to that kind of nonsense? advisors just dismiss it out of hand and leave it at that.

And what advisors don't realize is that this is an emerging new technology that is going through the growth pains that are very similar to every other new technology. If you look at the history of Apple, of Amazon, of Microsoft, you see that they had the very same experiences with their stock prices in their early years and look where they are today. Because it's a fundamental technology that itself is revolutionary. It's not just a beanie baby, pretty to play with and pretty to look at. And it's not just tulip bulbs, which is the most unsophisticated thing in the world from the middle of the 1600s, please.

We have to compare ourselves as something from the middle ages. So we need to recognize that advisors have a fiduciary obligation to go beyond the headlines, to go beyond the superficial examination, to examine the question, is there a there there? until you conclude that there is no there there, you don't have the right to say to a client, don't deal with it, it's something for your teenagers to play with, it'll get you in trouble, that's ridiculous. You've got to do your job. Even if your conclusion is you don't want it, fine, but give me a better reason than tulip bulbs and beanie babies. And that leads us to the second half of the issue, which Matt will get into, which is once the advisor says, okay, I do want to do this, now you've got challenges and how. Because at the end of the day,

Bitcoin is not a security. You can't buy it like you can buy shares of IBM or your favorite ETF. It becomes cumbersome and difficult and complicated to deal with. How do you overcome it? And many advisors would say to heck with it. It's not worth the trouble because I'm not going to put all that much money into it in the first place. I'm not going to do 25% of my client's assets. I'm not even going to do 10. Many aren't even going to do three. So why bother if it's such a small allocation to go through the hassle of figuring out how to do it, manage it within my practice, explain all this to clients, oh, why bother? I'm just going to buy an ETF and call it a day. And this is why we need simpler, easier solutions to incorporate this into practice management

for advisors because if they can't do it logistically, then their clients are going to be left out in the cold. And that's why solutions that Matt is familiar with and has developed themselves are really answers that advisors are looking for. Matt. Yeah. So a lot of good points. The solution that we've created for other advisors is something that they're already familiar with or a lot of them are already familiar with. And that's the SMA or even a TAMP or a turnkey asset management platforms. Or for advisors that have outsourced various portions of their asset class management, you know, that's large cap or bonds. This fits right in with that. So it's something that advisors are used to experiencing. And so for those folks, It's been a really good conversation that we've had and saying, hey, this is just another SMA or a TAMP that you can access to provide an allocation to digital assets for your clients. There's a lot that we can discuss around compliance because that is, Rick talked a lot about,

you know, what the reputational risks, the compliance risks around it. And those are real. And that was something where we felt, well, hey, let's step out into the space and really do the homework on the compliance side. And, you know, as advisors, we have to custody with our client assets with qualified custodians. And so there's a lot of work that had to get done and is still getting done on what that means for a company like Coinbase or for Gemini, right? The SEC is not necessarily weighed in on that. What they have said is that advisors, it's up to you to do your due diligence in your homework and do deep dives into these companies if they are going to be

custodying your client assets. And so that's ongoing. We are currently working with Gemini as as a custodial solution right now. And the good news is, Laura, it is getting easier and easier as these products and services are coming online. You've got GBTC and ETHI and BITW. You've got these trusts that exist in the marketplace, the trade as securities in the open market, like an ETF trades, daily liquidity. There are premiums or discounts. There are fees. You've got to understand how these products work like any other product, but they are available for anyone to buy. You can also now access ETFs that have been launched in Canada. They're available to U.S. investors. Fidelity makes them available, and other custodians will as well on demand. We have

J.P. Morgan and Goldman, both saying they're going to offer products available to their clients because of demand. So they're getting better and better. And we've got continuing applications at the SEC for more ETFs in the U.S. And we're waiting for the SEC to finally say okay, because this is what advisors are climbering for. This is what ultimately everybody wants because everybody's familiar with ETS. We can incorporate it into the portfolio seamlessly. Clients are familiar with their structure. It's simple, clean, easy, cheap, liquid. And in the meantime, high net worth advisors have a lot of products available through private placements, limited partnerships, hedge funds, venture capital, private equity. So that's great if you're a high net worth accredited investor, but it doesn't really serve the masses,

which is really what we need to include because the whole point of investing these days is democratization. That's what's making Robin Hood famous and acorns. We need to make this available to everybody everywhere. PayPal's doing it already, but is that what the SEC wants, people to be buying it? Bitcoin in a PayPal account? They really think that the consumers being better served by doing it there instead of Merrill Lynch. So we need to figure out how to get us to the next level.

In the meantime, advisors need to know there are solutions available today. You don't need to dismiss this waiting for an ETF because by the time the ETF comes about, what will the price of Bitcoin be? It's already north of 40. Is it north of 50? Is it north of 60? By the time an ETF comes on the market, well, Bitcoin be 100,000, to what degree is your inconvenience factor going to prevent you from

doing what you need to do to serve your client? Yeah, well, so, you know, that's actually what I wanted to ask about. You know, I know you guys were talking about that there are these solutions available, but I was wondering, what percentage of RIAs do you estimate are actually investing in crypto for their clients or, you know, even if that, because I imagine that's quite a small percentage. My guess, my CFP is younger than me. he's a millennial, and he kind of just very sternly gave me this little, like, you know, we don't do risky thing.

I don't remember what the wording was, but I was a little bit like, I don't think you have been paying attention to the space. That was my, you know, take on his response. But, and he's like half the age of the average RIAs. So what percentage you think are actually investing? And then what percentage do you think are at least, like, interested or attempting to understand it? I'd say it's very limited, right?

now. I think there's people that are starting to pay attention and starting to wake up. You know, they're getting asked about it for sure. I've seen several studies on this and Fidelity does it. Fidelity digital assets does a good one. They looked at, I think, European, as well as U.S. advisors and family offices and hedge funds. And I wanted to say it was, it seemed high. It was like 40%. And in my experience with dealing with other advisors, it's nowhere near that. It's, you know, we're trying to like get off zero, right? Let's do something here. you know, just back up, too, it was more, you know, there is, Rick talked about this, you know, PayPal, right? There's this hole of, you've got hedge funds that can do this. Individuals are doing it, right?

Advisors are getting asked by their own clients. I even a couple years ago told one of my clients, go open an account somewhere and do this yourself. I feel that strongly about it. But that's not a good solution because, you know, they may just open it and, you know, kind of move on and forget about it. So in even those that are doing it, to Rick's point, it was like, you know, one, two, three, four percent tops. But yeah, the calls that I've had, it's there's almost zero exposure from what I can tell. And according to the Bitwise survey that was just done recently, Laura, about five percent, I'm sorry, about nine percent of financial advisors say that they are currently allocating digital assets to their client portfolios today. another 20% say that they're planning to do so in 2021. So it is increasing in its adoption. And Matt is, I agree with Matt completely that it's largely because advisors are finding that

their clients are asking for this. And if I don't say yes, then they run the risk of losing assets as clients shift assets to Gemini and Coinbase and Cracken and other platforms where they're going to buy it on their own. And even worse, clients might end up in an environment where they are doing something dangerous that they shouldn't do. You know, not that there's a Mount Cox out there anymore, who knows maybe there is. It is still, to some degree, a Wild West, because there is not as stringent a level of regulation. The fact that you can be in exchange not regulated is itself a little scary, that there are foreign companies that are engaging in the space. So at least if the

financial advisor is involved, we can help ensure that our client is dealing with a qualified custodian, that we're dealing with grownups in the room and help our clients avoid getting scammed or ripped off in the course of their activity to help them implement and manage their enthusiasm. We can also help the client avoid investing too much, more than it is prudent for their own sake. So the advisors need to be involved. There has to be a platform that allows the advisor to be involved, and that way everybody can win. And Rick, you briefly mentioned earlier, ReaDAC, the Registered Investment Advisor Digital Assets Council, can you give us an overview of what it is that ReaDAC does

and how it attempts to address these issues? ReADC is strictly an educational forum. That's what's really lacking. The only place for advisors to learn about this is the same place everybody else learns about this, which is going on to the internet, surfing the web, word of mouth, and hearing from the companies themselves that are manufacturing those products and services,

and that means you're listening to a salesman because they're trying to sell you whatever it is the widget they're making. So there's no unbiased, purely educational resource designed by financial advisors for financial advisors. And that's what Re-Adaq does. So we, with the knowledge that I've got and my colleagues in the organization and the extensive contacts we have in the crypto community, we're able to put together the very best minds in the digital asset and blockchain space and bring them to financial advisors. And so we do a lot of webinars. We have a lot of content at the RIAAC website, RIA-DAC.com.

And we have semi-annual day-long events. We just completed one in March where Hester Purse, the commissioner of the SEC, was our keynote headliner and a lot of top experts. And we've created the certificate program with some of the top faculty from MIT and from the Fed and from leading universities and major. attorneys and accountants in the space to give financial advisors the knowledge and education they need. And advisors know they can come to this space at RiaDAC. They're not getting sold anything. They know that it's coming from me and I have a pretty strong reputation in the advisory community.

So advisors can feel comfortable that the information and content we're giving is legitimate, that it's unbiased, that it's objective, that we're not trying to get them to buy anything. And the support is coming from the digital assets community. They're paying for all this. that the content we're providing is for free. The certification program advisors enroll for. It's $549 for the 10 module course. It's online self-study at your own pace, and it's a very deep dive into this area and allows advisors to say, I'm setting myself apart.

I've taken the time to get this knowledge, this education. I've got the certificate to demonstrate that. So when I talk to you about digital assets and blockchain, I know what I'm talking about. I kind of have like the good housekeeping seal of approval on that. And we're providing the certificate holders with a wealth of information and access that's not available elsewhere, such as the Yellow Pages Directory that we're creating. Of all of the vendors in the digital asset and blockchain space, the companies that are building exchanges and custodians and software companies, being able to serve you in building

client portfolios, tracking this portfolios, tax reporting and record. keeping, everything that you need as a financial advisor to integrate this into your practice management so that it's easy and seamless, because what advisors want is easy. So they can spend their time with their clients and not spend their time fussing with all this back office stuff. So Ria DAC is really fundamentally focused on all that. We've got hundreds of advisors already enrolled in the certification program and it's brand new and it's proving to be really, really popular. And earlier you mentioned how difficult it was to explain digital assets to this community.

You know, we were talking about the tulip bulbs and the beanie babies. And I just wondered, so in your attempt to explain the potential and the opportunity in crypto to RIAs, are there any particular explanations that you found speak to them or tend to give them a light bulb moment? Like, what are your favorite ways of describing this to that community? Matt alluded to one, and I'll steal his thunder a little bit, the internet was originally designed to connect people. Think of Facebook.

The second layer of the internet was the internet of things, and that connected things to each other. Think of Bluetooth. You know, your phone connected to your car or your coffee pot connected to your email. So the first level of internet connected people together so they could communicate. The second level connected things

so they could communicate together. The third level of internet is the blockchain, and that is allowing the connection of money so that we can move money as easily as well. we are moving emails, as easily as we are moving with Bluetooth, we can do that with money. Until the blockchain came along, until Bitcoin came along, for you to transfer money from one country to another, say you have family in the old country, my grandmother used to call it, and she would send money back. She would go to Western Union. It takes five days and costs

8% to send money from one country to another. With Bitcoin, you can do it in 10 minutes, virtually free. This is the instantaneous movement of money and the potential for improvements in global commerce, the amount of money we save, the increased efficiency, the improved security, the greater transparency. This is the greatest invention in commerce since the Internet itself. And Matt, what about you? Are there any favorite explanations you have? Yeah, talking to it, I agree with everything that Rick said. But with advisors, one of the things that I bring up, and this is a word that's come up already, is fiduciary, right?

We have a fiduciary obligation to talk to our clients and put their interests above our own. That's what it means. And when I think about the technology and how it has or it hasn't infiltrated the current financial infrastructure, right, there's so much potential there for all the reasons we've already talked about to make it more efficient, make it more accessible. And another reason I think advisors are struggling is, you know, they've spent their entire careers thinking about a current financial infrastructure in one way. And here comes this thing out of nowhere that is literally at the intersection of technology

and money and finance. And it's like, oh my gosh, what do I do with that? It's just, it's such a powerful thing. But as it is a fiduciary, I have been saying to folk to other advisors, like, look, there's another thing that's coming, right, that's going to be very disruptive to your, you know, the businesses that you may have built, the infrastructure that currently exist. And it's, and what we're managing is our clients money, right? It's their, their labor, their life savings, right? Then we take that to heart. It's like, well, maybe we should put something outside of this traditional infrastructure that I think we'd all agree, starting to show major cracks as technology starts to bump up against this infrastructure that's 40, 50, 60 years old.

And so that's resonated with folks. And I'm just saying, look, let's have an allocation here. Let's get some small footprint outside of this traditional world. And I'm not here to make the past wrong, right? The traditional financial system has done an amazing job of creating wealth and distributing things. But there's something that looks like it could do it even better. So let's have some exposure there. And as a fiduciary, those are things that we're starting to talk with with our clients and with other advisors.

And one last question. Oh, uh-huh. Go ahead. Let me build on that a fiduciary theme because that's really important what Matt is saying. Advisors have traditionally taken the attitude that because I'm a fiduciary, I'm not going to recommend Bitcoin. Even though they don't know anything about it, I'm pretty well known in the advisory community for the fact that I don't like annuities. I'm pretty well known for a bunch of other things too, but that's a big one. I talk often on my radio show about why I'm not a fan of annuity products, etc.

But guess what? I'm an expert in annuities. I can go into great detail for you as to why I don't think it's in your best interest to buy an annuity. And that's my challenge to financial advisors. If you're telling me that you're not recommending Bitcoin to your clients, you need to tell me how you reach that conclusion. using your fiduciary obligation, what is the basis for saying no, don't invest?

Most advisors can't offer that because they haven't studied it. And so that's my challenge to advisors. Learn about this space, become knowledgeable about it, just like you are about other investments that you don't like, to explain why you don't like them. And I'm convinced that once you go through that process, you'll change your mind because you'll discover that this isn't what you thought it was. Use your fiduciary obligation to challenge yourself to do the job that your clients are expecting you to do.

Yeah, I agree. I saw Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports was on Twitter with a little video saying that because he'd sold Bitcoin at a lower price, he realized he was wrong now that it was at this higher price. And I tweeted basically saying, hey, if you think that you were wrong simply because other people bought Bitcoin, then that means, like, you still don't get it. Like, like, it has to be that you understand the value. And no matter how many other people sell or buy or whatever, like, you still have that conviction in it. And so, anyway, I don't have anything against him or anything, but I just

thought, okay, like, now you think that you know that you are wrong in the past. Like, no, you're still, you're still not understanding. But anyway, so in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about explanations, but also move into some of the different types of investment vehicles that are available. But for a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. The ScoreBet app here with trusted stats in real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions.

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Back to my conversation with Rick and Matt. So one last thing I wanted to ask about the explanations question was, are you able to go beyond Bitcoin to explain things like Ethereum or Defi? And if so, what explanations have you found that are effective for these kinds of more exotic crypto assets than just Bitcoin? Yeah, we've had a fair amount of success talking to other advisors about that. We start with Bitcoin, right? That's the first place for advisors to start or even for anybody to start when they're kind of beginning their digital asset journey.

Although I think a lot of people are getting exposure through NFTs now, but that's a different discussion. Defi is, I think, a really decentralized finance. I think is another way if people can wrap their head around Bitcoin. They can see the benefits of defy, right? And more real-time settlement, real-time access to things, decentralization and accessibility for folks. And they can start to see the value that the defy ecosystem can bring, not just as an investment, but also just being, like I mentioned,

being accessible for other people. So that's a really good one. The other one are some use cases around utility tokens. There's browsers. There's virtual private networks that people. can use and participate with, and they all have a token mechanism in there. And so those are things that I think people can, they've already, they're already using these services anyway. And so if you can introduce it to them and it happens to exist on a blockchain

and has a token feature with it, I think that's something that people can get on board with. I host an investment club for some college kids and I'm like, use, you know, use Lolley, use brave just to experiment with it and see what it's like to feel, you know, hey, I'm earning Bitcoin by buying things or I'm earning tokens just by surfing the web, things you're doing already. And it gives them just another way to interact with digital assets. Yeah, that's, that's a great suggestion. So now let's talk about investment vehicles because I think that this is a landscape that is literally changing as we speak in the last few weeks. So, you know, up until recently, I would say it probably was that most RIAs were giving their clients' exposure to

Bitcoin in particular through a traditional investment vehicle, such as GBT. But I did wonder also, you know, were they just buying spot Bitcoin or crypto, or how were you seeing most RAs choosing to give their clients exposure? In our experience at Readek, when we talk to advisors about how they're engaging, we get three answers, and they're all birds of a feather. The first is, even though there are 5,000 coins out there, how do you sort through them, how do you pick among them? We have to remember that Bitcoin is, what, 80, 90 percent of the total market cap of the entire space. So many are simply buying Bitcoin and the most convenient easiest, painless way is GVTC.

And I didn't say cheapest, but it's easiest and most painless and easiest. So many are simply doing that as a way to give their clients exposure. Bitcoin is the best known. Clients have certainly heard of that more than anything else. The second is to recognize that this space is more than just about Bitcoin, and Bitcoin has its limitations, which was why Ethereum was invented. And Ethereum's smart contracts, the next protocol in the evolution of this space makes a lot of sense. And Ethereum today is 5 or 10% of the marketplace.

So between those two coins, you've got like 95% of the entire digital asset space. So some advisors are buying GBTC for Bitcoin, ETH for Ethereum, both of them offered by Grayscale, calling it a day. others are however saying, wait a minute, I'm a fan of diversification. That's what I tell my clients to do all the time. You know, we own thousands of stocks and thousands of bonds and we have lots of asset classes. Why are we buying only Bitcoin and Ethereum? Even though those two are the biggest and the oldest, that doesn't mean that they're going to be the fastest growing. So maybe we should go beyond the top two. And that's where BITW comes in. The Bitwise 10 crypto index fund, which is a cap weighted fund, rebalanced monthly. of the top 10 digital assets by market size. And as you would expect, Bitcoin and Ether are about 70% of that fund. The other eight coins represent the other 30% or so. So you get more diversification, professionally managed, just like any mutual fund or ETF is, where they buy the securities for the coins for you.

They do the rebalancing. They do the reporting. It's no must, no fuss. So you have those three choices. Bitcoin alone, Bitcoin plus Ether, or the top 10 crypto fund from Bitwise. And most advisors are doing some combination of those three in our experience. When you're dealing with higher net worth clients, you have a much broader array of investment opportunities because of most of these products are available for accredited investors only. Huge array of really nifty products from Skybridge Capital and Galaxy and Pantera. and 10T and a wide variety of other vendors as well that are worthy of advisors to look at. But most advisors are dealing with small allocations, small amounts of investments, and GBT, ETH, BITW are very, very popular. Noted disclosure, I'm an investor in Bitwise.

I'm a big fan of what Hunter and Matt are both doing there. And so those three are very popular. Yeah, that's Hunter Horsley, the CEO. and Matt Hogan, who I think is the chief investment officer, and also disclosure bitwise has invested in my shows in the past. And just kind of curiosity, so why are RAs investing in these particular investment vehicles rather than buying spot crypto? Because as we know, the price of GPTC and ETG can vary from the price of the underlying.

So why are they? Yeah, there's no question that the premium discount scenario is an issue with these products, no doubt about it. But there's a tradeoff. They're convenient. They're simple. They're easy. They're familiar to investors because they can buy them in the same brokerage account

that they're buying all their other mutual funds in ETSN. And it allows them to rebalance along with the other securities. It allows them to debit their fee on a quarterly basis along with the rest of the assets. From a practice management perspective, it's very simple, very easy. It is seamless. From a client perspective, it's equally easy and innocuous. So the issue of the discount or premium is a thing. No question about it.

And advisors need to understand this. They need to consider it in their evaluation. And that's why, to Matt's point, an SMA or a TAM product may be a superior move and smarter investors. As you gain more experience, they're beginning to realize, oh, I can do that as an alternative. And that's why the SMAs and Tamps are increasing their popularity at a rapid pace. Thanks to companies like blockchain, which provides that foundation. They're doing a really great job and making this more accessible to advisors on a more broad scale.

And before we get into the SMAs and Tams, I also wanted to ask about this trend where public companies or also private companies are allocating to Bitcoin in their corporate treasuries. Have you seen that RAs now are turning to investing in those public company stocks with exposure to Bitcoin as another way of giving their clients' exposure to Bitcoin? I have not seen it. I can answer that. In fact, I should probably explain Arbor Capital, it manages traditional assets for investors, and then we launched Arbor Digital. In Arbor Capital, we have an investment committee, and we actually own individual

securities for our clients, and we have been actively looking and investing in companies, and a disclaimer here, right? These are things that we're long in, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and everything else we're talking about, but things like PayPal, things like the CME group that are, you know, trading Bitcoin and now Ethereum future. So our whole thesis is as these walls come down, it's going to come down from both sides, right? The bridges are getting built from the traditional world and they're getting built from the digital world.

And so we want to kind of position folks at that intersection. We think there's a lot of potential value to be captured there. I would argue that that's a broader investment play. In other words, if you're going to invest in companies that are buying Bitcoin or making Bitcoin available to their own customers, which is essentially PayPal's play, that is really the defy space. I think that's really the broader echo space of how mainstream publicly traded companies are engaging in this.

That's not the same as saying, I want to own Bitcoin. Buying micro strategy or Tesla, because you want to buy Bitcoin, but you might as well just buy Bitcoin. And those are very, you know, I know Michael Sill has been a guest on your show, and it's, It's been a very interesting journey watching his approach to digital assets, specifically Bitcoin as a treasury asset. And one of the things that I thought was really powerful that he said was if I have cash sitting on a balance sheet and I need to be using that cash in a year or two or three for projects

to hire developers, what's the inflation rate of their wages or these projects? It's not one or two percent. Now, what he's done is, you know, taking a pretty substantial position and issued debt to do that. Tesla is a little bit different. So there's been varying reactions from different corporations. And, of course, Square, I think was interesting because they published the paper and kind of open source their thinking and how to do it for other corporations, which I thought was a really interesting way to approach it. And again, to the culture of what blockchain is and the accessibility, not centralized permission blockchains, but open. source and permissionless blockchains. That's at the heart of what this is about.

So I did want to say that. And since you're talking about the investment side, I did want to say this because I feel really, you know, really passionate about it. It's like, this is not a zero-sum game, right? The old Wall Street traditional firms, right, I win, you lose, you know, we've got to go talk about a hedge fund that's going to be long, something, somebody else is going to be short. The culture of this asset class just feels and looks so much different, right? There's hedge funds that have open source their investment community meetings, and we get to participate with them. And they're literally saying, we're not experts here and nobody is because this is evolving so quickly. And so we just want, and to explain, advisors should just be paying attention and learning

as much as they can about this very, very quickly evolving asset class. You know, have an opinion about it for sure. Yeah. Speaking of quickly evolving, I wanted to ask about how GPTC in recent weeks has actually begun to underperform the underlying, and I wondered how that affected RAA interest in investing in GBT. Well, investor advisors hate premiums. So if it's trading at a discount, hey, what a buying opportunity. If I can buy a dollar for only 85 cents, hey, let's do it. So it is an opportunistic play,

and advisors who are able to be that agile on behalf of their clients are probably excited about it. I think, yeah, the premium discount, especially with GBTC has been quite compelling over the last few weeks, as it's gone from traditionally a premium to now a discount, whether that was a case because of, as Rick mentioned, the Canadian ETF getting launched, you know, with lower fees. Maybe that has something to do with it. That's, I think maybe it's anticipation of the ever coming, you know, Bitcoin ETF in the United States. I don't know. But it just seems that there's more on ramps get built.

It was expected to see some premium compression to go to discount. I think is interesting. And have you seen uptake of the Canadian Bitcoin ETF? I personally have not. We're hearing anecdotally of advisors expressing interest in it because it is available from some U.S. custodians. And I think it's all a prelude to ultimately the SEC saying, okay, everyone's kind of hopeful that the SEC will overcome its concerns and say, yes, in coming months, who knows when, who knows if, but when, I'll use that word, when that happens, these other products are probably going to become obsolete because the ETF will be

so much cheaper and always trading in NAVA, no premiums and discounts. So I think everybody realizes that. I think that's why Grayscale is planning to get into the ETF game as well, because that is the future long term. Just think what happened when there was the first gold ETF. GLD raised $2 billion within a couple of weeks. Imagine what's going to happen when an American ETF comes on with the marketplace. Yeah. Yeah, just to go back to GPTC, I do wonder about people who bought it when it was at a premium and then now saw it go below. And then especially, you're right, I do think that once an ETF comes, I'm not sure how much interest there will be.

But let's talk about that. So when the SEC does finally approve of Bitcoin ETF, which I think we all know probably will happen, especially with Gary Gensler, likely to become the SEC head, what would you expect to happen at that point? And how would you, you know, affect or believe that that would affect RA's perceptions about Bitcoin? I think it'll take away the last level of excuses. And I think the conversation will shift from why did you buy Bitcoin for your client to why didn't you? if it is available so easily and innocuously as an ETF, why don't you have it in the portfolio? If you truly believe in diversification, that doesn't mean you only buy asset classes you like. You buy every asset class.

I'm sure if you are true believer of diversification, you have small cap, midcap, and large cap in your portfolio. You have growth in value. You have U.S. and foreign. You have emerging markets. I'll bet you don't like all of them, but you've got them. I'll bet you've got short term and long term and intermediate term bonds, U.S. and corporate, foreign and domestic. I'll bet you've got high yield and high quality. And I'll bet you don't like all of them, but you believe in diversification.

So what's your excuse for not adding one or two percent into the portfolio of digital assets? I'm not saying you've got to like it. You just acknowledge it's aiding the diversification. So the fact that it's hard and cumbersome and awkward and unfamiliar is a good. good excuse why I'm not going to do it today. But when the ETF is available, what excuse do you have left? Yeah. And so speaking of the hard and cumbersome, we've touched on some of these issues before, but I just wanted to ask more specific questions about these. So earlier when we talked about the separately managed accounts, can you just kind of break down what it is that those enable

advisors to do that they can't do with traditional investment accounts and also maybe fill out a little bit more, what these tamps, the turnkey asset management programs, what those also, what problems those solve for advisors? The first problem that it solves in terms of the first question is we couldn't buy Bitcoin at a Charles Schwab or a Fidelity, even today for RIAs. Fidelity does have a digital assets, but that's more for institutions right now. Maybe it's going to be coming to their retail side. So we wanted to own not just Bitcoin, but Ethereum and have access to other assets. And what's important is it needs to be titled in the client's name, right? It needs to be in their own segregated sub-account. We can't pull assets together as well, we can, but we can get in

trouble and even make sure your regulatory filings are correct. And why is it that you can't just have a Coinbase account for it, that you manage for that client? Or something. Because Coinbase won't allow us to come on there and advise and manage it for them. I literally had that conversation with them last, I think, May and June and was saying, this is what advisors need. And they said, not yet. And it was later, a couple months later, when I ran across, I think what Rick had mentioned, blockchain is this technology partner that is building this.

They are custodial agnostic, but they are building it right now with Gemini. And eventually when the APIs, you know, they'll be able to intersect with other custodians. And so that to me is really important. We want to be able to have, you know, individual client accounts and then they can own the Bitcoin. I know it's on a, it's on a, it's on an exchange or custodian. So we don't need to get in the whole not your keys, not your crypto, but it does. It is titled in their name. So they're literally opening an account at Gemini. And Gemini is allowing us to come on and manage assets just like Schwab does, just like Fidelity does. Only that show up and Fidelity do that for traditional assets.

right, stocks and bonds. In terms of the TAMP, your question was, could you repeat the second question there? Oh, just what problems do those solve for RAs? Well, it solves the problem of accessibility. If you're in Alfayana, if you just want Bitcoin for your client, you know, just Bitcoin, we're probably not the solution. We're looking to add other assets to the portfolio. We want to be diversified, not just by having Bitcoin, but looking at all of the digital assets that are available for folks.

The other problem it solves, is I think I may have touched on before, is it's a solution that advisors are comfortable with and familiar with, this TAMP idea or an SMA. Other firms can hire another firm to manage, say, large cap stocks or, you know, or low duration bonds or whatever it is. And that's traditionally been outsourced by a lot of folks. And this is just the same thing. So we're taking a product that advisors are used to and now just applying it to the digital asset class. So another thing I wanted to ask about was a few years ago, I came upon this Bitcoin IRA and it enables you to hold actual Bitcoin in an IRA. However, I remember the fee, and this was three years ago and I haven't looked into what Bitcoin IRAs look like right now.

But the fee for, you know, being able to put actual Bitcoin into your IRA was 15% of all the Bitcoin you were moving into the account, which, you know, to me was like highway robbery, basically. So I just wondered, is that still the kind of fee that we're seeing or is that changing? That, yeah, that's definitely changed. I don't, wow, that's, that's, that's really high. That harkens back to the days of, you know, upfront load funds type of a thing. And those have, they're still around, but they're going away. No, the fees have come down dramatically. Just to be afraid, Arbor's fee to manage is 1%.

There's an additional blockchain charges a fee. And then Gemini has a, you know, a transaction fee. Those are not at zero, like the traditional world where all the commissions have gone to zero. But to your point with IRAs, we actually do have an IRA custodial. solution and their fee is $300 per year just to do the paperwork and file all the necessary IRA disclosures to the IRS and to the different agencies. And I'll mention Kingdom Trust, another company I'm invested in, they're $20 billion in size and they clear everything through Fidelity, institutional, digital, and they allow you to open

accounts and manage them as IRAs and the fees are radically less than what you described. The fees are still higher than what you're going to find at Vanguard or Fidelity, you know, it's the ETF world because it is still relatively new. There isn't yet all that much competition. But the fact that fees are coming down, we're starting to see a price war in this space. And that will continue. As more and more competition and more products come online, it'll eventually get as low as it is in the ETF world. And let's keep in mind, you know, paying a one or two or three percent fee,

if you're expecting a three or four or five X return, Who cares? So I also now want to talk about something that's, again, come up a little bit here and there throughout the show with the caveat that nothing said on any of my podcasts or videos is investment advice of any sort. And with the understanding that everybody's individual financial situation is different, I did want to ask, what do you generally recommend in terms of portfolio allocations for people of different risk tolerances or time horizons?

or what are you seeing that a lot of investment advisors are recommending? Yeah, we're, it's important. Yeah, disclaimer as well. Yes, I'm a financial advisor, but nothing here is financial advice, but it's very individualized. We sit down with each client and have a conversation about what this is and what this asset class is. And even in our disclosures, this is speculative, right? That's what we want to, the approach we want to have with, with folks and the conversations

we're having. And so from there, we explain the risks. explain how to access it and what's appropriate. And, you know, one to three percent is about where we're comfortable and talking to folks about it. If, you know, I've been on calls or people, like, can we get access to the ICOs? I'm like, no, this is not what we're doing. This is an asset class that we want to have exposure to that as fiduciaries, we feel strongly it's, it should be a part of your portfolio.

But let's be prudent with how we allocate it. Yeah, there are two kinds of people who are interested. in the space, the get rich quickers, and those who are asset allocators. The get rich quick, you know, it's like gold. People, we got a lot of phone calls in our office when gold is rising. That's when people want to buy it. Whenever anything is going up, that's what they want to buy. Because they just want to get rich quick. And they, you know, GameStop. What a wonderful example. And so these people have no idea what they're doing and it's always going to end badly. So we just dismiss them out of hand by saying, you really shouldn't do this until you learn a lot more of what

you're talking about because you're setting yourself up for failure. But those who are recognizing that this is a new asset class, it's a new opportunity for diversification, that there's a potential for reducing the risk of the overall portfolio and improving its returns, maybe there makes sense for a small sleeve. And I'm the guy who created the 1% allocation strategy several years ago. And I've got the data, go to redact.com, and you'll see the one-page chart I've got on this that shows a 1% allocation has the potential for materially improving the return of the portfolio. But if it goes bad, as Matt said, it's speculative. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

If it goes bad, a 1% loss, if it's totally worthless, isn't going to interfere with your future financial security. So the good news is it could help. The bad news is it isn't going to hurt. And a 1% allocation for most folks is plenty. If you want, you really are into the space, you really understand it greatly, and you know the ins and else, yeah, knock yourself out. Go 2%. Whereas Matt says, three, most folks aren't going to bother, and it's not necessary for most folks to do this. As Mark Eusego says, get off zero.

And then how often would you recommend rebalancing, given that in not too long of a time period, somebody's 1% allocation, well, okay, so this would be across probably a few. few years, but could go to, you know, like 50% or something of their portfolio, you know, along the way, would you rebalance like, what, every three months, six months, a year? Or, you know, because are you going to like keep it at the 1% consistently throughout or, you know? Well, what we do is rebalance, my preference is that you rebalance frequently, meaning you look at it on a regular basis to protect itself, yourself, from having an overweighted portfolio. If you wanted a 1% allocation and it doubles, you should probably rebalance back to the 1%.

I wouldn't let it go to 10 or 20 or 30, as much fun as that would be because bad things can happen. We did adjust that when we added GBTC into our alternative asset class two years ago. It was significantly lower than where it is now. And as it continued to rise, we wanted to maintain that 15% weighting in alternatives. And so our average client had, you know, between 10 to 15% and alternatives. And so as GVTC and Bitcoin would just rise, we would be selling it back. And then last year when it falls, it gives us last year in March when it collapsed, that gave us an opportunity to go in and buy it back.

So our idea is to rebalance periodically, you know, at least quarterly, but this is such a volatile asset. It requires constant monitoring and not constant rebalancing, but you need to really be paying attention. And it trades 24-7. obviously. So it provides more opportunity for for management. And so here's the fun part of it, is that whereas a typical advisor would off the cuff say, oh, it's too volatile. I'm afraid of it. They forget that someone who engages in rebalancing, that volatility works to your advantage. And so for someone to say, I don't want to buy it because it's volatile really doesn't understand

what they're saying. But what about taxes? Because I would imagine if you're rebalancing with something that's fairly volatile and that complicates the tax situation. So how do you, you know, try to minimize the tax impact? Yeah, that's a good question. And it has to do with just honestly knowing the client's individual circumstances, this is what comes down to being a financial planner is about and a financial advisor knowing if they've got, you know, other things that they can use to offset gains. We're not just managing Bitcoin. We're managing other equities and other things that can create capital losses or capital gains. And so when we're managing the whole relationship, it makes it a little easier to have that conversation. And of course, at the end of the

day, if you're saying, yeah, well, you made money on this, sometimes it's okay to pay taxes. If you've done really well, like Rick was saying, if it goes up 5 or 10x, which we have that experience, it's not always a bad thing. And one of the newest trends in crypto has been earning yield on these assets. Are RIAs in a position to take advantage of those products? Not yet. That's where there's not a lot of regulatory, regulatory clarity. We are actively working in that space right now. Coinbase and Gemini have, you know, earn and different products around that.

But it creates a very different structure. What I was saying before about having an account in somebody's name with Bitcoin in a theory a minute, if a lot of those products, you're a lot of those earning products, you're taking those out and lending them outside, not necessarily locking them into, a defy protocol, but they're lending it out to other things. Similar to margin, but we're still exploring and working on it. But the answer right now is no, but this gets to the broader point

is it's coming, right? And we want to be at the front of this and learning and working with regulators and working with the custodians to build and make sure we're doing things in the proper way. Yeah, well said. There are some pretty terrific companies like Celsius, which does this. and you can earn five, six, seven, ten percent in yield. But it is risky because you've got counterparty risk involved. And it is a largely unregulated space. Imagine engaging in this with your baseball cards or comic books. So it's largely unregulated.

It's not like margining your stock account at Goldman Sachs. And you have to ask yourself, why is it I'm buying Bitcoin in the first place? I'm trying to earn a 5% yield. most folks are going to say, I'm trying to get a 5x return on this. Does the 5% yield really matter all that much in the scheme of things? So you've got to ask yourself, why are you doing this? What's the strategy you're trying to engage in? And then do due diligence very, very carefully on the companies you're going to engage with.

Okay. So if you were to take out your crystal ball, how would you project the personal finance industry's attitude toward crypto or adoption of crypto will have changed by year's end? I don't know about years end. I think the real key is going to be the launch and availability of an ETF, which I do think is going to be coming within the next couple of years. And I'll tell you what I've been saying for the last five years. We'll have an ETF within 18 months.

I've been saying that for five years. I do believe that once we have that available, I think that virtually every financial advisor will be using this in client portfolios. It'll be as routine as a large cap growth stock fund. I agree. Yeah. If there is an ETF that's launched and there's more regulatory clarity around the custody issue around the trading, you know, best bid, you know, best execution, all this stuff. If we can get some more regulatory clarity around that, I don't see why it wouldn't, you know, be more almost 100% adoption. But yeah, the ETF is definitely a big one because as Rick said earlier, that's easy. People are already, our advisors are already managing client accounts and they can just go buy an ETF just like they can go buy this off. Yes, yes, I agree. I guess the big question is just, when will this happen? All right, well, it has been so fun talking with both of you. Thank you both so much for coming on Unchained. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work? I'm on Twitter at M. K-O-L-E-S-K-Y. If you want to reach me personally, it's info at arbor.com. And also digital.com. Arbor.comptopal is the website where you can learn more about what we're doing in the digital

asset space. And you can learn about the work we're doing at RIAAC, including our webinars and our certification program at rea-dac.com. R-I-A-DAC.com. Perfect. Well, thank you both so much for coming on Unchained. Thanks, Laura. Thank you, Laura.

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Rick, Matt, Edelman Financial Entions, Arbor Capital, and the RIA Digital Assets Council, check out the show notes for. this episode. Don't forget, you can now watch video recordings of the shows on the Unchained YouTube channel. Go to YouTube.com slash C slash Unchained podcast and subscribe today. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Yun, Daniel Ness, and Mark Murdoch. Thanks for listening.