Insuring Crypto 2.0 With Becca Rubenfeld

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If the conditions have to be right for you to succeed, your success is conditional. It's not real success. Play like champions, man. Here we go. Insurance agents from around the world. Welcome to the Insurance Guys podcast. My name is Scott Howell, your fearless host and leader, insurance agency owner and insurance evangelist for iProtect Insurance and Financial Services based out of Huntsville, Alabama.

And before we get started on today's episode, please help me welcome, he is a 6'3 sophomore from Mobile, Alabama. Parade first team All-American, rivals, five-star recruit. He is a fantastic insurance agent.

and a great American. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome the incomparable Mr. Bradley Flowers. How are you, Bradley? Fantastic. How about you? Well, Bradley, I got big news to report. Big news to report. Crackhead Christy is back at Pine Ridge. Okay. And came back about a week ago. Scott's neighbor, for those that don't know. My wife's arch nemesis.

She'll steal everything in your house. She'll steal everything in your barn. Christy, no idea where she's been, but on day numero uno of her return, she talked. the painter across the street into letting her help paint the porch across the street. Okay. And my wife is, how do I describe it? Obsessed. She's obsessed. It's an obsession.

She's probably at my wife is probably looking out our front window right now as we speak on this podcast, just waiting on her to come walking down the street. Yeah, it's been an interesting. It's been an interesting two or three weeks. You know, the Wilson brothers, one of them passed away from an overdose. Their trailer two weeks ago, the guy that owns the property. For those of you that don't know, I live on Meth Mountain.

Scott and Kim own the nicest house on Meth Mountain. Yeah, we own the nicest place on Meth Mountain. The guy that owns the property, and I sent Bradley this video, so I'll have to send Bradley videos and pictures because... No one would believe anything that I say without visual proof. So I sent him a video. This guy that owns this property where the Wilson brothers lived took an electric fence around.

their trailer in that property and put about 20 cows and bulls in there and i drove by and he's putting up his fence and i said the cows are in with the trailer They're going to destroy the trailer. And they're going to destroy the trailer. Next day, I drive by, and I'll be damned if there's not a bull standing on the front porch of that trailer. Y'all, I'm talking about a 6,000-pound bull with horns standing on the front porch.

Well, that's like with the bears in my neighborhood. They say that if a bear ever figures out, I have an infestation of black bears around my property. If they ever figure out there is food in your house. There's nothing you can do to keep them out. Absolutely nothing. They're coming. Yeah. That is nuts. Do they ever get in your garbage like raccoons? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

So you just go outside and the garbage is just thrown all over the place? I keep the garbage in the garage. So my garage smells terrible all of the time. But about three months ago, I get a text. I live on... kind of like the main road in my town, and there's a lot of traffic. And I get a text at like 6.05 a.m. from a customer of mine. And she said, Hey.

And it was trash day. Hey, just so you know, your garbage is turned over in the road. Oh, great. Because that's when they get you is on trash day. We only see them on trash day. They get out Mondays and Thursdays. And I'm guessing a bungee over the thing doesn't even. No, because when the trash truck comes, it's, you know. Yeah. So I walk out there, Scott, and there is 100 yards of trash this way. Oh, my God.

And 100 yards of trash this way. And everybody knows it's my house. Did you just get a trash bag and start picking it up? It's diapers. So it's very clear whose trash it is. So I'm out there at 6.15 a.m. in my pajamas dodging traffic, and it's still kind of dark picking up trash out the middle of the road. So, yeah. Does it not freak you out?

When you're in your house and you got all those cameras, I mean, I've seen these videos and there's like a 350 pound black bear standing at your. Yes. That would freak. Like I'm talking about like real time video. Yes. He's in my backyard right now. Yes. That is crazy, man. Yes. Actually, our house, we have glass doors that go to the back porch, and the back porch extends to the master bedroom.

the we have the same glass doors in our primary bedroom and the first night that we saw him on the cameras right after we moved in He was standing right outside our window. And I'm like, man, that is terrifying that this 300-pound death machine is standing. And this is first thing in the morning. And I walked to that window or that door to take a look, and it was unlocked.

We left it unlocked. It doesn't stay unlocked anymore. So you've got – Bradley has this really nice back deck porch area with the big TV and the – you know, outdoor patio. Have you ever like about to be going to bed and you're like, I left chips and salsa sitting on that and think to yourself, Oh my God, that's going to be.

that hasn't happened what i will say is i do not pull the trash out when it's pitch black dark because you don't know what's out there that is crazy man that is crazy all right guys we've got a very special guest and i want to say this

her episode of the insurance guys podcast i had no idea if there were going to be three people watch it a thousand a million i had no clue the day after her episode Came out. I just assume none of my agents ever listened to this podcast just because they work with me every day. It's kind of like having a famous parent like Brad Pitt. You know, if you're Brad Pitt's kids, you're just like.

Well, that's dad. Like, who gives a shit, you know? I just don't think ever that any of my agents ever listened. Her podcast came out, and the very next morning, one of my agents sent me a text message, and he goes, Scott. I don't get to listen to every one of your podcasts, but I saw this. It was about insurance, Bitcoin, all that. And this was one of the best episodes that you've ever done. And I was like, holy shit.

One of my agents actually listened and it was this podcast. And then I had like eight other people. And by the way, no offense to Bruce. How old is Bruce? 55. A podcast about insurance for crypto. Like you would think that that would be a 22 year old, right? You know? Yeah. And I've had five or six other people reach out to me like, Hey, uh, I've got crypto.

I want to talk to anchor. You know, how do I get with you on this anchor watch product? And I'm like, well, and I think that's where we kind of left off the podcast last time was, you know, we were. talking about agents getting an opportunity to sign up and be able to partner and be able to have this product and it was kind of a november december beginning of 26 but We wanted to have her back on today because she's been to some conferences. There have been some updates.

to the Anchor Watch product. We're also in that fall Bitcoin dip. We're in fall. I don't know if there's been a dip, but it'd be interesting to talk about that as well. So without further ado, I want to bring her on the show again. Rave reviews from her first episode with the IGP, but she is originally from Duluth, Minnesota, and currently resides in Seattle, Washington. She got into Bitcoin in 2019.

And she is bringing a product to insure Bitcoin to the industry. We've already talked about that. She is the co-founder of a product that I just mentioned earlier. called anchor watch her first podcast we had brave reviews on this show and i think we're a little closer to the end zone now to bringing it to the independent insurance channel Ladies and gentlemen, second time guest and my profound honor to bring on the show today, Miss Becca Rubenfeld. How are you, Becca?

Hey guys, thanks for having me. Well, thank you for being here. Let's start with a start. We left off the last podcast. We introduced the independent channel to... anchor watch and what it was going to be a week later my dog groomer walks up to my front door and he's getting my dog because he's a mobile dog groomer and he's got

A frown on his face, and he looked sad. And I said, hey, man, you're putting out some bad vibes this morning. What's going on with you? And he said, well, I had $160,000 worth of Bitcoin stolen from me. Okay. And I said, I'm going to text you something right now. And I texted him Becca's episode. And he was grooming my Bernadoodle. Boy, I said that wrong. My wife's Bernadoodle.

And he was sitting there. I looked through the little window, and he's got his AirPods in listening to Becca's episode about Anchor Watch. He said that he had reached out to... The police, and they had put him in touch with somebody that was helping him try to get this Bitcoin back. I didn't get into it. What usually happens in those scenarios, Becca?

It depends. So there's, I guess, a few different scenarios and it all comes down to the individual and how they actually held their Bitcoin to start with. Let's say he held it in self custody, meaning he had one of those little hardware wallets and he had his private keys himself. And he was holding it himself. It can be a physical theft. Right. And that's something we insure against. Right. So somebody comes to your house, says, hey, I know you have that Bitcoin. Give it to me. I like.

and and eventually if they're scared for their life they'll hand over the device hand over the pin code and and it's a burglary so that that would be one way frequently what happens especially if it's in the lower quantities so hundreds of thousands are lower sometimes it's just on exchanges so they've purchased it at a crypto exchange they left it sitting there

I'm not talking about the exchange becoming insolvent, which is always a risk and why I don't keep crypto on exchanges. But what can happen is the individual can be phished or more or less fooled into moving their own Bitcoin. can reach out say hey i'm a representative of coinbase you know we're doing maintenance and we need you to move it from one wallet to the other wallet but like you have to do it because we can't you know for your security we can't do it for you so just do these

steps and we'll walk you right through it and they'll actually send it themselves and crypto once sent is irreversible their password to an exchange can be hacked uh where it gets moved themselves their phone can be sim swapped which then the thieves use to more or less hack their account because they'll go they'll use they'll sim swap somebody's phone and then they'll use the phone to reset a password so it can be any of these things i'd be very interested to talk to him now you know

We're not a recovery firm per se. I can certainly recommend him to some to look into it if he can. So Coinbase had a major data breach. A lot of customers lost, were fished out of their assets. And some of those actually Coinbase made whole. because it was their data breach and we picked up some of those customers so once they were made whole they removed their assets and they brought it into custody i'll tell you what i've been seeing i don't know if you've seen this

So I just looked in my calendar. So I've gotten 27 phishing, not emails, calendar invites. And if you're a calendar oriented person like me and I have an assistant that manages my calendar, so that's the situation where she's likely to think it's legit. Sure. Right. And I'll just read one of them to you. It's like confirmation PayPal Bitcoin payment received. We're confirming blah, blah, blah. If this is not legit, log in here.

And it's a sneaky little way that you wouldn't, everybody knows spam emails, but I don't think a lot of regular people that don't have the eye for spam. like oh well that must be legit you know i could see my assistant saying oh well that must be something bradley signed up for let me do this for him even on the business side uh there's a new one where they'll actually get you and they'll

More or less fish you into an actual meeting. So they'll propose a business deal or something They get you on a call or they're gonna demo something and is part of the demo They'll get you to allow them to control your screen and then they just control your screen and steal your assets so yeah you do you do have to be very careful and and one of the reasons that our custody solution is set up the way it is is it removes all of

All of those risks, really, strongly, strongly mitigates them by how our keys are held, how customer holds keys. But both of us are required signers. So the customer has to sign and Anchor Watch has to sign.

that mitigates many many of those uh physically sign um and in the case of the ones that we can't perfectly mitigate say like a gun to the head then the insurance is there so what we've done is we've built we built a custody solution with all of those risks in mind and said like how can we utilize the incredible cryptography that bitcoin is built on which

is incredible it's the same thing that protects the the nuclear codes and we've built this very very uh impenetra mostly impenetrable defense but there are some holes and then we plug those holes with the insurance And so we think our custody solution ultimately is the safest because you're protected by the cryptography and then you're protected by old school insurance in the few places where we can't perfectly protect you through tech. And one of those holes.

is tortured and gun to your head give me your password that's that's one of the that's one of the major holes unfortunately and it really it is unfortunately because because the events in in 2025 Jumped significantly. They jumped in the first world significantly. Good news is the most newsworthy ones, which was the rash of attacks in the first half of the year in France.

Those were organized by a Moroccan criminal ring and got shut down. So that was generating a lot of them. That one shut down, but they'll just keep popping up. There's some other rings that are still active.

Unfortunately, a gun to almost anybody's head ultimately can make the best plans fall apart. You put a gun... you know to your own or to your child's or to your wife's and uh you know your your priorities and how tough you think you are maybe changes and and it should and that's why we have insurance what's like the security companies alarm system companies now have you have your regular like punch-in code to disarm your alarm but then they'll give you a secondary code

for that scenario that does disarm the alarm but it also calls the police so you can silently call the police without nothing we have some various records and because and we actually do in like live verification too so we hop on a zoom

all and we've got some you know blink twice if uh type of things hey guys it's bradley i wanted to talk to you today about gail You know, one of the biggest frustrations that Scott and I hear from agency owners is the need to hack together different AI platforms.

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Guys, you want to check this out, head over to meetgayle.com. Tell them the insurance guys sent you. Really appreciate it. Thanks. Hey, Becca, I had a quick question I wanted to ask for our listening audience. So my dog groomer comes up to my door. He just lost $160,000 in Bitcoin. Which to some people is dropping the bucket to a mobile dog groomer, $160,000 is a lot of money, right? What should the average person...

on the street because there's a lot of people. In fact, I would say if you take all of Bitcoin, there's probably a ton of people that have 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000. you know like to some people that's like i'll just drop in the bucket to other people it's like a lot of freaking money yeah if something like that happens to them

And they don't have an anchor watch, but they have some kind of, like you said earlier, like an online account. But their Bitcoin's not there anymore. It's been taken out. Who should they contact? Is it local? Do you call police and file a police report? What do you do? It is, unfortunately, like has to be connected to cyber crimes. And depending on the amount, I can't remember the exact amount is where it kind of you can report it.

federally, but now start start with the normal reporting methods and just push until you're connected to somebody with cyber who actually can investigate this type of things, depending on the amount, honestly, is going to drive. how much investigation happens you know i had a vespa get stolen guess how much investigation right right uh thanks for taking the report nothing's gonna happen right so i think the actual amount uh

will depend. And therefore, if recovery is possible, will depend on the circumstances. But I think if you find yourself in that situation, you got to just start down that painful path. You got to advocate for yourself. I would say that That's kind of a borderline amount. It is a lot of money. If a $160,000 painting was stolen, they would pay attention, right? You're right. So it is a lot of money. You should be able to get some good response, but it's not.

you know, a career making amount of money either. So you got to advocate for yourself and really push if it happens because a company's own security failed.

uh because remember bitcoin has never been hacked it's the issue is not going to be like oh bitcoin got hacked and it was stolen there's nobody to blame there's somebody to blame yeah so if it's the company you know push really hard on the company like do they need a lawyer letter like you know push them to make you whole even if they can't recover but it's uh but you know it's not a this is not a guaranteed happy ending unfortunately i'll tell you this is

adjacent to this conversation really has i don't think has anything to do with crypto so i had a a friend of mine that had a situation where a employee stole some money similar to your situation years ago and the person that stole the money was a financial guy so it was very complicated to figure out exactly what he covered his tracks well enough but then eventually it was like hey something's off we just don't know what crooks are good at crooked and so

You know, my friend reported it to the police. And, you know, my friend is a very smart guy and deals with financial stuff all the time. If he can't quite figure it out, local law enforcement aren't probably going to be able to figure it out either. And so he reached out to me. He's like, hey, because I know one of the prosecutors here in town that does financial crimes. So could you reach out to him and see like what we and so I called.

This friend of mine is a prosecutor, and he said the one thing, and I'm giving this advice to the listeners if you run into this, the one thing people don't think about with fraud is usually white-collar fraud involves the male. You report... mail fraud to the postmaster that's right and people you never think about going to the postmaster and he said a lot of times in most major cities the postmasters are not very very busy

and they love to hunt down somebody doing mail fraud. And that's federal offense. It's federal offense. And he said if you look at... white collar crime across the board a lot of times it's the male fraud that gets them yeah so it's definitely true i i hesitated to to mouth off too much because I might not be factually accurate here. But yeah, for sure. So mail fraud is a common way to get criminals. So that's Postmaster above a certain dollar amount. And if it involves dollars also.

Then also, I guess the Secret Service actually has an arm and that can be very effective. It has to meet criteria for that, I believe, including... If not like cash, but it does need to involve dollars in some variety. Well, if you think about all the stuff the Pulse Master deals with is boring.

Sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you. No, go ahead. All the stuff that Postmaster deals with is probably boring as heck. And to get like a case to run down, they're probably really excited. All of a sudden he's Thomas Crowning affair. Yeah, whereas the police are like, the police are like, we've had four murders.

in a whatever to hunt that like i'm not worried about your 150 000 sir you know you know to that point um we had a criminal enterprise out of atlanta that was going around huntsville alabama and they had gotten one of the universal keys from a postal employee. Your cousin Ricky delivers the mail at your house, so they have a universal key to all these blue.

Right. Postal that you see in office parks where the entrance will have one of these big blue. These sons of bitches went all around the city of Huntsville. And they were just, at like 7, 8 o'clock at night, they would come in, use the universal key, get all the mail out, and then open all the letters, anything that looked like a check, take the checks, put them in like a... a stack and then cut the checks you know because they they'd make a copy of them you know change you change the

person that it was to, and then they would deposit those checks. That is how I caught the girl that stole over a hundred thousand dollars from me that we prosecuted was not. her doing it it was i had two checks that got kited where they had taken them out of those because i was putting checks in these blue big blue boxes that you see you know

And these people were taking these checks out, and they were changing who it was to, the two. You know, instead of it being to the Athens Electric Co-op, it was to John Stevens for $185 or whatever.

I do have a story for you that I wanted to ask you about, Becca. It appeared on the Huntsville local news last week. And the camera... I believe, was at a gas station. It was inside the gas station. You'll see people, videos like on Twitter or TikTok where somebody comes in and robs like a gas station. You see it all on the... on the store camera so the the camera's in the store lady walks into the gas station and she is using a bitcoin atm yeah

puts her stuff in however you do it i'm guessing it kind of works like an atm yeah you put money in put put dollars in and i hope i'm telling this right because this was on the nightly news like a local nightly news But it says, sorry, you know, call this number. You can't, you know, blah, blah, blah. She calls the number and this person's kind of acting weird on the phone. And she's like, I can't, I'm trying to get some, some money out, Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And the store owner.

sees that there's a problem and he calls the police and this cop pulls up, comes in and he's like, let me speak to them. They get into it on the damn phone, screaming at each other. This cop... And whoever is on the other end of that line, I don't remember how it all shook out, but it sounded like similar to what you said earlier, somebody had hacked the Bitcoin ATM or somehow got this.

phone number to call and then they were going to get you to give them your information and they were going to take your bitcoin or something well it was something really weird like that so i'm looking up it looks like so just the Quick scam. Is Huntsville in Marshall County? Yes. All right. Might as well be. Yes. OK. Yes. I think so. I think the scam started at home.

I think it started as a normal phishing scam. Okay. And where they were convinced that they needed to do something. They got to go to the ATM. the criminal to try to get bitcoin because once they have it they have it right right they instructed the people to go do right go to an atm because the person's like i don't have bitcoin i don't know how to get back right

So they send them to an ATM to try to tell them, OK, this is what you do. You have to go. You put your money in. It's going to get you Bitcoin out. And then I'm going to tell you how to send it to me.

I assume was more or less the breakdown of it. So it seems like just a broader phishing scam. And the reason that just Bitcoin in general is targeted, it's half logical and half stupid. It's logical because...

because once it's been sent, it's sent, right? So it's like, you can perpetrate... uh the crime and have the bitcoin in your wallet that you control that nobody can take from you that can't be hacked so you did accomplish the crime right and in that point of view i guess i guess they did a good job as criminals

where it gets stupid and where also as an insurer that i get interested uh is that it's very traceable it's it's a public ledger right so if i have bitcoin it's stolen from me i know where it was it was in my wallet So now you can take it to one of the tracing companies or like data analytics companies because this is all public and you can see it move as soon as they move it.

from my wallet to some other wallet and maybe from their wallet it gets split out into six wallets and from there it you know one of the six gets sent to an exchange in brazil and four of them are just sitting there It's just sitting there in those wallets and you can watch them and eventually and they can sit there for years. Right. And eventually, though, they can move. And when.

these data analytics companies and anchor watch has them on retainer right the best of the best but they all have relationships with the exchanges all the major exchanges around the world and many minor exchanges around the world and law enforcement agencies around the world. And so if you're tracing stolen Bitcoin, we work with them very quickly, get a warrant if necessary. And then you can work with the exchanges and say one of those six, it moved to an exchange because.

what does the thief want they they want money like so at some point they're going to want to cash it out transfer their bitcoin back into spendable currency that they can that they can buy their lambo with right and uh because that's what criminals criminals are right i'm laughing because scott jokingly yesterday said he was going to buy a lambo so you're correct is that the aspirational

right so you got to get your lambo so you need to convert it to fiat currency at some point when it does we can we can freeze it at the exchange because then it has left the custody of the criminal they sent it to the exchange and said hey exchange let's do a little switcheroo for some some fiat and the exchange says not so fast this particular bitcoin has been marked uh as as needing to be frozen and we can try to recover it as an insurer we've got segregation right so eventually let's say

All this took months and months because we're tracing, we're watching this Bitcoin move on chain. We're going to very, as soon as the claim is filed, we're going to work. with the claims adjusters and we're going to adjust out the claim and if it was a heist that that's covered by our policy we're paying out the customer they're taken care of and they're removed from the situation right so now anchor watch and our our vendors are now tracing our asset effectively.

You know, Bitcoin tends to go up in value over time. So we become more and more motivated to continue tracing it. Eventually, even if it's three, four, five, six years later, it moves again. We can freeze it. We can catch the guy. somebody makes a mistake, they do something, they pay somebody, and that person is, you know, docks, that person's identified.

and they can you know lean on associates so that eventually people will make a mistake on a public ledger and uh and we'll get them and when we get them and we recover some or all of those assets If years have passed, it's very likely that the value has increased. We can recover some or all of our losses. So it's actually a great asset to ensure. It's a terrible asset to steal if you want a peaceful life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Is this sort of like, you know, I think about, you know, whenever there's a new financial product, there's always fraud in the beginning and then eventually it gets sniffed out and it goes away. Let me give you an example. So when checks first became a thing.

yeah we had tons of you see these stories from like the 80s and 90s of like people writing just millions and millions of dollars of bad checks because they could get away with it and now through infrastructure at the banks and security it's it's very very hard you don't hear about

You hear about really small bad checks or maybe grandma made a mistake and overjury, but you don't really hear about fraud in relation to bad checks because the technology gets so good that you can prevent it or sniff it out very quickly. Are we going to see that with some of this? type stuff you think? Yeah. So the tracing that I'm describing is

At the center of that. So, I mean, I think the tracing abilities, it requires a lot of compute, right? Because you are tracing this widening web as people are breaking it up. Bitcoin can be... uh what's called mixed or coin join where more or less bitcoin gets sent into a pool broken into a bajillion little pieces mixed with other people's little pieces of Bitcoin. And so let's say you put one in, gets mixed up. It's now in 100 pieces mixed with 50 other people's little pieces.

when you pull your one bitcoin out all the component parts are mixed up maybe there's a few parts of yours original stuff but there's also all this other People's Bitcoin right so that the map gets very big and convoluted if those tools those obfuscation tools are Utilized and so it used to be that like pretty much if if Bitcoin made it to a mixer it

It was kind of in-game, right? It was just too hard to break apart. But think about all the compute that exists just a few years later. Think about AI compute, right? So now they can continue to trace those with some success. even if they they go into tools like that and I think I think the other thing that will change as well is I think thieves will start to understand that and will understand the

risk reward better. So I think right now there's a perception and maybe it was mostly true that it was a great thing to steal because once it was yours, it was yours. I think especially for large heists, I think thieves are just going to see that over time, especially, even if you got away with it initially, you probably don't get away with it over the course of a few years and you're still going to prison.

they learn that then why do you try as much like 100 of ponzi schemes have been uncovered and you're only going to be be able to get away with it for so long yeah and uh and what do you want to risk to do it right like you tend to do crimes mostly, that you think you can get away with. That's kind of the point. Nobody ever committed a crime that they didn't think they were going to get away with. Exactly.

I am definitely going to jail for this. Let's go. Hey, Becca, it was about eight weeks ago we had you on the podcast. And I know you've been through a lot in your life since then, personally. Professionally, you've been to some of these conferences. Can you quickly, because we're going to probably have to get off here in a few minutes, but I wanted to get with you before we got off this podcast today.

What are the latest updates on Anchor Watch and what have you learned in some of these conferences and things that you've attended?

yeah sure so i mean i think last time we were here i was a bit fuzzy on kind of our broker plans we are officially going to be launching broker program in december so i think by the time this airs we'll have a just a broker info info portal up where they can request more information and then like a full portal with all our policy information uh we'll launch 12.1 and we'll get that going so that'll be exciting get people

the opportunity to get in there, learn more about our products, and if it's something they think will land with their customer base, actually be able to distribute these with us. So we'll do some training seminars and things like that so they can speak knowledgeably on the product and on Bitcoin.

and get them the information they need. So that will be coming out. And I can't remember how many details I shared at the time, but the other big thing right around 12.1 is we're launching a few additional variants of how we do insured custody. So previously we had it where a customer held more or less a multi-sig and AnchorWatch held a multi-sig and were both required signers.

We have a different variant of that that's a little less friction for customers. They have a single wallet where they are verifying their identity. So all the same security features, but less friction. We have multi-institutional custody. What we're finding is especially...

in the commercial side, a lot of companies and company executives just don't want to hold keys. They don't want to keep their money on exchange because exchanges have not been proven to be good stewards long term. It's very risky to keep your bank.

there, but they're not super comfortable holding keys either. And so multi-institutional custody is a model where the keys are not just held at a single company, but they're broken up between three companies and all three companies have to sign. And that works.

actually just for for actuarial reasons when you look at internal fraud and internal collusion you know there's a certain risk level for that when you introduce a second company where the people would have to not only collude with their buddies who

they work with every day, but they'd have to collude with employees at a second company. Risks of fraud and collusion go way down and a third company way down from there. So it's actually a very secure method of not holding keys. We'll have that fully insured. We can do custom policies for large commercial customers starting 12.1.

We can underwrite other people's custody models. So we've got a lot of kind of new products. One that we're super excited about, I can't remember if we had launched it yet, it would have been right around there, is we've started selling Kidnap and Ransom. Because ultimately, everything our policy covers is in terms of those those kidnap and ransom situations. It's if the Bitcoin itself is stolen. So if gun to the head and you have to move your Bitcoin, that's covered by.

our policy but what isn't covered is like gun to the head I know you have a lot of Bitcoin send me ten million dollars right tell your family to collect 10 million dollars because that was going around and collecting a ransom payment that is covered by a kidnapping ransom policy and those press

uh professional hostage negotiators that would all like that's included in a kidnapping ransom policy so we started selling that it is particularly designed for crypto owners so a lot of times if you you know if you sell knr you know that actually Publicly owning crypto can actually get you denied for coverage or raise your rates a lot. So we've worked with Lloyd's.

on this customer base and and they understand that that's who we're selling to and it's it's designed for them it has some extra coverage points and price should be more competitive because it's focused on those company those types of customers and we know how to underwrite those customers

So those are kind of changes on the Anchor Watch side. But we're super excited to start working with brokers here at the end of the year and into next year. Excited to learn from them, too, about what they hear from their customers. On the Bitcoin side, yeah, I did. in between some medical treatments, I snuck out and hit a couple of conferences, which was great. Great to get back out there in the industry. And I was focused on both custody.

tech is where I was focused on so I won't go too too much into it but just to give you a teaser you know what what we mostly do is cold storage meaning it's never connected to the internet and therefore it doesn't have cyber risks. There's another form of very secure custody that's called MPC or multi-party computation. And it's just a different method of securing Bitcoin that uses technology called Taproot, which

If your listeners are interested, there's a lot of information out there that you can dive into, but it's newer and it can unlock really powerful privacy and privacy can be useful for security, right? Like if the thief doesn't know how many people he needs to.

attack because he can't see then that's powerful information like maybe he won't even attempt a theft because he doesn't know how many people he needs to take down so um we were kind of diving into that and and this more advanced security and trade-offs and and development of that tech and then how it's applicable to insurance and how it can help insurance

So that's kind of where I was focused. But, you know, it's moon season on price. So a lot of people have been focused on Bitcoin price and price expectations. Historically, Bitcoin has really moved. on a four-year price cycle right and if if we were following that price cycle right around now I mean literally now like the last three weeks and the next couple of weeks should be

if you were a cycle theory proponent, which I always have been. So I might get proven wrong here. We should be right in just like a ripping, roaring bull market right now. So we would have expected... to see prices quite a bit higher than we would see right now. And historically October has been a very strongly positive month. and instead we had about a 12 or a 15 drawdown last week and so it's sitting like

It looks like it's 1.13 at the moment, 1.13.6. But it's been sitting at like 1.10 all week. So... This cycle, if we want to call it that, or at least just 2025, has seen the entrance of institutional money. The ETFs came on last year, different players, and it really has changed the dynamics. You know, now that institutional...

asset managers are putting in their funds as the price goes up, they actually have to rebalance, right? They're not holding forever like Bitcoin hardcore enthusiasts are. You know, if maybe they were, they got permission to three percent or five percent of their fund is the price appreciates and now it's eight percent on a schedule they're going to have to draw down their bitcoin position sell

and get themselves back down to their authorized five or three percent so there are different behaviors it's adjusting price so now the popular thing now and i'm getting wise and starting to hold my tongue on my opinions but the popular theories now are you know just this concept that because of institutional money because there's futures and options uh also that impact price and uh people are doing things on leverage there are companies like uh publicly

traded companies called Bitcoin treasury companies that have sucked some liquidity over to them. And so as a result, like now there's this idea that we're going to go up and have these just small grinding upward.

things where we keep hitting all-time highs the the most recent all-time high was about 125 before that it was 124 before that it was 122 right so really just painful where you're going up and then draw down and then going up and beating a little bit and maybe that now that institutions are here we're just going to grind up forever and uh i don't know how i feel about that either but i also know that i wish the price was higher in october so

I think it's probably a good buying opportunity, especially if that point of view is correct. Anytime is always going to be a good buying opportunity in that case. And even if you zoom out long term, everybody who bought the previous cycle top, top.

you know, is way in the money right now. If you bought 68, 69,000 last cycle, you're up to X and looking goods, but lots of attention there just based on the time of year. Well, thank you for coming on today. I really appreciate it. We wanted to have.

you own for a couple of reasons but i'm glad we were able to talk a little bit about just common folk out there that own it and what to do if it gets gone for some reason or it gets stolen or you you know misplace it or whatever and i think um That December timeframe, I don't know exactly when this podcast will come out, but I hope that when you get that portal set up. you know, in terms of going live that you will email Bradley and I so that.

we can put it in the show notes because we're going to have a lot of agency owners that are going to reach out wanting to know where to go to get signed up, especially agencies that deal with more high-value clients. We have a lot of those that deal with actors, musicians. I'm thinking about Aaron Gordon insuring all those watches. Don't say the name. I'm not. A lot of famous people. Yeah, a lot of famous people that have insurance with friends of ours in the industry that...

I guarantee you they've got some Bitcoin in their portfolio, you know? Oh, for sure. And unlike their watches, it might just be excluded from everything. Like cryptocurrency or cash, cash equivalents, you know, it's excluded. from their homeowners, it's excluded most likely from their umbrella. So yeah, those specialty brokers I think will probably be a great fit.

and then commercial as well but yeah happy happy to explore this and really excited to get it launched i think it'll do well awesome guys you are listening to the insurance guys podcast and as i end every episode rewards come from action Not discussion. Get your ass out there today. Become the mayor of your village.

Go build relationships with people. Make money for your wife, for your husband, for your kids' college fund, for your parents and your in-laws that are struggling out there. Go make money for them. Write good business for the agencies that you represent.

and write good business for the carriers that you represent. Bradley Flowers, I love you. Thanks, man. Thanks, Becca. Thanks, guys. Thank you. We love you. Hope you get feeling good, okay? Thank you. Thank you. Guys, you were listening to the Insurance Guys podcast, and we love each one of you.

Thank you so much for being a part of our family. We'll see you back here real soon. Take care. Thanks for listening to the insurance guys podcast. If you need to know more about me or you need to get in touch with Scott. you can always reach me at the insurance guy online.com or email me at Scott at I protect insurance.com. And if you need to get in touch with Mr. Bradley Flowers, go to portalinsurance.com or email him at bradley at portalinsurance.com. Guys, we love you.

We thank you so much for listening to our show and being a part of our family. And we look forward to seeing you again next week on the next episode of the Insurance Guys podcast. Take care.