¶ Intro
We want fair regulation. There's a lot of unfair regulation on the industry. Now we're seeing a lot of good, common sense regulation and it's leading to some amazing things. Secure closed loop system means that funds, whether it's USD or crypto, can only be sent by you, and those funds can only be sent back to you.
We see this tokenization race that's happening with big firms, and they're looking to tokenize money market funds, thocks and so forth. As that market matures, will I Trust look at possibly integrating some of these tokenized assets unequivocally. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and joining me is Jared Felman, who is the SVP of Operations at I Trust Capital. Jared, great to have you.
Thanks for having me. It's really nice to be here. Happy Friday.
Yeah, Happy Friday, Jared. Big news this week with I Trust partnering with Coinbase, and I want to dive into all the details there and all the great things you guys are doing. Let's quickly start with your background. Tell
¶ Jared's background
us a bit about yourself and how'd you end up in working at I Trust.
Absolutely for those of you who have not heard of us.
I Trust Capital is a platform for investing in digital assets as well as precious metals.
We have physical gold and physical silver.
I'm happy to get into all the details about the company during the course of this conversation. For me, Jared Feldman, SVP of Operations, I help oversee various things at the firm from client experience. I help out on the marketing side, business development. I interact with the product and engineering team as well. And we are our company that have a lot of interesting people with a lot of interesting backgrounds, a lot of folks from the alternative assets space and
the gold and silver space. For me personally, I came from the financial advising world, so it was amazing to be able to get an opportunity need back in twenty twenty one with I Trust Capital to be able to merge and marry my traditional legacy financial planning background with the digital asset space.
Yeah, and I trust offers a unique way to invest
¶ iTrust's services
in assets like precious metals and crypto Tell us about the investment products you have and the benefits of using I trust is services.
The biggest difference between an I Trust Capital and any of those mainstream exchanges that people usually download and app for and get referred to and hear about. Is that we really put security first and this is at the request of our clients. A lot of people who are in the crypto space, whether they're novice, new investors or experienced ogs and crypto, they feel very vulnerable on exchanges.
They feel very vulnerable even performing self custody. And that's not to say that we don't have a lot of respect for the exchanges and don't have a lot of respect for people that do self custody. And we firmly believe in folks that want to have the not your keys, not your crypto mindset, and we have a lot of respect for that, and there is a lot of merit for that.
But the truth is is that.
Most folks, especially new folks in crypto, do not have the ability to manage their own keys, and even folks that do have that ability, they don't want to do all the self custody by themselves and they like having the opportunity to outsource some of the key management to other parties. And I Trust Capital utilizes institutional storage providers.
We leverage coinbased prime fidelity digital assets as well as fireblocks to ensure that funds aren't directly held on exchanges and have that sort of vulnerability that people are afraid of, and we have been doing it for retirement accounts for years.
We can get into some of the features of the tax shelter capabilities of retirement accounts during this conversation as well, but people wanted to see that same level of security in a non retirement account, and that's why we came up with our Premium Custody account, which is a non retirement account that has the same secure closed loop system that our retirement accounts have. What does a secure closed
loop system mean. It just means that funds, whether it's USD or crypto, can only be sent by you, and those funds can only be sent back to you. And that's just a feature that we have and if people really want that emphasis when they're investing in the digital asset space.
We also couple that.
With really good customer service, which sets us apart from a lot of those aforementioned mainstream exchanges. People can call us seven am to five o'clock specific on weekdays, and we feel that's a huge differentiator in the crypto marketplace, and we couple that with over ten thousand four to five star reviews on Google and trust Pilot.
That's really great. I love the customer service. And as you mentioned, your custodial services are institutional grades. So you mentioned Coinbase Prime, the likes of black Rock and other institutions. You're using those platforms, so that's really great. I've often stated that second to let's say self custody. You know, I personally believe in self custody, but this is a
great option. It's it's top tier custodial services. And then that's for digital assets, but like for precious metals like gold and silver and so forth, how are you custoding those assets?
The physical gold and the physical silver is a really really unique program, and a lot of sophisticated precious metal investors often ask us since I've even been starting working here in twenty twenty one, they ask us, how are you offering such competitive fees for physical gold and physical silver that can even be taken delivery on our clients who have retirement accounts can actually take retirement income in physical gold and physical silver if they choose to do so.
And it's a very unique program offered through Kitgo kit COO. They are a precious metals dealer and they work with a program that's referred to as vault Chain, and there's also another component to it called the trade Wind platform. And what this program does is it takes the physical gold and silver which are held in huge like four hundred ounced bars that are guaranteed and backed up by
the Royal Canadian Mint. They take those bars and they break them up digitally onto a private blockchain and subledgered onto a private blockchain. So these are actually real world assets, physical real world assets that are stored and accounted for and ledgered on a private blockchain. And that blockchain technology allows for twenty four to seven liquidity buying and selling for gold and silver, instantaneous settlement, and a lot of
cost efficiency. And it's a really really unique capital efficient program that we offer on our platform.
That's amazing on multiple fronts. I love the blockchain aspect that it's essentially the tokenized right where you can track it. And if you said traded twenty four to seven.
It's these are they are tokenized real world assets. You hear so much narrative about real world assets and what's going to be you know, the first real world asset and what will be tokenized besides dollars through stable coins, and we see a lot of different things that are being tokenized. There's treasuries and money market funds are really highly liquid that they can be tokenized. It is harder
to tokenize hard physical assets like real estate. But gold and silver is very, very unique because it has more of like a static nature to it. It's just it's a physical a physical thing and a piece of metal that can actually be just stored in one place. It doesn't generate income, it doesn't have all those complicated hoops to jump through like real estate. It's just a really simple,
straightforward thing to tokenize. And we're we just always had people that have been interested in gold and silver on our platform because there's a ven diagram between the ideology, macro economic views and just perspective on government spending that
crypto investors have with gold and silver investors. There's a lot of overlap there, and that's why there's always been inherent interest in gold and silver, coupled with the crypto on our platform and the fact that we can do it and not gouge people like a lot of these other gold and silver companies do and charge extra erroneous, unfair fees.
It gives us a lot of pride.
Yeah, that's awesome. And to your point, investor is having these two acid classes, which is essentially the debasement trade. Right, these acid classes have been outperforming other assets. So you have crypto, you have gold and silver. So talk to
¶ Crypto IRA
us a bit about the IRA setup and the tax benefits and things like that. In going this rep.
Most trading in the United States for all asset classes occurs within retirement vehicles. Why is that because people want to be able to buy and sell in a tax sheltered way.
It's a lot more capital efficient and.
It goes really really well with people's financial planning strategies when they're thinking long term. And I can give you
an example of what tax sheltering really means. If you purchase ten thousand dollars of bitcoin, for example, or XRP or ethereum, and you purchase ten grand in a regular non retirement account, and that ten thousand dollars in value grows to thirty thousand dollars in value, and you need to sell the thirty thousand because you have to pay for your kid's education, or you need to do some
sort of renovation to your home. The twenty thousand dollars in profit thirty minus ten is twenty thousand dollars in profit is going to come with a capital gains tax. If you held that bitcoin or other asset for less than twelve months, you're going to get hit with short term capital gains, which is the same tax bracket as ordinary income tax that you would pay through your job on your paycheck. If you held onto that asset for more than twelve months, it's long term capital gains, which
is a lower tax rate. Irrespective of that, you're going to get hit with taxes one way shape or the other. In all likelihood if you make that profitable transaction, If you made that same transaction and took that same profit in a retirement account, it's all tax sheltered. You're not even reporting those trades or those gains to the irs. And that's just one of the incentives the government creates for people for saving in a retirement account. Another example
is staking, right we have ethereum staking Salona. Staking people can earn rewards not the same level of risk, but a simil learn dynamic to earning interest in a in a bank account. And when you earn staking rewards through those protocols and you do it in a retirement account, the staking income is actually tax sheltered as well, which is a really powerful mechanism for people that are saving for retirement.
Yeah, this is such a great option, and especially if you have that long term view. And yeah, I mean, look, I've cashed out crypto in the past and yet a capital gains tax man. I wish it was, you know, if I didn't have to take the profits, it was a different way to avoid those taxes. But you can't write unless you do something like this more long term. But this is such a great option. Now, there was news this week that you partner up with the folks
¶ Coinbase Partnership
at coinbase to offer bitcoin yield. Tell us a bit about that.
Our clients have always held spot. We have a lot of clients that you know, are active traders. They're doing self trading all the time, daily, weekly, monthly, et cetera. And we don't provide any sort of financial advice, right, That's just something that I always have to say, and it's a big part of our platform because our clients are really motivated, self directed people. At the same time, for all of our clients that trade. We have many
clients that do not trade. They're just classic hoddlers. They're holding on for dear life and they're doing so happily because they believe in the asset class. They believe that bitcoin is a store of value and its modern gold. They think Ethereum is going to financialize the global system, and same thing for Solana. A lot of our clients believe that XRP is going to play some sort of role in the future of the financial system and so on and so forth. And for those people holding Spot
is great. At the same time, they would love the opportunity to be able to have yield or some sort of income on the crypto that they hold. And for accredited investors on our platform, we've reached a deal with Coinbased Asset Management to partner with them to offer a managed strategy to produce yield on bitcoin.
This is a.
Program that's offered through Coin Based Asset Management. They're a us SEC registered investment advisor. I Trust Capital is merely a software platform and we work with a trust company and we're able to serve as a conduit for people to have these sort of opportunities made available to them. But ultimately our clients self direct into them, and for credit investor clients, they will have the opportunity to onboard into the coinbased asset management fund to be able to
generate yield on their bitcoin. I'll kind of punt right now on discussing exactly how the yield will be generated. That'll be part of a future conversation as we get closer to rolling out the offering during during Q four it's exciting.
And then for folks who have an existing IRA or
¶ Rolling over IRA
four one K, can they roll that over to I Trust's self directed IRA.
Yes, there's three ways to fund a retirement account with I Trust Capital.
You can do a four to one K rollover. People.
Let's say you were at Coca Cola and you took a job over at Pepsi. You can move that four oh one K from Coke to Pepsi. Or you can roll over into an individual retirement account. People do this in order for them to be able to self direct and choose the assets within which they invest. So if you roll over a four to one K to I Trust Capital, you are empowering yourself to invest in any of the eighty six digital tokens that we have as well as the gold and silver, you can also do
an IRA transfer. For folks who have already rolled over a four to one k into an IRA in the past, or people who have put cash into an IRA in the past, they can do an IRA transfer to US. If you have crypto in a retirement account, you can also do an IRA transfer to US. And then finally, the third way that people can fund is merely with a cash contribution. You can do seven thousand per year max into an IRA if you're under fifty, eight thousand
if you're fifty years old or over. And those are the three ways within which you can fund a retirement account with US. We also have the Premium Custody Account, which is our non retirement account, and you can fund that with either cash or digital assets.
Jared, Recently, we've seen the Trump administration open up for
¶ Crypto in 401ks
one ks and retirement acounts to be able to invest in different assets classes such as crypto. So it seems the trend is to open up retirement to invest in a lot more asset classes and much more. What are your thoughts on this and how this may play play out over time.
Historically, I think that there were two main types of investors. There were people that were really really self managed. They just traded their own money and they were super responsible for deploying their own financial plans. And then there were people that always worked with an advisor, always had some sort of financial planner or tax professional build their entire investment thesis and strategy and deploying it for them. I think over time there's a lot more people that are
doing self direction. I think a lot of that is like skepticism of the legacy financial system. A lot of that started happening in two thousand and seven, and a lot of people want to take more ownership and have autonomy over their finances. And because of that and people are doing more self direction. In general, it's only natural that alternatives are going to be part of people's portfolio. We see it happening right now with gold and silver, We've seen it happening over the last ten years with
digital assets. People want more control, and when they control their own destiny, they go into alternatives. And that's a big part of why the Trump administration is putting an emphasis on alternatives real estate, private investments, crypto and being able to own those through retirement accounts. Because people are just more independent, they're doing more self direction, and when they do more self direction, they naturally gravitate toward alternative assets.
Yeah, and that helps. Seeing makes sense. You know. One
¶ Tokenized assets in IRAs
of the things we talked about earlier was tokenized gold, and we see this massive move or this tokenization race that's happening with big firms like black Rock and others, and they're looking to tokenize money market funds, stocks and so forth. I'm curious as that market matures, and you know, we figured out all the ins and outs well, I trust look at possibly integrating some of these tokenized assets unequivocally.
It's the number one initiative that I have right now is to create these sort of new age opportunities for our clients. You see it with the coin based asset management bigcoin managed strategy product. That's a huge part of what we're trying to accomplish. But that's only the beginning. We're looking into other similar opportunities for different tokens on our platform. Those opportunities will be created for fiat, they'll
be created for stable coins. People on our platform will be able to take fiat and put it into stable coin sort of yield interest bearing opportunities. Getting rewards on their stable coins. We're very much looking into that. And then there's so many different opportunities that are going to proliferate with real world assets. You see so many companies, whether it's Googenheim with their digital commercial paper product, you
see Franklin Templeton have their real world asset products. And when you look at a platform like XDC network, I mean there's just unlimited companies that are going to be proliferating over the course of the next five to ten years that are going to offer real world asset opportunities and we want to be at the forefront of that.
Yeah, it's exciting to see what's happening. And you know,
¶ CLARITY Act
one of the things a lot of folks are waiting on is the Claritiact to pass the market structure bill that's currently sitting in the Senate and some folks anticipating may pass by the end of Q four. You know, what do you think that means for the market and even for your business As the acid cloud continues.
To grow, People in crypto have always been asking for fair regulation, right, we don't want to not be regulated, and that's a misconception about the industry. People think we don't want regulation. There's nothing that could be further from
the truth. We want fair regulation, and if you look at the previous SEC administration, there's a lot of unfair regulation on the industry and now we're seeing a lot of good, common sense regulation and it's leading to some amazing things and we're going to see the market open up in so many ways. And the Genius Act certainly was a good first start for us to be able
to get some actual legislation in the space. But I think the Market Infrastructure Bill is going to be next level and it's going to create a framework that will allow so many different companies, credit card companies, banks, non banks, FinTechs to be able to participate in the space in a compliant way. Give more people access to crypto. Why is it important for people to get access to crypto?
I was at a luncheon last week where there was a macro economist, a macro economist who was speaking about all sorts of things going on in the economy. He was a very smart guy, and then at the end someone asked about crypto and he was like, well, it creates no value. And for me, that's like twenty eighteen called then wants its narrative back because there's so many just inherent value propositions for crypto, and the main ones are that it creates more transparency and democratization in all
sorts of financial markets. It creates instantaneous liquidity and settlement, and it creates lower costs for getting into markets. Right, so not just transparency, but lower costs and faster settlement. And companies like Fidelity, black Rock, multi billion and trillion dollar companies, they spend billions of dollars every single year on facilitating settlement and clearing, and crypto allows you to
do that at a fraction of the price. And just that in itself creates a lot of value for people, and that value will I think naturally it'll be passed back down to users of these institutions. And I think just that alone creates a lot of value proposition for people that are in the crypto space. And that's why we want good regulation.
Yeah yeah, well said. And you know, I love the transparency and we actually just had a great example of it this week. You know, some people were talking about on social media, but for example, the folks at Paxos accidentally minted a little extra for the PayPal sable coin about three hundred trillion, But guess what, within thirty minutes it was resolved. But the important thing is we all saw it at the same time on the pards of the blockchain data. We saw, hey, something, what's going on here?
Why is this much of that stable coin minted? And then you know, they announced, hey, an errow is made, and we saw when it was burned. You can't have that transparency at a bank. There's no way you would know that.
I think those kind of things happen all the time, not necessarily at the scale of three hundred trillion, but I think that there's a lot of manipulation and not necessarily rule breaking, but rule setting activity within the legacy financial system, and there's sort of an inherent capability for people in the legacy financial system to rig the game
to benefit themselves. And you don't really see that happening in real time the way you see it happening in crypto, and people track things on the blockchain all the time. You know, suspicious activity gets flagged all the time, and that transparency, for me, I think you would agree, is a real game changer.
For financial markets in general.
Yeah. Absolutely, Now, obviously you guys got a lot on you know, you're working on obviously the Coinbase partnership rollout and much more. What else is on your road map that you want to highlight.
We've already launched, as I said before, Ethereum and Solana staking. We're going to be adding Cardono staking, which is really really exciting for our clients, and hopefully we can get that done in the next couple of months before the end of the year. We're going to be offering some new features through our non retirement accounts, such as the ability to add beneficiaries to the account, which would allow people to utilize that account as like an estate planning tool,
which is really cool. We're going to be launching new account types. We'd love to be able to offer accounts for businesses and for people that have trusts and LLCs, which we think, you know, allowing institutions to participate on our platform and get access to those same security features that our retail clients covet is something that's really for us,
and we're just going to keep building. We're going to look for new opportunities for people to be able to generate income on their money in a in a risk managed compliant way with full disclosure, and we're just going to keep moving the ball forward. When it comes to innovation, that's really great.
I love that adding new assets and I love the additional features, so I'm excited for those to roll out as a user and even explore how I can leverage them as you know, having a trust and things like that. So that's really cool, Jared, great stuff. Love what you
¶ Wrap up questions
guys are doing. I got some wrap up questions here for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
Hmm, If I can create my own metaverse, what would the theme be? It's a really really good question. I would love to do something through through sports. I think that when you look at I remember like the Golden
State Warriors. I'm not sure if they still do this or if they if they've been doing it the who whole time, but they offer the virtual reality court side seats, and I would love to see more of that within sports in general, to just have a metaverse where you can be able to and I'd even be willing to pay some sort of monthly subscription for this, but the ability to like feel like you're at the game, and
they really make this look easy. There's so many of these, like bars and restaurants where you can pay like one hundred bucks to go on a Saturday and feel like you're watching Manchester United play because they have a camera set up in the stadium. And I would love to be able to do that, to just kind of hop from stadium to stadium and feel like I'm going to
all these sporting events through some sort of metaverse. And you know, obviously the tickets could be NFTs and there's a lot of different cool ways that you can utilize crypto technology through that sort of offering.
As a sportsman, I would love that as well to be able to do that. Rapid fire questions.
Favorite food, sushi, favorite musician or band, believe it or not, Like that's such a hard question for me, not because I listened to so much music, but because I'm just not a connoisseur when it comes to something like that. But someone was playing Santa Ria earlier and I really enjoyed that.
So a really good song.
Yeah, for sure, favorite movie Gladiator, favorite.
Book, favorite book, Lords of Finance. This is actually the way I got into crypto. I didn't get into crypto because someone was like this crypto isn't to change the world,
or bitcoin is going to change the world. I got into crypto by reading Lords of Finance, because Lords of Finance is about how central bankers over the last three hundred years have manipulated the system and made a lot of wonky moves that have impacted fiat currency and how it's led to wars and impacted wars, and it led to famine and countries, and it led to a lot of excess in other countries and just destabilized the world.
And by reading that and learning the history of that, that actually orange pilled me in a lot of ways. So that was a really fascinating way for me to get into crypto. Lords of Finance.
You know, Jared, I'm gonna have to check that out because I read the Creature from JACKI Liland right and the creation of the Fed and you know all that stuff. I've never heard of the Lord of Fining, So I'm gonna check that out. Thank you for that recommendation there. I highly recommend And when you're not working, I trust what are you doing for fun?
Family? It is a lot of family stuff, you know.
I got a I have a seven year old, and I have a four month old, so a lot, a lot of family stuff right now. We're getting into skating, so I actually roller skated for the first time. That might be the last time I do it. I think I'm gonna have to pick up a pair of roller blades.
But just spending a lot of time with family. As you know, I'm super into crypto and I'm super into sports, and you know, between all of those different things, and you know, now fantasy football, I you know, kind of have my hands tied.
Awesome, Jared Pleasure. Really looking forward to the future updates A on I trust. Thank you so much for joining me, Thanks for having me.