iTrustCapital & Coinbase's BIG Plans for Bitcoin Yield! with Jared Feldman

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
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

(00:42):
Edward and joining me is Jared Felman, who is the
SVP of Operations at I Trust Capital. Jared, great to
have you.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Thanks for having me. It's really nice to be here.
Happy Friday.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
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
us a bit about yourself and how'd you end up
in working at I Trust.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Absolutely for those of you who have not heard of us.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
I Trust Capital is a platform for investing in digital
assets as well as precious metals.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
We have physical gold and physical silver.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
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

(01:39):
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

(02:01):
twenty one with I Trust Capital to be able to
merge and marry my traditional legacy financial planning background with
the digital asset space.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, and I trust offers a unique way to invest
in assets like precious metals and crypto Tell us about
the investment products you have and the benefits of using
I trust is services.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
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

(02:45):
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,

(03:07):
not your crypto mindset, and we have a lot of
respect for that, and there is a lot of merit
for that.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
But the truth is is that.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
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.

(03:37):
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,

(04:02):
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

(04:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
We also couple that.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
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

(05:24):
that's for digital assets, but like for precious metals like
gold and silver and so forth, how are you custoding
those assets?

Speaker 1 (05:31):
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

(05:54):
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.

(06:17):
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,

(06:40):
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

(07:03):
program that we offer on our platform.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
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

(07:38):
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

(07:59):
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

(08:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
It gives us a lot of pride.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
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
us a bit about the IRA setup and the tax
benefits and things like that. In going this rep.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
It's a lot more capital efficient and.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
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

(09:43):
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.

(10:05):
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

(10:28):
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

(10:51):
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

(11:14):
is a really powerful mechanism for people that are saving
for retirement.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
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

(11:40):
news this week that you partner up with the folks
at coinbase to offer bitcoin yield. Tell us a bit
about that.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
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,

(12:11):
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

(12:32):
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

(12:54):
Coinbased Asset Management to partner with them to offer a
managed strategy to produce yield on bitcoin.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
This is a.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
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

(13:25):
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

(13:48):
it's exciting.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
And then for folks who have an existing IRA or
four one K, can they roll that over to I
Trust's self directed IRA.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yes, there's three ways to fund a retirement account with
I Trust Capital.

Speaker 3 (14:02):
You can do a four to one K rollover. People.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
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

(14:28):
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

(14:48):
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

(15:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Jared, Recently, we've seen the Trump administration open up for
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.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
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

(15:59):
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

(16:19):
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

(16:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, and that helps. Seeing makes sense. You know. One
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.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
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

(17:50):
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

(18:10):
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

(18:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, it's exciting to see what's happening. And you know,
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.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
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

(19:25):
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

(19:46):
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

(20:09):
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

(20:31):
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,

(20:51):
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

(21:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
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

(21:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
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

(22:33):
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

(22:55):
a real game changer.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
For financial markets in general.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
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

(23:30):
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

(23:52):
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,

(24:15):
that's really great.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
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
guys are doing. I got some wrap up questions here
for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse,

(24:36):
what would the theme be?

Speaker 1 (24:39):
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

(25:00):
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

(25:20):
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

(25:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
As a sportsman, I would love that as well to
be able to do that. Rapid fire questions.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
So a really good song.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, for sure, favorite movie Gladiator, favorite.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
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

(26:43):
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

(27:04):
get into crypto. Lords of Finance.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
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?

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Family? It is a lot of family stuff, you know.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
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,

(27:45):
and you know, between all of those different things, and
you know, now fantasy football, I you know, kind of
have my hands tied.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
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.

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iTrustCapital & Coinbase's BIG Plans for Bitcoin Yield! with Jared Feldman

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