Transcript+
What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of darkness, 1974198792972000 and whatever we're going to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we. Sell, I say, when we sell. The topic for today's conversation is preserving wealth in the digital age. And so just to since we have a handful of us on the call today, I can just go around the horn on behalf of everyone and then I'll hand it over to Michael to kick us off here. So from the on ramp side, we have Michael Tanguma, who I'm assuming most of you would be familiar with Co founder, CEO of the business, Cam Stromi, who leads our private wealth team. And so if you are an existing on ramp client, more likely than not you've spoken to Cam at least some point in the future or the the past and Brian Cabela's who leads our strategy and research efforts. Brian, nice to see you as well. And then Brahm Consign, who is a great partner to the firm. He runs Bitcoin for millennials. He's one of the most trusted independent thought leaders in the space and also Co host the broadcast with Brian and Michael for those of you who may have checked out that podcast before. So thank you all for joining us today. I'm excited for this conversation. The best place for us to start, and I'll pull up the presentation as I hand it over to Michael is we want to talk about the why. So we're talking about on Ramp Finance today. This product was launched officially almost 3 weeks ago now. And in my opinion, before Michael, you go ahead and and get started here. It really pulls together the client experience. And so I really think of the word unification as a great way to describe the why behind launching On Ramp Finance. Many of you know us for a long term preservation of wealth, security, inheritance, insurance and on Ramp Finance really acts as the glue to pull together the rest of the client experience. But Michael, I want to hand it over to you. Share more about the vision, share more about the launch of On Ramp Finance and maybe even before that, if you just want to kind of give a little bit more context behind the business, wherever you'd like to start, please go ahead. Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for anybody joining and who's going to tune in. And then also Brahm, you know, it's later and Brahm's been a great partner. Think we started similar times with his journey kind of building his podcast and following an on ramp. So it's been great to find aligned partners. Jackson's a real pro because he he, you know, acts like he hasn't been talking to us. We just literally got finished with a podcast, the last Trade with Josh Fair, an individual that's super sophisticated on the gold side. And I'm bringing it up because a reminds me of very early days when Cam and I were building out on chain. And you know, you get on a call on a consultation and you reference this huge team that was going to go build or work with you on concierge and then you or somebody else right next to you was on the concierge call. So we just got down with the pod and now we're doing this. And where that all ties together with all of this is one, a lot of these products and services have fundamentally been built for ourselves scratching around it. We've been in this space for a very long time. We've kind of grown up I think when I met Cam he had two children Now he has three. I didn't have any. I have two and and the team here has all grown their families have grown their personal responsibilities have grown in custody had really not done that. And we have been on boarding thousands of people, billions of dollars in capital, realizing that if we truly, because we, I would like to think we're principled individuals, anybody here, including Brom, who's an extension of our team. We want to build products and services that are fundamental to the value problem of Bitcoin, but also help existing holders navigate their life. But then how do we expect the next 10 thousand, 100,000 millions of people? And there's a reality. We're still so early that the products haven't caught up. Whether it's on the custody side, you have to pick between managing your own asset or trusting a third party or on just how do you think about preserving wealth? It's getting harder and harder out there. Good buddy Parker has his, you know, monthly or quarterly inflation index with the rib eye and we saw last night, I think it's another 20% increase. And so there's this reality that we can play defense and we can wait for the market to buy material amounts of Bitcoin and then learn about all the ales and maybe lose their assets at a block fi equivalent, which we saw and then find us and grow our business that way. Or we can play offense and we can go build better effective quote mousetraps ways for individuals to participate participate in on ramps ecosystem in an introductory way. And that's really what spurred honor and finance was this notion of post genius act. All the different administration like introductions to favorability or you know, feeling OK with this asset class allowed for a Bitcoin company to provide dollar in cash equivalents next to Bitcoin financial products, along with a bunch of other things. And that's really the like confluence of events that was around honor and finance. It ties into people not being able to preserve the wealth, not having a good counterparty to unify that experience and then have an ability to not play hot potato and ultimately as they grow that percentage of Bitcoin holdings to be able to not have to leave the ecosystem and just go into long term cold storage under in finance. For anybody that's not familiar, it offers up to 5% earning on your cash and a half percent on any card swipes, Iras, lowest cost Bitcoin brokerage, gold allocations in a physical component and then the lending component through Arch. And then over time, we'll be adding more financial services to that. So I'll pause there and see if Jackson wants to add anything or if we want to open up to moving. On Yeah, I would like to Michael, get your thoughts on going back to the custody. So I think it was in the blog that you authored as part of the launch here kind of the vision behind multi institution custody and really the way that you thought about building the business. So custody was not an afterthought. It wasn't something that was bolted on to the rest of the financial services that are offered at on ramp. Why did we have to start with custody first and foremost? And could you tell us more about just how you think about multi institution in the landscape of other solutions? Yeah. So I mean this really, really was an inflection point that I, I viscerally experienced and I think Cam did. And anybody that was around the space, especially if you were working, because you saw a lot of people lose money, people that you knew, and then also people that lost credibility around 22, it was Q3Q4 with FTX, Celsius and blocked by those entities blew up. And the acknowledgement, at least on my side, was we had a deep market structure problem with Bitcoin because if we looked at how much friction existed with somebody trying to get a material allocation of Bitcoin and then preserve it in managing hardware devices to file distribution, why it's all these things that associated. It was not going to be scalable for the masses to come in that way. And if we expected trillions of dollars to come in once the industry got cleaned up and the ETFs came, this was kind of like the vision in 22 was that we were going to get pushed into to centralized custodians. Now, it sounds good on face value if every custodian never lost the asset, didn't do anything funny with it and had complete transparency. But we know that's not the case. And also anybody here that's underwritten, you know, Bitcoin and look at his trajectory, I find it hard to believe you didn't have to at least study some level of gold. I think the Bitcoin standard gives a good like recap on how gold got to where it is an ultimate where it failed, it failed at that centralization point. And so it was a real like potentially existential, look, it's kind of a heady thing to think, but like there was an existential situation, situation where we were headed down that path. And we've kind of seen this already with the amount of assets, centralizing the amount of capital coming in, because as the asset grows, it gets harder to put 10 Bitcoin on a hardware device versus, you know, a third party custodian. And there was just this reality that this had to exist. And then obviously, the business opportunity, I think everything works, including Bitcoin on the sense of like 1 component preservation opportunity and as other component for, for greed or preserving. Well, similar here. We live in a capitalistic society and I looked at there's a huge opportunity. It worked for Bitcoin, but it also worked for us to really build what we think is it potentially A generational business off of the backs of standardizing effectively custody and then offering this to a larger market once it becomes the null. Appreciate those thoughts there. Brian, I want to get you looped in. And then just before we do, I want to call out as well for people that are tuned in right now, please drop questions in the Q&A because we'll leave a good amount of time here at the end to get as through as many of those as possible. And so, Brian, if I could segue it to you then being the Chief Strategy Officer of On Ramp, being from the very early days, Brian, Cam myself, we've we've been together of course with Michael for quite some time now. And so, Brian, I would love to hear from your vantage point just as the firm has evolved overtime, how you kind of think about the evolution of not only the custody landscape, but also of the business in the context of on ramp finance. Could you speak more just about the competitive landscape, how you think about things today? Where are we going and all that? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Jackson. I think and Michael sort of touched on this in terms of the foundations of the business being centered around custody. I think a large disconnect and and I sort of learned this from my prior experience in the traffic by world and then spending a year at Coinbase before I I joined Michael to build on ramp. But there's a large disconnect in that people perceive and view Bitcoin as just another asset. Typically they don't think about its unique characteristics in terms of it being a digital bearer asset. And so they try to basically, you know, mold solutions that look like things they've done in the past. So for other, other assets. And that just doesn't work. And we've seen that over the past 17 years of single counterparties, over a long enough time frame, we'll have a single point of failure. And the big difference with Bitcoin is that if if there is a failure, there's no recourse. You can't just, you know, remit the shares per SE. And so that's a real market structure problem as Michael highlighted. And so that's why this business was founded and so focused on specifically figuring out a superior custody architecture first and foremost, because if you don't figure that out, then you can't have a material long term allocation to this asset with any level of confidence. And frankly, like that's what has kept a lot of people out of it, whether it's high net worth, individuals, institutions, or even just your average day saver. They hear the stories of a hard drive landing in a landfill that hear, they hear the stories of exchange hacks and they say, how could I ever get a material exposure of this asset and know that it's going to be there in 50 years, pass it along to my kids, etcetera. And so you needed to figure out basically a fault tolerant and redundant solution. And that's what we've built with multi institution custody. And that allows us now to evolve to this next stage of basically being a one stop shop for more of someone's actual total financial lives. Because even if you're super convicted in Bitcoin, you have even a majority of your net worth stored in the asset, you still likely need to operate in dollars to some extent. And so it's something that Michael and I talked about really since the early days of like at some point we need to tighten the fidelity between dollars and Bitcoin and have it be very easy to go in between these things because even just a couple years ago, it wasn't that easy to go in between those things. And so as we move to this world, as Michael mentioned, with the Genius Act, Clarity Act coming and just like overall the adoption of digital rails, I think it's easy for some two people in the Bitcoin camp to look at all of this development and progress and say, well, this is about crypto, it's not Bitcoin. Well, the reality is that this is all good for Bitcoin because it normalizes these things. It normalizes digital rails. And so that's what we're seeing play out in real time right now. And so we have to start with the foundation of custody and now we can sort of build around that in terms of expanding the financial services that someone needs to basically live their lives on a Bitcoin standard, but still interact with dollars, maybe even have exposure to gold. And then the one thing I'll mention as well is I think the huge opportunity for what we're doing with on rent finance also rests in basically what we're not doing. And it's it's, it speaks to sort of the broader financial winds of the rest of the market. So whether you're looking at a coin base or Robin Hood or any of these other platforms that are also trying to be, you know, your financial platform of, of that does everything, they are moving in a much different direction in terms of speculation, high velocity, moving people out, the risk curve prediction markets, all these things that we hear about that are becoming popular eyes because people don't think that they can actually just save money. And so we're taking, you know, a a very different stance in that like you can preserve and grow your value in a much more conservative manner just by holding hard assets, Bitcoin and gold transacting in dollars when you need to earning on your dollars better than you would in a traditional bank account. Like these are the principled conservative steps to actually preserve and grow value into the long term. And all of that is underpinned by this extremely robust security model for actual long term Bitcoin storage. It all plays together and it all sort of speaks to this evolution of the firm, which really I think was always part of the plan in terms of you've got to start with custody first. We've got to figure out that market structure and then you build around that from a financial services perspective. Yeah, well said. I mean, I definitely resonate with Brian. The theme that you spoke to just in terms of gambling, one of the soup du jours, one of the fastest growing financial sectors. I think if I could distill a lot of what you and Michael have shared so far is really wanting to stand in opposition of that and providing A venue for people to work hard, protect their family, store their savings in something that is scarce, durable, appreciates over time. And so these are really just aspects of sound financial planning, right? Like none of this is novel in terms of how we'd think about building a business. But I think what is important to highlight is the fact that most of the financial services industry is going in the other direction. A lot of these businesses that opened up, quote UN quote, democratization of financial markets have ended up offering like prediction markets on platform have been pushing sports gambling notifications to their users. And so I would also argue the fact that, yes, of course, we want to build the best Bitcoin financial services versus business, but we also want to build the best money business. We want to build the best business where people can use their dollars saving Bitcoin allocate to gold, saving gold as well. To Michael's point, we just had an interesting conversation that it will be released tomorrow with Josh Fair. And, and it's very clear that gold and Bitcoin are going to play a very prominent role in the in the monetary system of the future. And so really we are a firm that is really trying to facilitate for our clients sound financial planning. And that is why we started with custody. And to your point, to Michael's point, that needs to be rock solid because if you are serious about Bitcoin and it becomes a foundation of bedrock of your family's financial life or your business's financial life, if that is not in a tight spot, if it's not something that you can secure reliably for the next 5-10, twenty, 50 years. And it really is all for nothing. We are a firm that's focused on sound financial planning. And this is really something that is going to persist for decades, for centuries, for millennia. This is not going to change. This is fundamental to how someone is thinking about their future. And Brahm, I would love to get you involved now because you've been a partner of the firm for I want to say probably close to two years, maybe 18 months, but to be more precise. Would love to hear your thoughts as someone who has remained independent in the space, has been having hundreds and hundreds of conversations with individuals, with businesses, with professional investors. Why, you know, what were you kind of drawn to about the relationship here? What are some of the things that are on your mind in the context of individuals navigating Bitcoin, financial services, custody, etcetera? I know it's a big question, but I'd love to just kind of open it up to hear your initial thoughts and then I can certainly ask you other questions as we get further down the road there. Sure, thanks. Well, I think it's kind of starts with, you know, whenever someone this discovers Bitcoin and, and eventually understands, you know, that they can truly hold their own wealth. I think there's a, there's a really big shift and kind of like learning curve that takes place, right? Like I used to work in Transfi like 8 years ago and I would always walk into the big shiny headquarters in Amsterdam. But I had my little Bitcoin pin on, on my backpack and always felt, you know, like this, this intruder that was like in the belly of the beast basically. And there were all these projects around blockchain and whatever, but no one ever really saw or what Bitcoin could bring. And logically, I think Pratfi is late to the game in terms of getting getting to Bitcoin, but also Ford for the wrong reason. So I see there's a huge opportunity for Bitcoin native financial companies like like on Ramp with people at the helm that truly understand Bitcoin to its deepest level to kind of like take over that role, I would say of track fire and kind of like usher in this this new age of Bitcoin. And you know, obviously this is going to to take a long time. So I hope Michael is how do you say that like enough stamina and and you guys right, But I love how you guys started out with, you know, a very specific solution to I think the custody problem, where I kind of view it as, you know, there are different people that have different risk profiles. They will self custody to a certain degree, or maybe they will just start with on ramp, right? But eventually I think most people will diversify the way that they are are storing their Bitcoin. That's one I think. And the next thing with with what you guys are launching now, and and I talked with Michael about this before. I'd like I have an international business. I'm using, for example, a wise, which was a transfer wise, right? Like they have a card, I'm using strife. I think there's a stripe card coming. I have sometimes I have Bitcoin, etcetera. And I would love to have a place where this is more consolidated, right, But with Bitcoin at its core. And yeah, I think I think that's what you you guys are now, you know, transitioning into which I think is very positive because eventually, you know, when you are on on a Bitcoin standard yourself or with your company, that is kind of like the foundation on which you want to operate, right. So if bit by bit and overtime you can actually move away from from trap fi, you know, more into actually planning and living on a Bitcoin standard that, you know, that is something that I think should be built. Now, obviously there's a there's a lot of competition with all different kinds of, you know, storage solutions. But I think in the case of on ramp, it is a very unique approach that I think you guys are are slowly also perfecting, right? Yeah, I just think it's a, it's a very interesting option for people to actually use when they're moving toward the Bitcoin standard. Yeah, appreciate that bro. One thing to share and this kind of ties in that I left out there. Part of like I'm learning when you're really building a business, big component is to always check the biases and and try to remain as objective as possible. And in a case like an example is I I naively thought everyone was going to hold their keys. I thought collaborative custody was a feature was this nice middle ground between not having to take all of that control, but also not trust in a third party And through the years in a lot of is working. You know, I have this famous anecdote of onboarding somebody with a cold card into collaborative custody and then helping the individuals older. And there used to be this little like millimeter gap between where the SD card and we got to the end of the hour and a half process and he pushed it between that millimeter gap and lost the the SD card. It was done like we lost the whole the whole setup. And it wasn't just that experience. It was like multiple looking at it, realizing that like there has to be a better way and that it's, it's hard to articulate, but if you, you know, just think about it, or at least like you'll see this in the future. I really believe that custody, the fact that somebody cannot wrap their mind and hands around a digital bearer asset and how it can be custody keeps them and prevents them from adopting Bitcoin. And the subconscious level is they look at it as just a speculative asset because everything they hear is somebody's losing it somewhere, whether it's North Koreans, whether it's FTX or whether it's a landfill. And so ultimately, long term, if we're going to get everyone in, you have to standardize it where they don't have to think about it the same way. You open up a computer or the browser or your phone and it just works. And you know that something's not going to get in the middle between you and accessing sensitive information. And the easy example is like, think about how many people in your lives and maybe some aren't necessarily there themselves. Would you rather just like taking inflating dollar as bad as it is versus losing all your money and parking it in this thing that you can't wrap your head around? And so that's really like the underpinnings. The beauty to Brahms point being diplomatic is like where we're interesting is we solve salt, we solve things for people to have 3000 Bitcoin in the same way we solve things that for somebody buying their first Bitcoin, you don't really see that in the market. Like that's either you're on to something niche and it's never going to exist or it's going to be that like a future standard in the way I see it because. Because you ultimately need to build things for the people that need it most today. That's how you stay alive. But then you need to have a grasp and remain objective into how are the rest of the market going to come in when you see the third party ruggings, whether it's a volatility, the liquidity, the hacks and then people will ultimately go to the most fault tolerant trust, minimize solution. And that's what I think we're building here. It's very well said. And it is something that we see every single day, just dealing with our clients. And it really is a challenge. I mean, Brahm, you touched on one aspect of it, just like fragmentation and as an individual having to navigate the space for a number of years, everyone that we've spoken to pretty much, unless it's someone who's met new to the space, everyone who's been around for, call it a year to 10 or more has had this challenge of avoiding all the potholes, the pitfalls that exists. And effectively, we've had to play hot potato with the Bitcoin. And to tie it into Michael's point, I really do feel confident in saying that this is the only solution that actually scales from the person who just got into Bitcoin and is unlikely to ever figure out how to manage their own keys, especially as that allocation grows, which is actually most people. And that's why you're seeing so much excess with ETFs. It's why you saw so much interest with the treasury companies. It's why the Charles Schwab, the Fidelity's are launched Bitcoin brokerage and are going to be wildly successful is because there is a ceiling to the amount of people who can technically and confidently manage their own keys. And the other aspect of that is that's for the net new person, for the person who's been involved for 10 years that may have 10 Bitcoin, 100 Bitcoin, 1000 Bitcoin. We work with them all. It has been incredibly challenging to keep that secure for a decade and imagine the next decade 2-3, etcetera, as the stakes just grow over time. I think that's an aspect that a lot of people don't appreciate. Appreciate is Bitcoin is becoming more valuable. And what does that mean? That means the incentives are in favor for more attacks to happen. Michael, I forget if it was on this webinar or another conversation you had today, about like 5% or so of North Korea's GDP is actually from stealing people's digital assets. And so you can imagine like that's just one group, the Lazarus group. But you can imagine that in a future state where Bitcoin continues to appreciate meaningfully, maybe sovereigns are adopting, financial institutions are doing so already, the incentive for physical tax, for digital tax only increases. And so I really think we are well ahead of the curve in terms of thinking about these different threat vectors and how you're going to want to protect yourself, your family, your business against those. And with that, I want to hand it over to Cam. I mentioned at the top of this call leads our private wealth team. Cam's been helping thousands of clients over the past half a decade at this point. Families, businesses, institutions navigate this space from the first purchase to the hundreds, the thousands of Bitcoin on a corporate balance sheet or even individuals trying to manage this. And so Cam, could you please speak to your point of view as it relates to the the significance of on ramp finance? How are clients that you're already working with using it? How are kind of net new clients coming into the fold and and getting interested in it? Could you give us a little bit of context around the conversations that you're having and the perspectives that you have? Yeah, thanks. Jackson it's it is, you know, definitely doing a walk down memory lane as Michael mentioning some of those early days at Unchained and thinking about all the clients we've helped since then, when, you know, we've been fortunate to be able to serve thousands of clients through the last five years plus. So for us as operators of the business, it's so helpful because we don't have to really wonder too much about what clients need what, what you all need, what you, what's working for you and what's not. We feel like we have a better lends than most because of all these client conversations and people telling us how about how they've lost Bitcoin or how they've almost lost it or what's working really well for them. But one thing is clear that this theme of unification or consolidation, this is really a big one. And so I think about it in if three different kind of concepts here where multi institution custody that actually allows people to consolidate their Bitcoin for the first time because that's been like that age-old adage of you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. People have had to spread their custody around into a few different solutions because they couldn't get comfortable enough typically with one solution because either they realize that their counterparty was the single point of failure or they were the single point of failure. So having three custodians all working together solves that need. Then the kind of the second concentric circle outside of that in terms of consolidating is being able to consolidate Bitcoin financial services into one platform. So years ago we added trade, we added IRA's, we've added Bitcoin back loans, we've added inheritance planning and insurance all within to one account. And then this honor of finance is really the expression of of now the kind of that third layer where clients can add dollars and gold in one account and further consolidate their financial life. So I had to ex post go out recently and usually my post don't get a whole lot of traction like Jackson's or Brahms do. But this one really hit for me anyway. And it really keyed on this notion that clients are really trying to consolidate where they want to keep their Bitcoin. But ultimately, that has just been really tough over the years and that's what finance allows. Yeah, appreciate. That Cam, if you were able to, if we could segue into just giving a little bit more of a behind the scenes on what the dashboard actually does, how do people use it? I think that'll help people to start to map what we're describing today to how that actually comes to life. So I'm going to pull my presentation off the screen here, give you a second to get it situated. And what Cam will pull up is a demo account. So you can actually get a sense of the functionality that lives within the platform from custody to inheritance. We could even talk about insurance, earn accounts, trade, et cetera. But Cam, I'll hand it back over to you if you can walk us through here. Sure. So. This really, and this is an example of the on ramp dashboard. I mean, you've got your primary vault here at the top and you've got your finance options here at the bottom. So right here, this is one of the biggest evolutions I would say in Bitcoin in general, where you can buy Bitcoin in the same place where you can have your cold storage. You can fund your account by moving cash into it either via ACH or wire, buy Bitcoin and then move it into your long term cold storage. So for most people on this call, that in itself has been an absolute nightmare of having to buy Bitcoin from Coinbase or some exchange and then having to move it off that platform in the cold storage. So what you can do by contrast, is go into my trade account, buy Bitcoin by first moving in cash via the wire transfer or now via ACH transfer in all 50 states. Once my account is funded with cash, I can buy and then I can move the Bitcoin from my trade wallet into my primary vault, which is the multi institution custody vault. So we've made trade much, much easier. We've got Iras now on multi institution custody where you can safely park your retirement savings for the long term in a segregated on main multi institution custody account. We've got our earn a product. So if you're looking to buy rib eyes in the near future and you're looking at Parker's inflation metric and wondering how am I going to be able to afford that? Hopefully you have a good amount of Bitcoin, but also for any dollars that you have, those can earn up to 5% back in your earn account. We have a card coming out where you can earn up to 1.5% back and you accept it anywhere Visa is accepted. It's a debit card that earns cash back rewards which then are compounded in your earn account as well. We have an excellent loan partnership with the Arch team. We had practically since the inception where you can post your Bitcoin as collateral. It's never rehypothecated. We made a major improvement yesterday to the interface so that anyone who has both an on ramp account and an arch account will be able to to view the health of their loan right in this account. It within their on ramp dashboard, the loan to value ratio, health of the loan, your collateral amount and your principal. All right here. Soon you'll be able to see as a fast follow the gold exposure. So we've out have a partnership with Argo in Canada, world class gold firm holding physical gold, which you can also request delivery of. So the we'll release more details once that partnership is live in the application. But all the same principles that you and I would want in Bitcoin, we've applied that to our partnership with Argo as well. So a lot we can say here. There's inheritance built in. You can see that the multi institution custody vaults are insured through Lloyd's of London. Would love to chat with anybody one-on-one who wants to go into detail see how these flows work. But the general idea is that again we've made the money flows between dollars and Bitcoin and then soon gold far easier and then all within one platform. You just say a. Few quick things to to touch on. We we easily gloss over some of these aspects. I think an easy example is the IRA. The IRA, I think it's fair to say like market for Bitcoin is fundamentally broken because you have this long duration asset you're planning generally not to touch for roughly 20 to 30 years if longer and no custodian has existed that long and it's generally how best practice from an IRS perspective. So you have to throw that trust there or there are products unless you take delivery of it and then you have to still manage those hardware devices for 30 years coupled with are you breaking any kind of like IRS guidance? That example is kind of just like broken kind of market structure as it relates to long term preservation of the asset in similar to loans, we fundamentally believe the best loans in the future of loans will be on multi institution custody. We've experienced our previous firm not one single dollar on loan loss is built on this architecture. That's what we're working on. But one other example just to call out is Kim rightfully said, you know, you can buy Bitcoin deliver, move it over into multi institution custody. But the next step in the next few weeks is you're going to be able to buy directly out of earn. So earning up, you know, to 5%, but then DCA or buy directly large amounts into multi institution from that. So up until the point you're earning, you'll be able to buy get deposited and then the reverse as well be able to sell that Bitcoin and have it deposited back into your earn account. The last thing I'll say is, again, we're starting to get these rails in with dollars, but I fully have the ambitions to have our team be able to deliver best in class money movement because at the end of the day, nobody's really happy with their financial service partner, whether it's a fintech or it's an existing Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab. I mean, there's some of the worst when you think about like just user experiences, let alone how do you actually have the ability to move? What kind of reporting I think of Mercury is like that Gold Star or gold standard for if you're a business in the type of experience you get all the way to the wires are part of the solution. You have to pay as you're sending money out. That same experience will come into this platform and then you start to slice away at, OK, if you hold Bitcoin, will you have a multiple bank accounts? Will you can get rid of those bank accounts because not only do you get better ability to earn rewards, but you can move those in a way that's easier, seamless and it just has a better experience. Similar with Iras lending, there's a mortgage product that we've been actively working on for individuals that have long term Bitcoin exposure and now want to go and get that mortgage, but historically haven't been able to recognize that underlying capital. Again, ties back into the architecture because if you're going to manage a loan for a mortgage for 10/20/30 years, you naturally need to know if the underlying is secure that long. So there's a lot embedded in here and there will be a lot more common in the future. Just one. Final thing came to, we'll go ahead. And then if you could after that, just show the inheritance real quick, just because I know that's typically a reason why someone may be interested in working with us for sure. And I thought. Of two other things that I figured we would get questions on in terms of buying Bitcoin, you can make bark, you can place market buys, but you can also place limit orders now. So this is huge. I think about my own experience, I had a solution or two for custody. I would sometimes use Gemini because I could place limit orders there and I didn't like that because you know they do crypto and do other things and then dollar cost averaging recurring buys run river or another platform and we'll be adding recurring buys in the next, call it 4 weeks. So we really are collapsing all these services, whether you want to make a large OTC purchase at the lowest rate with best execution and lowest spreads or you want to place a smaller order via ACH or recurring orders, that's all coming into the platform here. And then 2, Michael and I have wanted this forever as well, an easier way for folks to start to partner with us where it didn't require so much on on the front end. So what I mean by that is if you want, you can create an on M finance account at no cost. It takes you 10 minutes to go through the onboarding. You can do that very easily. There's nothing technical required. You're signing DocuSign agreements and you're looking at a dashboard like this. So if you want go through the onboarding, select the on ramp finance tier. You'll see everything here except for the multi institution custody vault. And then if you ever want to upgrade or when you're ready to upgrade and start storing some Bitcoin for the long term with us, just contact us and we will help you to add that multi institution custody vault. But right off the bat, you can create it on ramp finance account, start buying or selling Bitcoin, use earn, sign up for the card, roll over an IRA and that's all available to you. OK, and then quickly I'll show the inheritance part too, because again, this is it looks so simple on its face, but this is one of the biggest reasons clients work with us. This is the one of the biggest innovations we've made in the entire industry. I think it's just kind of a something we've stumbled upon really in in part of this design service of multi institution custody and what it enables and what it enables is your wife, your spouse. If you die, they can just call. It's that simple. Like just being able to explain that to your spouse is it's an emotional thing. I've had clients tell me that their wives have hugged them after they've told them, hey, it's not on this device anymore. You can literally just call me or call this firm on ramp, they'll take care of you. You just show up, you provide a death certificate, your driver's license or passport. They will help you gain access to the Bitcoin. So we've solved for the possession here. What you do is you within a matter of a few minutes, you designate a primary indoor contingent beneficiaries. We're generating a legal transfer on death agreement for you. This agreement, this is a huge benefit as well, where your Bitcoin now avoids the probate process. It doesn't go through the public records. It's a fast, private smooth transfer. And then third is that your beneficiaries receive a step up in basis. So if bitcoins $500,000 in the day that you pass, that is the new basis that your beneficiaries benefit from. So inheritance comes with all core and private client accounts. The accounts with multi institution city. Excellent. Thank you, Cam. So we can pivot to QA just before we do real quick, I'm going to pull up back on my screen here the Genesis program. And then please, I do see some questions submitted, but please continue to ask some and we will get through as many as we can or all of them if time permits. So on the Genesis side, as part of the launch of on Ramp Finance, the Genesis program is the official launch offer where we have 210 seats allocated for net new clients that are interested in getting access to everything that we described today. The highest earn rate possible, 5% on the earn account, 1 1/2% cash back, you get 21,000 sets deposited. Michael, perhaps we could do a special code here webinar and Michael can determine how many more sets you'll get as part of the webinar, our promotion today. And then you also can get a free year of multi institution custody. Essentially, we're de risking the decision for you. I've had a number of people that have been in touch with us for some time. Really call this a no brainer because at the end of the day, Cam's point, you can get on board at 10:15-ish minutes and then you'll have access to all of this and you can actually start to get a feel for the platform. You can buy Bitcoin on the platform. You can. Move Bitcoin in from. A multi into your multi institution vault, you can move it back out, get a feel for how that flow of funds works. What's the verification process to move Bitcoin out of the vault, etcetera. So I put this on the table just because anyone who is joining who is not a client already, this is definitely something for you to consider while there still are spots remaining and unless Michael there's or Cam Brian Brahm, anything else before we pivot to questions, we can go ahead and get into those. All right, so I'm going to stop sharing my screen then and we can just do some questions. I can answer a handful of them, quarterback them as I see fit. And like I said, Q&A box down below, just submit them. So is it possible to roll over an existing Roth IRA to on ramp? And then also someone asked Traditional IRA is listed. Is there a Roth IRA option as well? So yes, we can support traditional Iras. We can support Roth Iras solo 401 KS, I believe Sep Iras as well. And if you already have an IRA that has a Bitcoin allocation, you can do a rollover in kind. So that's incredibly invaluable. It saves you from any time out of the market. It saves you from any transaction fees. And so yes, if you have an IRA already, you're able to move that Bitcoin over in kind. Kellen on our team leads the IRA product. He'll actually walk you through the entire process. I think it is very smooth. I've I've heard of our IRA accounts already being opened in one day. And so relative to the market, I think we have a really great experience here. And you'll have multi institution custody. And so to Michael's point, if you're thinking about a retirement account, if you're closer to retirement age, maybe you still have 5-10 years. If you have a long ways, you may have 20 or 30 or 40 years until that retirement. So multi institution really stands alone in terms of providing security and protection for your retirement assets. We also got a question about Genesis for new clients or is it also for existing? So it is for new clients. For existing clients already have access to everything on the account. So you have, you can sign up for the card on the wait list there you can actually set up the earn account already. It's just a few clicks and then you can start moving dollars in you can earn on the account for anyone who is interested in existing clients. If you want to reach out to me Jackson at on rampbitcoin.com, I'll make sure I get you on the list for some swag on ramp swag that Michael will personally ship to you and he'll deliver it on on horseback. And so that is another thing that we can give you as an existing client is some of that exclusive on ramp swag that's highly coveted. You can see Michael's got a nice jacket on today or Vasta can't tell. Any future plans for joint accounts and kid accounts? So that's a great question. I mean, at the end of the day, we're really trying to provide this solution for everyone in the family. And so while we don't have joint accounts necessarily on the road map yet, it is something that is starting to come up more and more. The best way to facilitate access for your family is what Cam described through the inheritance process. So one of you husband or wife can set the account up, have it in your name or you could have it in your trust name if you have a trust. And then you can set up the inheritance in just a few few minutes, a few clicks and be able to name your your spouse as the primary, your children as contingent beneficiaries and percentage allocations in terms of how you want to manage your inheritance plan. And just to add to that to Jackson. So if you do onboard a trust as the account holder, you can have multiple users on that account. So that is similar to a joint account where you and your wife could both have access to it and it's under the name of the trust. But if it's a personal or individual account, then it's just like Jackson said, One person's on the account and then list their beneficiaries. Yeah, the one. Thing to share is you can do this now under private clients we didn't touch on, but we have new custodial partners live and then others coming. And with Tetra Trust you have the ability to get enhanced permissions. One of them is being able to reconstitute that wallet so independent you can download that wallet, put it in the open source tool to know it's always there, takes on ramps trust out of the equation. If we ever disappear, those assets are secure. But also you get the ability to have multiple bolts because that's a user experience. You can imagine where you add multiple bolts to that and then you can label them and have those assets secured for other participants in the family. Thank you. We got. A question here on timelines around additional banking features such as bill pay, direct deposit, DCA, etcetera. I believe some of this is already live and then DCA. But Michael, if you want to speak to it, yeah, it's a great. Question. It's stuff we're actively working on because the DCA will be live I would say in the next maybe 2 weeks a little less. I know that we're already testing it out. The bill pay functionality a little behind the scenes is there's different functionality that's coming with FDIC insured deposit. So think of this is like traditional bank deposits. And then what's kind of have come with the post clarity or Genius Act, which is around this notion of partnering with the stripes of the world to offer bank like products, but they're sitting in treasuries. And ultimately why that's important is because they have different rails as it relates to like Fed wire, SWIFT international payments. And so right now we have a partnership with Stripe. We're actively talking with a few banks on bi directional partnership. So being able to offer them custody and then ultimately the banking as a service features where we basically collapse what it looks like to be a full-fledged bank to offer those deposits, lot of the direct deposits already Live Today. But ultimately being able to do a lot of those like pool payments for mortgage and other like products that you wouldn't naturally need a swipe for or want to do a like one time wire. So there's a lot that's coming because in that world it will be able to like our real vision is to be able to collapse multi institution just to do everything outside of it. There's no reason why if you have 100,000 to 1,000,000 and beyond, why you need to move the assets outside of that to take out a loan. Because if the collateral is already perfected with three independent institutions, you should be able to sign an additional legal agreement if you wanted a loan. Or taking a step further, if you wanted a card that had offered some credit for you to be able to spend your day-to-day life, you should be able to get credit based on that underlying custody. And then you can either roll that over, if you're OK with the interest, you can pay it off. You have more flexibility and similar. The last thing is on the mortgage side, we already did a beta on the mortgage. We have some T's and C's to cross before it's publicly announced, but that's a similar contract using multi institution working with a credit union that's recognizing that collateral in that vault that's issuing. I think the facility is over $100 million for clients of a firm to be able to actually put some of that BTC in a segregated wall it and it's very similar to the better construct with Coinbase where there's no liquidation, there's no volatility management. It's dual collateralized with the underlying mortgage coupled with the Bitcoin collateral. So we're actually working a lot of this for anybody that is just deeply interested or fall into space. There is just a real situation where the administration previous to this had really given a bad taste in the mouths of the banks and other firms scare to get involved in this space. So they're slowly waiting for everything to be clarified. Now the dollar movement stuff is in place when it comes to Bitcoin custody and banks. While theoretically they can do it, they're still tentative. Guidelines are waiting to be opened up again, little maybe too much information, but it has to do with collateralization ratios around dollars and then the Bitcoin that they would hold on balance sheet. So we're actively having conversations with these firms because they're actively seeking differentiated custody solutions for their clients. Because at the end of the day, right now, all that exists is a bank either builds this stuff, they're not going to do it. And then they basically the alternative is send it over to Coinbase. And a lot of firms understand that they're disintermediating themselves by going to Coinbase, but they also potentially, if there's ever an issue there, they're on the hook and that could be the end of their bank. And so they're being very thoughtful about the approach. Thanks, Michael. Appreciate that. Had a question on integration with Arch loans. So this person was asking just how easily are they managed on the dashboard? How does it all work? So I can speak to it and then Cam Michael, if you have any additional thoughts. But the first step was getting the Arch loans if you have an existing loan integrated into the on ramp dashboard that Cam showed earlier on this call. So now you'll be able to see your outstanding loan, the loan health. So in terms of where you're at from an LTV perspective, any thresholds you need to be aware of from a margin call or liquidation. And then this question is asking about topping up a Bitcoin collateral, borrowing more and kind of tapping into the loan when the LTV drops. And so right now it is managed. If you want to actually manage the loan, it is still through Arch, but that is being worked on currently. It's in the product pipeline in terms of having the API so you can access and manage all of it from the on ramp dashboard. I will say the at least from my perspective and I think I speak for the team here, there haven't been any issues with the Bitcoin volatility and liquidations of our clients. So even you guys may remember February 5th. I want to say when it was the, the 15% drawdown day where I thought the, I thought the world was going to end when Bitcoin moved briefly even below 60 Ki want to say. But even through the extreme volatility, the benefit you have working with us as we have close relationships with all of our clients. And so we're able to help manage your loan on your behalf in the sense of we're monitoring constantly liquidation levels, we're monitoring margin calls and we did not have any clients that were were liquidated on their Bitcoin back loans. And so I think that's an incredible testament just to how close we are with the client base, how we're able to help proactively manage collateral there and ensure that, you know, your Bitcoin stays safe and you're able to get that collateral back out of the loan when that time comes, you know anybody. That's listening, knows that. Throw like one. A little little jab it Jackson. This is the one Jackson really aged himself there because you know, that was like a a dip for ants. You try to go from 67 down to 17 or 14,000 and 22. And even that wasn't the scary one. It was 2020 going down to 3K thinking that this could actually go to to 0. This last dip was not too bad, but I think all the points still stand that Jackson reference that we're able to help facilitate that because if somebody's using US for multi institution arch, anybody managing a good lending book is using discretion, not just clicking a button because it hits a certain ratio. And that's the benefit or one of the benefits of having your assets next to that loan, that collateral. Well said. Brahm, question for you. Just in terms of being outside of the US, being in the in the Netherlands, like how do you kind of think about the landscape of options that exist? I think I'll, I'll speak from my perspective. We do have a lot of international clients. We have them all over Europe, Latin America, Australia, Middle East, Asia Pacific, etcetera. And I'm just curious like from your vantage point how you kind of think about the the range of solutions that are available because I think a lot of US based businesses are not actually able to facilitate services for international clients and we're kind of in a unique position there specifically from the custody perspective. Yeah, I saw I. Saw the question about you know are are Dutch citizens really liable now for Texas on unrealized gains? If so, how my Dutch on ramp lines be affected? I think there's a very interesting question. The the vote is still up for debate, right? So there's two houses in the parliament and it's it's still up for debate, but there's a lot of pushback on it. I actually got in touch or threw some people with two very well known Dutch billionaires, like tech guys who are actually really rounding people up and and making like some type of, you know, not not class action lawsuit, but like class action, like group action together. People are thinking about, you know, really moving their companies, threatening that to the government. So there's a there's there's really something going on. But why the question is interesting. And maybe I think Michael could allude to that too. I think from an international perspective, it's actually quite easy to to work with you guys, right. So obviously you know, anyone who has self custody can, can do that. But I think once you move into a solution like on ramp is offering the great way with Bitcoin obviously is that it's not physically anywhere. It's just as easy as as working with on ramp as it would with a European based companies. So there aren't really any barriers there, but I think Michael can add some nuance there. Yeah, the. Thing I'll share is some of our largest clients and largest clients are outside of the United States and it's an interesting dynamic because we just had this call with Josh Fair and he talks a lot about their have unique like regulatory construct being in a sovereign domiciled place in Wyoming. He'll articulate it better but it's this idea that people all over the world are parking gold in the depository there. I learned this over time when we had set up a Cayman entity. When you go set up the Cayman entity, you say, well, where do the, where do you park the dollars? And they say, well, in the US, that's where everyone does, even though you have the entity there. And it has to do with like that, for better or worse, the US is still regarded as the premier capital markets provider, but also like rule of law and construct to the point of what you guys talked about on the cap gain side. So a lot of people actually end up using US outside of the United States. We do have on our radar, there's a lot of firms across the main regulatory bodies. There's Mika, there's a DGM, there's a Singapore licensing, a few others, but ultimately like those firms leveraging our architecture so they can have the licensing and then have that as their counterparty if they wanted to. So there's a lot happening internationally, but the main point stands that if somebody's coming in specifically for self custody to something that we're offering, they can pick their different custodial keys and park their assets with us. All right, I think. We have one more here. Just a question, Michael, maybe you can kind of speak to just in terms of how we think about rolling out product. Someone asked about ACH deposits. It must be an existing client and asked about like instant clearing of ACH deposits versus where we currently are. If you can just speak to like how things you know how you think about product release here, creation of the business and kind of where you see this all going in terms of building out like the best flow of funds between dollars, Bitcoin, gold, etcetera. Yeah, I think. It's a good. Question. There's different flows we're refining. We've always taken the stance of like we get the product out there and then we ultimately refine it based on the client feedback in the user experience. And right now specifically, I think what this is referring to is if somebody's not wiring in capital, they are linking up to executed trade and there's just a fundamental clearing which is, you know between 24 to 72 hours before that ACH transfer from like a compliance risk mitigation. We can collapse that somewhat. It's relied on our counterparty wires are generally best if you're going to do larger transactions. But the benefit to all that is as we get more demand, we can go and refine that process to either tighten it or where would that we want this all to go is if we build the best experience for clients dollars to manage their cash mean so they can wire out so they can spend and earn, so they can get rewards. Then theoretically you start to take out a lot of the constructs of how long does it take to get into ACH, how many days and it's already sitting there. So we're looking at it from both angles. That's part of the banking conversations we're having because without going in the weeds, there's like a tokenized deposit, which is different than a stable coin that's an FDIC insured bank deposit. They each have their own positives and negatives. For anybody that's been falling into space, tokenized deposit sits as like anybody who looked in the TS and CS of your bank's money is not your money. It's also over leveraged. How many, however many times to one versus if you have a stable coin balance that's sitting in treasuries, it's earning interest, it's not being leveraged, but you get trade-offs with the way those money that those type, those money likes can move within our system and external system. So the only other thing to add is for clients that ask for increased limits, we can increase the limit from an ACH perspective from 2500 up into 10,000 and beyond. And then also as we get like more like an analytics around the money movement from those three days, we can start to collapse that into two days to 1. And then where I think we get is we'll clear a lot based on our own balance sheet and what we feel comfortable with to do instant credit. And then ultimately but that it comes with risk. So we have to be able to get better analysis on that before we kind of awesome. Thanks. Appreciate that. All right. Well, gentlemen, we've reached the top of the hour and really appreciate the time. Thank you. Brian, Cam, Michael Brahm, thank you for those who joined the webinar today. Hope you got value out of it. Again, if you're not at a client already, you can sign up for the Genesis program. And if you're an existing client, reach out to me, Jackson at on rampbitcoin.com. Make sure we'll get some swag shipped out to you for being a loyal client of On Ramp. And thank you again for joining us. Appreciate your time and we'll talk soon. Thanks for listening. To this week's episode of the show, if you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client Advisors.
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