Crypto Market Reset: What To Do Now

Welcome everyone to the Directed IRA webinar and special Directed IRA podcast. We are here talking about crypto. This has been the hot asset over the last 10 years, the one that's probably made the most people money if you were smart and investing on it early. But this last year we have had a major crypto reset. Bitcoin, as an example, is down 50% from all-time highs last year. I don't know, it might be up 300% if you look 2 or 3 years ago, who knows? But many people have seen some 100-plus numbers at the price of Bitcoin and were enjoying that wealth and that growth, feeling great about their investment, and it has reset. And so, we've brought some experts on today from Arch Public. We've worked with these guys for many years now. Who have an algo trader. They're in the crypto markets every day working with investors, getting a pulse on things. We're great at retirement accounts, of course. And by the way, yes, your retirement account can own crypto. We'll talk about that. But we kind of want to get some insights on what's going on in the crypto market and what you can do about it from Tilman Holloway, CEO of Arch Public, and co-founder Andrew Parrish as well. So Tillman and Andrew, welcome to the special webinar and podcast episode. Thanks for being on.

Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.

Absolutely.

So what's the story? What's happening? You know, I mean, let's just get to it.

Well, I mean, if you're plugged into the retail space, you think the sky's falling and the price is indicative of, you know, people running for the hills and kind of abandoning their, their Bitcoin and crypto aspirations. I think that the narrative from a developer, from an enterprise and a corporate treasury perspective is the exact opposite. It could not be more white hot, if you will. There's a lot of capital on the sidelines right now. And that capital is being very prudently placed into Bitcoin to get the exposure percentage that those large institutions are looking for. So I think we're just seeing a different 4-year cycle than we've ever seen before. And it scares people and it causes people to, you know, wonder if, you know, the market's changed materially. And I think the market has changed as it pertains to who's kind of the dog and who's the tail. I think Wall Street is firmly entrenched in our space at this point. They're not going anywhere. The integration—

For better or worse.

Yeah, for better or worse. But I will say like things like Coinbase, in terms of breaking down access barriers to people being able to invest in IPOs and securities through the tokenization of those assets, I think that's a big deal. I think that's gonna change the world for the better, and it's worth whatever, growing pains we have to incur along the way.

Yeah, go ahead, Andrew.

I would just say probably sentiment could be best put together like this. I saw a post earlier, and then I commented on it, that Bitcoin was dead at $13,000, Bitcoin was dead at $64,000, Bitcoin was dead at $3,000, Bitcoin was dead at $20,000, Bitcoin's dead at $64,000. And the caption there is, Bitcoin's funeral keeps getting getting more and more expensive. And so when you look at it through that particular lens, it changes what you actually see. And so we spent a week in New York at Anthony Pompliano's event, Bitcoin Investor Week, and the sentiment there was significantly different than, let's call it, retail crypto Twitter space. Uh, it was opportunity is always found in depressed prices of an asset that isn't going anywhere and is still of meaningful value. And so people are looking at opportunities to accumulate an asset that always has a cycle of some sorts that has a pullback. And if you're smart enough and use the right tools to accumulate during that time period, you end up all the better for it.

Yeah. And I think there's like, you know, there's some psychology on this perhaps as well. I don't know. You know, I mean, it went over $100K. A lot of people maybe took some money off the table. Some people— I think there might have been some consumer pinch in the economy right now. We kind of a little bit of a divided economy. Some people had some wealth in it. Maybe it's time to take some money off the table. I mean, let's be honest, there's a lot of people that have made money in crypto. And they're starting to maybe deploy that. We got a little pinch in the economy for some people, new highs. I think there's some psychological thing to it. Also, what do you think, though, about some of these macro things happening, like inflation starting to trend down? It seems like a lot of people like Bitcoin, especially when we have massive inflation. They feel like there's some protection to it, almost like precious metals used to be. It's not anymore. Do you feel like that's at play too, that we're like starting to have some deflationary pressure?

We are having deflationary pressure. I mean, the AI impact this last week on stocks is a pretty significant example of that. I think that, you know, we are becoming AI-driven from a markets perspective. All innovation, every company on the earth is going to be impacted by this. To say that it's understated, I think, is short-sighted. I think it's— I think we couldn't overstate this more. I think it is going to impact us globally in ways that we can't even predict. But the negative impacts in the form of, you know, lost jobs or repositioned jobs also come with, I think, exceptional opportunities. And I think those opportunities far outweigh the negative aspects of AI and crypto and these new AI agents that now are becoming, you know, well-known, but they're also driving this conversation around how do they pay each other. And crypto is the natural leg of that conversation that then takes, takes over. So I think we're living in a day and age where wait a week and we could have a monumental headline that everybody, you know, gets bullish sentiment around and we see this parabolic spike up. I think we're just— I said this earlier on a podcast, I think the frequency of human beings through social media and the connectivity that we have through technology is now allowing the masses to move very rapidly in and out of investments. And that's a good thing. But it also creates a lot of volatility in markets that we haven't seen that volatility in the past. And similar to silver, I mean, silver has shown exceptional volatility compared to what it traditionally does. And it's because, you know, people, people want the 2, 3x. And Bitcoin will have that, that day in the sun. And I think the longer it stays at these prices, the higher we go when it does.

There, the, you know, to come back to macro, and there's a lot of narratives out there. And in fact, in 2026. There's no shortage of narratives. That's how we live our lives now at this point. Like, social media is just narratives, right? So how do you work through all of the noise and get to the signal? So some signal is, you know, we're less than 2% away from another all-time high in the S&P 500, right? Like, 1.75% of a percentage. Given the narratives that exist and the negativity that often exists in echo chambers, you know, you wouldn't think that that's the case, right? You just wouldn't— you wouldn't think that that's the reality. But media is such that, you know, blood sells. And so negative headlines are always going to take precedence over good ones. So that, again, that's when discipline and unemotional decision-making make the most sense. When the noise is really noisy, as it is right now, and the narratives aren't difficult to find, to grab onto, to make maybe some poor decisions, you know, signal has to be the thing that you're focused on. And finding a way to reduce emotional decisions is really, really important, right?

Yeah, I think, you know, from kind of like someone— I'm not following crypto every day. Obviously, I've been aware of the price change and Bitcoin particularly here being being the most popular widely held cryptocurrency is, you know, when I started digging into it, I'm like, there's nothing there there. Like, sometimes it's like, okay, there was a new law, or maybe, you know, Jamie Dimon speaks, talks crap about crypto, or like, you know what I mean? There's like, there's something that happens that's like, that's a negative thing. Crypto goes down and there's a reason for people to sell. But when you look into it, it's like, there wasn't something that happened necessarily. Right? Which is a good thing if you're investing in it, because it seems to be like a— that's like a good thing. I think if you're interested in the asset, it wasn't like negative news, a negative law or something that's permanently going to affect it. It's this weird sentiment thing happening right now. And maybe this fear.

Of people.

And so, I don't know what your guys' perspective is on that. And like, I mean, because there hasn't been something like momentous from a legal or a structural or how traditional financial services view it. If anything, it's been the opposite in terms of institutional adoption and Wall Street, as you mentioned earlier, Tilman, about like kind of embracing it more. Like, am I missing something?

Smart money is accumulating, and smart money uses headlines to accumulate. There was, I think, $500 million of liquidated long leveraged loans last night in Bitcoin. Those are— that's ripe for the pickings. If you have it, just go look at Jane Street headlines today as it pertains to manipulation of the Terra Luna crash and making money and how they made money. And that is common practice across the board. If you are a market maker, there's this very fine line between being a market maker and a market taker. And a lot of people in the crypto space don't even know that line exists. So there are DeFi liquidity crashes that cause algorithms to essentially eventually panic and can't find an equilibrium. And they find that equilibrium in price below liquidity events and high, high leverage areas and big price breaks. And once you get that cascading effect, it's hard to recover. That's— there's no rhyme or reason. There's no, like you said, there's no driving reason behind that other than what I would point to as a rounding bottom accumulation, like point in time, like the— where you see the big firms, the people who can't place their trade over a month, even over 5 months, like firms that are wanting to buy Bitcoin in the billions of dollars need to appropriate that capital very— on the smoothest cost curve that they can appropriate it on. They can't take big bets and place all their eggs in one basket. Look at the Bitcoin treasury companies and how well that turned out, right? So the important thing is to spread the capital out over long periods of time. What do they do? They buy when there's blood in the streets and they buy prudently. They don't overload. None of them are sitting there going, oh, '60s, the bottom, bet the farm. That's not how they work, right? It's like systematic placement of capital. Putting, you know, as much risk-adverse cost management into that purchasing schedule as you possibly can. That's how the big players move. And I think that's what we're seeing on the charts. And I also think that's what we're seeing in these liquidation events as it pertains to leveraged longs and how everybody is wanting to pick these bottoms and bet the farm on it.

Yeah. And it seems simple. Buy low, sell high. Yet the psychology of people is they just don't want to do that. I mean, we even see it here, you know. I mean, I, I, I, you know, I fell victim to that even because I bought Bitcoin at $2,500 per BTC, you know, with my retirement account, by the way. This is 2017. I don't know if— maybe there's 100 people that have done it by then. I don't know, maybe 1,000. But I thought I was pretty pioneering how to figure out how to do that. And we have a whole product about that. We're going to talk about that. It's a tax-free way to grow and build wealth. By the way, right now is like the prime opportunity to invest in crypto and take what I call the Tax-Free Crypto Pledge. We'll hit that in a second. But I want to make a point, which was that even I, you know, I think crypto kind of— I made quite a bit of money on it. It went up, and then I felt like there was crypto winter. And I don't remember when this was, but it was, you know, maybe a year or a year and a half after that. And it kind of went down about 30%, 40%. And I sold a bunch of it. And it was like the dumbest thing ever, obviously. And we've had so many times of that over the past— Bitcoin's been around 15 years now, where I was like, that was a total mistake, even though I understood the asset, I believed in it, I saw that the adoption is particularly Bitcoin within crypto as a general market, And, but the psychology is, that's when I need to get out. It's too much.

Yeah, let me nerd out for a second, because I think some people would appreciate this. I look at Bitcoin as a network. A network has value. Amazon is a network, Facebook is a network. All of these companies that are building connective points where data can be transmitted, received, and sent. That is, that is the definition of a network. The more people you have in that network, the more valuable it is. The more people you have in that network, by definition, the more computational power you have to have in that network to support all of that data. If I gave you a window into Amazon's capacity needs, and how much throughput as it relates to server capacity that they have online at any given point to host the transactions that we all are utilizing to give us goods to our house, right? If you were able to track that, it would be an incredible indicator as to the growth of Amazon and the services they're in and their profits. We actually have that window into Bitcoin. And yet no one uses it. And so if you go look at the hash rate of the Bitcoin network, you're going to find out something that we are now above 1 zettahash, which a zettahash didn't exist before Bitcoin existed because Bitcoin broke the ceiling of the largest network that's ever been created by man. So we have this network that has more data, more computational power, more capacity to work than Amazon. And we can see it because it's public information behind the curtain as to the growth of that computational power in the form of hash rate. It's at all-time highs. And guess what? The hash rate continues to grow consistently for the last 17 years without the same interruptions in progress that the price has. So I think it's a much better indicator than price as it pertains to kind of measuring and monitoring the success of the Bitcoin network, if you will. And I think that would help people kind of quench their fears as it pertains to whether this is dying or not, because it doesn't take you very long to figure out it's growing very, very rapidly.

One would do well to disconnect from let's call it crypto social media, and then just only follow hash rate growth, right? If you only followed hash rate growth, eventually Bitcoin price, you know, not necessarily always catches up, but it certainly follows it. And that would be, you know, your signal versus noise, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's definitely like the key performance indicator, right, for Bitcoin Period. Value, adoption, whether it's going to be here tomorrow. I mean, that would tell all, I think. That's a really, really great insight.

Yeah. Go ahead, Andrew. And if you want additional, let's get back to the world of finance and traditional markets, right? So, there is no slowdown in the narrative associated with what BlackRock is doing with Bitcoin and then also DeFi, just announcing a couple weeks ago that that they're opening up their now almost $6 billion BIDL portfolio and it's available to trade on Uniswap. That sounds, you know, somebody mentioned a couple weeks ago that that sounds like a Babylon Bee, you know, type of headline from 3 years ago. Like that would be a joke to most people that BlackRock is now involved with Uniswap several years ago. But now it's a reality. So—

Yeah, I remember we talked about this before, I think on Scott Milker's podcast, massive. I was watching a 60 Minutes episode of Larry Fink. Yeah, crapping on crypto, that then they cut back to him and now he's championing it. Yeah, and they're like, what happened? And then this is 60 Minutes, of course, you know.

Well, he's become the CMO of Bitcoin. He's the chief marketing officer of Bitcoin. He never stops talking about it. They never stop putting out educational videos for their, you know, their investing community associated with both Bitcoin and crypto. So They haven't slowed down, they haven't stopped anything. They're going about it as is, this is an asset, an asset class that is worth owning, that has meaningful upside. You know, again, I, you know, people that, you know, negativity in the space, I just keep coming back to besides the hash rate discussion, I don't think BlackRock is in the habit of bringing on billions and billions and billions of dollars from very, very large institutional clients that probably, you know, that have additional billions with them in other asset classes.

Right.

They're in the habit of trapping those people into meaningful losses and saying, we gotcha. That's not the business that they're in at all. It's the opposite. So, you know, again, those narratives working towards, you know, stay here and go meaningful lower for forever. No, is the answer.

Yeah. Okay. So, I think we've hit some— you guys have hit some really good points. And I mean, my original take was I didn't really see anything negative. So, there's some hysteria out there. You guys have drilled in on some things that are actually happening that are meaningful to help you understand the value of say Bitcoin here. But Andrew, I know we were talking about so just like even winning in a bear market, even if crypto was going down. I mean, what have you seen of people investing in crypto, doing things smart? I know you guys have your algo trader, but like, is there a case study or anything about winning in a bear market that'd be helpful to people?

So we, yeah, we shared with you guys, our team finished a case study yesterday taking a look at bear market outcomes, not only short-term, but they took a look at the entire cycle since the top of the last cycle in 2021. And I'll I'll try and share it here. For some reason, I'm having a little bit of a hard time. It's giving me some errors, but I'll just talk it through and maybe your team on the backend can pull it up. So here's an important one. Right. So in 2021 and '22, we were at cycle highs for the previous cycle, $69K, which is higher than we are today. And if you would've bought and hold Bitcoin, you'd have had some real fun, right? We hit $126,000 6 months ago and now we've come back down. But if you just bought back then and you held until now, in that period of time, you had a net standard buy and hold return of 8%, right? 8% over that period of nearly 4.5, 5 years. Using our algorithmic tools, right? By the way, we don't just have a tool that folks can use. We have an enormous amount of tools that you get to choose from and decide what you want to do and work with our team and make that happen. But if you use— just using our oracle protocol over that time period, instead of the 8% return you got on Bitcoin with buy and hold, you got 189% return. See, there it is. Right. So not only did you end up with 189% return, but you also added an additional 1.5 Bitcoin to your total stack. Okay. So what does it mean to take advantage of the volatility presented to you with Bitcoin? Because volatility with Bitcoin is a feature. It's not a flaw, right? You have opportunities to enter into an asset that is volatile to the good. Over meaningful periods of time, it will give you entry points. And it's just a question of are you disciplined enough to take those, to take those entries? Well, our software is the key to making sure you're disciplined enough because you set it and then you don't have to fool with it. Your hands and your mind are off of it. It's making those decisions before you. So these are numbers that that not only are meaningful in the aggregate, but they're even more meaningful inside of an IRA because that compounding really begins to make a huge, huge difference to your portfolio.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you're making money in crypto, again, many people have. I love the case study there. You know, but you may be trading on that. And one thing when you're doing this individually is you're going to get 1099-DA, right? That's going to go on your 1040. These are all tax forms, people, that result in you sending money to the IRS. When you do that with a crypto Roth IRA where you're trading with Arch Public, you have the algo trader and now you're making money. Well, that's not going anywhere. There's no 1099. There's nothing going on your 1040 to the IRS. And every penny that you're making can be reinvested. I mean, penny's the wrong, you know, phrase there, but you know, everything that you're making there, depending on what you're investing in crypto, is being reinvested, compounding over time. And the power of retirement accounts is the compounding over time and using that Roth account, which grows and comes out totally tax-free. In an asset you believe in and that can have the highest rate of return over a 10, 20-year, whatever your investment horizon is when you're looking to retire. I mean, that is so significant. Even if you were still investing, let's say, $100,000 personally and $100,000 in a Roth IRA, I'm just telling you, when you look at investing over 10 years, at the same rate of return, you will have at least twice as much money in the Roth IRA account because every penny got to be reinvested and nothing's going to the IRS.

Well, it's the laws of compounding or the 8th wonder of the world, as they say. And Einstein said, "You either understand it or you're a slave to it." Those are his words, not mine. And so, you know, you look at yield harvesting or taking advantage, like Andrew said, of volatility, A lot of people don't know what that means. So I'd like to kind of dissect that and go into it from the software perspective. So if you're familiar with like a covered call strategy, it's pretty good.

You'll need to explain that.

Okay, so let's just say, let's take through the decision-making process of I am a high net worth individual and I've come to the decision that I want to have Bitcoin exposure. And I've come to the decision that I wanna own Bitcoin, spot Bitcoin, not an ETF, I wanna own it. Well, how do I appropriate dollars to that? Well, if I have a long time horizon and I have the desire to save as much of my gains as possible, I open up a directed IRA account and I put money, a contribution into that, and I start accumulating the 5% exposure in Bitcoin that I would like to gain. So Bitcoin, as it drops in price, presents buying opportunities. You know, you always want to buy when there's blood in the streets, or buy other people's fear, as Warren Buffett says. And so when there's a giant disproportionate drop in price against what we would call the VWAP, or the volume weighted average price, That is a mean regression play. If your objective is to accumulate Bitcoin, that's too good to pass up, which means you're buying the dips, right? So as the market presents those dips, you have automated software sitting there ready to buy those. Well, as you're accumulating those dips, there's different entry points to every one of those cost bases, giving you a very smooth cost curve against the average price of Bitcoin over that time period. That's the best way to accumulate a long-term position that you can do. That is what a mathematician will tell you. That's what a professional trader will tell you. That's what a money manager will tell you is dollar cost averaging is the tried and true method to remove volatility risk. That, that's what it does. So the question on your buys is now answered. Instead of dollar cost averaging on Tuesday at 9 a.m. arbitrarily, because that's when you're available to sit at your computer. Now you're dollar-cost averaging when the market gives you the best discount to do so. As those positions are accumulated, there is upward volatility as well, right? You don't just have a bunch of red candles. You've got some big green candles too. Well, on those big green candles, because you have software that's keeping track of cost basis,, you can program it to say never sell on those green candles if I'm below my cost basis. Well, what that does from a rules perspective, it allows you to know that every time you're selling, you're profit-taking, right? Well, those profits, if you're playing the yo-yo and Bitcoin isn't going directionally one way, if it's just bouncing and trending, You know, you have yield potential, you have all of this earning potential in that volatility that if you set the traps and you have automated tools that you can harvest that yield. Well, inside a retirement account, all of that is accrued and compounded. So you're literally buying low, selling high, buying low, selling high, buying low, and all of that growth is compounding tax-free. Free.

That's—

I don't know of another system on earth that is offered that gives people that advantage. And, you know, other than this, this collaboration that we're doing with you guys, I don't know any other automated tools that can be appropriated into a self-directed IRA and you self-custody the assets that you're buying and grow them tax-free.

So real quick, to add something, there's portions of this that sound complicated. The word algorithm, the word automation, the word, you know, volatility, all that stuff can sound somewhat complicated when most people just want to put a certain amount into their IRA each year and they want to put in some stuff that just kind of grows. That's why we have concierge program teams at Arch Public. We will do everything in our power to shepherd you along this process, to give you opportunities to say, if you do this, then, then this, if you do this, then this, and let's make that decision together. We work very, very hard at Arch Public at being a crypto company that is the best there is at service, literally the best there is at communication and service. So if you reach out to us and if you want to have communications with us, We have a team of service folks that are going to listen to you, understand what it is you want to get accomplished, then going about the process of getting that done with you.

Yeah. And they're passionate about that because 90% of them were customers first. They, they love the product. They— it's changed.

We—

I think one thing you have found in crypto and I think, you know, you said it very well at the beginning, once you get into crypto, it's hard to get out and you become very passionate about it. And I think it becomes a force multiplier for you in, in whatever your goals may be, because I think the goal of growing, right, is, is growing our retirement account, growing our investment accounts, growing in wealth. Those are questions that we all have. And Bitcoin provides a very, very unique set of characteristics that you can't find other, other places. And these tools that we're providing collectively allow people easier access, easier management, easier accumulation of that very asset.

Yeah, yeah, we've had, I mean, a lot of customers working with Directed IRA and with Arch Public. We are of that same mindset, as you guys know, in terms of customer service, best in class in our industry, and value that. We want to have the great strategies and opportunities and let clients be able to invest in what they want to and what they know. And as crypto came on the map, for us, it was like, We've got to let clients use their IRA to buy crypto. Why would you limit it to stocks, bonds, and mutual funds? Why would you limit it to real estate? Why would you limit it to private equity? Why would we limit it to venture capital? You know, and so for us, when you have an IRA at Directed IRA, just so everybody knows, if you don't have an account with us already, is we let you invest in any asset allowed by law. Now, we have a specific crypto IRA product. The most common crypto IRA is someone using a Roth IRA. You've got, you know, a $300,000 Roth IRA at Charles Schwab and you're doing stocks or ETFs and you're like, yeah, maybe I want to send $50,000 over to directed IRA and invest in crypto. Well, you could do that. That's a not taxable transfer over $50,000. You could make a new contribution to $7,500 for 2026, $7,000 for 2025. You could combo that up, by the way, right now because you can still make 2025 contributions until April 15th. That'd be $14,500. But you got to get the money in, right, in this tax-qualified account, whether you make new contributions, you're moving money from an existing account somewhere else. But this could also be a traditional IRA. This could be money sitting in an old employer 401(k), right? There is $45 trillion in U.S. retirement accounts. There is more money there than in any other place. But most people, when they thought about crypto, they thought about, you know, linking some money to their checking or savings account and on-ramping into some crypto. You can do that. That's fine. And so many people, you know, they traded some dollars for crypto, but they did it with personal funds. It's now hitting their 1040, right? Page 1 on your 1040 tax return says, have you made money in digital currency? Yes, no, under penalty of perjury.

Okay.

Right now, when you— what you can bypass that question, if all your crypto is owned in your retirement account, even if you made money, nope, because you didn't make money, your IRA did, and it doesn't pay taxes. So, so this could be the traditional IRA, this could be the Roth IRA. We love the Roth because it grows and comes out tax-free. You could have a health savings account, you could have a Coverdell Education Account. All these different account types can be invested into crypto. And for a lot of people where they're like, all right, well, how do I be more strategic about crypto? And this is a lot of your clients at Arch Public is they're working with you guys. And I like how you kind of positioned it, Tillman, of like, let's buy at the right buying time and sell at the right selling time. And that might not be 9 o'clock in the morning on Tuesdays when that and that's just the time you have for this, right? I mean, we're busy people, right? And I think a lot of people's mindset with their retirement account is set it and forget it. Let me work hard, get the money in, and set it and forget it. But if I can be more strategic about that, then I have other greater opportunity perhaps to win. So, I think that's really combining a number of concepts here, right? There's a number of concepts we're combining here. Here? An asset class, if you believe in it, in crypto. I'm not trying to convince you, by the way, not financial advice here. I'm just saying, if you believe in it, I know many of you do, um, how can I own it in a most tax-advantageous way? To me, I'm like, you should take the crypto tax-free pledge. Pledge to never pay taxes on crypto again. How do you take that pledge? You open up a crypto Roth IRA, directed IRA, and you start accumulating crypto there. And then the third piece here is the Arch Public. And what Tillman and Andrew are talking about is now let's be more strategic about it. We've all seen what's going on in the crypto market, it going up, it going down. How can I profit on that and be more strategic to maximize my yield and return to grow and build more wealth? So, well, those are all the pieces coming together.

I just will touch on one more thing that's really powerful here. To maximize yield, you're day trading because the yield can happen in very short windows of time, 4-hour candle. Day trading is taxed at the highest rate of any trading activity. You can literally go from the highest rate for this activity, which should tell you the potential it has, to zero.

You're not doing California. When Tillman says the highest rate, we're talking 37% federal tax. We're talking 13% state tax. We're talking you make less than half. Yeah. When you actually make money on a winning trade. Yeah.

But big stuff. Make it all huge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we might have some questions coming in. I've got Aaron, the great Aaron Halderman, our CEO at Direct IRA, the great and powerful over here., he's been in the chats. Um, I don't know if you have any questions yet. If you guys do have questions, throw them in the chat that you want to ask, Tilman and Andrew here while we've got them, um, or anything on the Roth IRA. I think Ryan from our team, um, Ryan Hyde, uh, Director of New Accounts, is in there as well, uh, answering questions. You can book a call with him if you need help on your crypto IRA. I think Arch Public's contact's in there too. I want to make sure that I've been dropping all that in there. Okay. All right. Aaron's on it. You know, he's not just sitting over here, you know.

So let me ask this just to give this as an example, because we were talking about some of the different product types we have.

What's a checkbook IRA?

Okay, let's cover that. And then I have some other questions that are specific to Arch.

Okay.

Checkbook IRA. We call that an IRA LLC. So there you'll have your IRA, but rather than it going directly and opening up a wallet, which we use Gemini for that, It works with Arch Public too. It's all coordinated. Um, but if you just have a crypto IRA, what will happen is your IRA account actually owns a— and has a wallet with Gemini. Okay. And we send the money in, it goes into USD in your Gemini wallet, then you can decide what crypto to buy. We talked about Bitcoin, but you could be doing XRP, Solana, you know, other cryptocurrencies. Um, that's Option 1, that's probably the most common and simplest. Some clients use something called an IRA LLC or checkbook IRA. A lot of like real estate clients, clients using their IRA to buy real estate, use this IRA LLC. Some crypto clients use it. What that is, is you have an IRA, but it will own an LLC 100%. You don't own the LLC. Your IRA, your self-directed IRA owns the LLC 100%. That LLC has a bank account. Bank account. There's a bank we work with that understands what the heck this is. And then you're the manager of the LLC. You don't own it. Your IRA owns it 100%, but you're the manager, which gives you authority to act for the LLC, manage the LLC's bank account. There, you could actually do the same thing here that we're talking about with the IRA LLC that now has a bank account where you can link it. Well, you'll get a wallet at Gemini and then also can connect to Arch Public. So that is the IRA LLC used for crypto, sometimes called a checkbook IRA. And you can book a call with one of our team members if you're like, what option should I do? That's a more advanced strategy. It's going to cost you more. The lawyers in my law firm, KQS Lawyers, set up that LLC. It includes a consult with the lawyers. They all understand crypto and have worked with hundreds of crypto investors. But it's going to cost you. $1,200 more because you need that LLC set up properly. It's different than your regular LLC you might have for business or rental real estate or other investments.

Final answer.

Oh gosh, don't be mentioning our competitors on here.

Some of our listeners— what is wrong with you people? They work there and they— yeah, it's like, what happens all the time?

What are you doing?

Yeah.

It's painful.

Yeah, because they don't have any good content themselves.

So our heart, our heart hurts. Yeah, um, no, it's all good. We, uh, hey, competition's good, it's good for the industry. Okay, so let me hit this real quick. So one of the ideas of what are called moving of crypto and another IRA, uh, company or account, you can do that with this. A few people have asked If I have an IRA that's already invested in crypto, it's holding Bitcoin, can I move that? Do I have to liquidate it? I'm interested in putting that to use and doing the ArchAlgo. Let's hit on that process real quick.

Yeah, absolutely. So what we'll do is we do what's called an in-kind transfer. So we will open your crypto IRA here, depending on the account type, maybe it's traditional IRA, maybe it's Roth IRA, whatever the account type is, is, and then we will actually transfer that crypto. So we will make a request with your other provider to say, transfer that crypto directly into, to us, which we will then put into your wallet at Gemini. And then you can do the same process with Arch Public if you want to link with their services as well. So yes, that way you're still invested in the crypto no matter what's happening in the interim as you're opening up the account and moving it. So absolutely, that's a possibility. Most people, I'll say, transfer over in cash.

Yeah.

And are coming in, you know, from a brokerage IRA or, you know, an old employer 401(k). That's the most common. It's just coming over in cash. That's easier to on-ramp, but we can still do the in-kind as well, and we do that often.

There's a couple what we had called prohibited transaction questions coming in. We'll just address that. You can't mingle. If you have other crypto wallets or other cryptos that you own personally, you're not going to be able to move that into an IRA.

You can't do that. Yeah. And we've done the gymnastics. I've had so many clients over the years pay for my time to try to figure that out. There's no way to do it legitimately. If you personally own crypto right now and you're like, 'But I want it in my Roth IRA so I pay no tax when I sell it.' There is no way to do it. Even if you're like, 'Well, what if I transferred to my friend or my brother and then they transferred it to me?' That's a step transaction. Yeah, that is— the IRS is all over this. That causes what's called a prohibited transaction. So, when we're talking about buying crypto with your Roth IRA or other tax-advantaged account, we're talking about new dollars. And this is why I think it's kind of compelling now if you believe in the discounting value concept that we've been talking about and buying low, is you obviously make money on the buy, like you want to buy low, and now is a good time to buy. But this would be new money coming in, whether this is a new contribution, as I talked about, into a new Roth IRA or backdoor Roth IRA for those of you who are high-income earners. Maybe it's a health savings account. You've just been, you know, letting sit at a bank or credit union doing nothing for you. You know, let's get those dollars to work and invest in an asset you believe in that has some— that has significant potential. So, um, but, but you're, you're buying now, and this is new crypto. The crypto you personally own, hang on to that. They'll have a different thesis on what, what's happening there. But no, if I'm buying new crypto, I want to do it in the tax-advantaged way, particularly I like the Roth IRA. I love the HSA too. Even the traditional account, it's growing tax-free. You could do a crypto HSA. Yeah, yeah, we do. We do kids' Roth, by the way. You could do a— if your kids have income, maybe they have a summer job or they work in your small business or at a rental property, you can do a kids' Roth IRA for them. Throw $7,000 a year into that if they're working enough to provide that value, and they can be investing that and growing that too.

Let me say this and let's get into the process to how the Arch algo works? 'Cause I think that's probably what he's getting at, 'cause we're getting a flood of questions of what are the fees? How do I use the algo?

What are the next steps? Well, I was just gonna add one thing is if you do own a lot of crypto and you want liquidity against that personally, the crypto lending is now becoming more and more prevalent. That's the way to do it in a tax advantageous way, but legally that doesn't get you in trouble.

Yeah, let me make sure everybody understands that. Let's say you have a $100,000 personal crypto portfolio. You could take a loan against that. Maybe it's 50 grand. You know, there's different lenders have different priorities and you don't want to over-leverage too, right? But let's say that you can take out, you can loan against that. When you take a loan against that, that's not capital gain. That's not a sell. You haven't sold the crypto. You've gotten a loan against the asset. I mean, this is like a wealthy person strategy, right? They never sell assets. They accumulate assets and then they borrow against those assets. Whether you're Jeff Bezos, who borrows against his Amazon stock, or Donald Trump borrowing against his real estate, I don't care who you are. They don't sell the assets to then take the money to go buy the new house or the yacht or whatever the heck they're doing. Those are just the crazy, you know, rich people thing. I just, I don't know, whatever. I like the examples. I'm sticking to them. All right. So, whatever your need is, you're like, "Matt, I'm not buying a yacht, bro." Whatever your need is, it's the same concept. Okay? We're just like a couple less zeros behind it. But that has become more prevalent is institutions willing to provide, to let you lend against it, which is, as Tillman said, there's no tax on that when you're drawing against that equity. It's kind of like a home equity line of credit. Take stripping out equity.

We, uh, just for those of you that are popping in or hanging with us, we will have this recorded and put it up on our website and on our webinar and podcast page. Uh, why don't we go through the process of next steps, like how the Arch Algo works, opening up a crypto IRA account with us, and how all that comes together, kind of a paint-by-hand paint-by-numbers situation on next steps and how—

bring it home for us on how it all works. Sure, I can. From an Arch perspective, yes, our algorithm is completely free to use. We make that available so that we don't have to explain the ins and outs. There's thousands of different ways to use the software. It's a toolbox that allows you to allocate capital, allows you to unallocate allocate capital, allows you to trade trends, all sorts of things that we can walk you through. And it's very simple once you put your hands on it. But we pride ourselves in, in walking you through that process. So what the best way to do to get started is to come to our website and click Get Started Now and schedule a time to meet with one of our concierge team members. They will help you get up and running. And once you see see exactly what the software does. You can step up into our paid version if there's a desire to do so, but seeing is believing. So we want everybody to kind of try it and, and prove to themselves that it's got a lot of value to them before moving to, to paying us anything for the software. And once you do move to that, if, if you see the value, it's a lifetime license that allows you to pay us one time and get unlimited support while you're getting up, up and running so that you know how to use it exceptionally well. And then you have that tool in your possession and in your toolbox for forever, lifetime.

One critical piece, if you are going to do this from the very beginning and this is like what your intent is and you're going to use the algo, we do have a separate relationship with our crypto exchange of choice at Gemini. You would need to tell us that in advance, that that's what you're planning to do. If you open a crypto IRA and then that's not what you're planning to do, to use the ArchAlgo at this time, that's totally fine. But if you are going to use it and you're new to this and this is what you're using from day one, you'd need to let us know because there's some steps that we have to take on our end to set that up. Alternatively, if you're an existing crypto IRA with us and now you're wanting to add in the ArchAlgo So you would have to let us know. There is some additional steps again and things that we have to do on the backend to enable that and help process that. If you're an existing client, you can contact our customer service team. If you're a new client, please reach out to our new accounts team on our appointments page. You can book a free call and I'll put those links on, on the chat here again right now.

Yeah, and part of that's just about information sharing and coordination, that communication between us, Arch Public, and then also Gemini. We, we, those three parties, we've all worked together, had a lot of clients successful and happy. So it's just a, just a coordination of the different parts to make it all happen for you. So, um, okay, any other questions? Or Tillman or Andrew, anything on your guys's end? I appreciate the to make sure we got the link in there so everybody can go test it out and try it if you're interested in it. I like that concept too, and the ability for people to get an understanding of it for themselves before they deploy it into real practice. I think that can be, you know, everybody wants to have some level of comfort of being able to do that without having to take a huge financial commitment to implement it.

The only thing that I would add is, you know, we're north of 17,000 users at this point, and we don't have of unhappy users. The reason is, is because once you see our tools, you know, execute their first automated trade for you, you think this is magic. I, I probably will never take, take positions ever again that are not automated. Um, we work with Scott Melker. We're on Tuesday shows. Matt, you've been on the show with him. Yeah, he started with a portfolio with us with $100K, and then it turned into $200K, then $400K, then $600K, Why? Because he kept waking up and at 2:30 in the morning, our algorithms were taking positions for him that he wouldn't have taken himself. And they were remarkable. And he even said several times like, this feels like magic and I'll never manually trade ever again. So, so once you have that experience, you'll realize this is, this is so much better than I or even than most experts could ever do it. And so I'll never do it any other way. And people have that experience with us and, you know, it changes the way they look at accumulating great assets.

Yeah. And Scott's someone who's like in the crypto industry every day. You know what I mean? Not just like me or some of us that might be on here that are like, I follow crypto a little bit, you know? I mean, and so, The difference in value, I mean, it's big for him. I mean, it can be significant here. And so, what I want to say is like, you know, this is not to be any endorsement or, you know, obviously we just want to provide good information, people we've liked working with. We're not about telling you what to invest in. That's not our thing. Please don't misunderstand what I'm talking about. I tell you what we do. We tell you what your options are. But the greatest thing about having a self-directed IRA is you're captain of your own ship. Ship. You get to decide, but we let you— we enable you, I should say, and give you the tools available to invest in the assets you know and believe in to grow and build wealth in a tax-advantaged way. We just want to bring together the tools to make it possible for you to captain the ship and do what you want to do. So, um, if you have any questions for us at the Directed IRA team, Aaron gave you the contacts there for new accounts versus existing accounts. Arch Public's info is in there. You can work with their concierge team as they talked about, test out what they're doing or learn a little bit more about them as well. I'll have a couple announcements too. Okay. Aaron's looking at me.

I'm like, I'm not done.

I was actually going to hit something else before you even get to announcements.

Okay, let me get the announcement and then I'm going to turn it back to Aaron here for a second. We do have our Self-Directed IRA Summit and we should— we need to get Tilghman and Andrew on that actually.

Yeah.

Do a little section on crypto. April 17th. April 17th, our Self-Directed IRA Summit. It is 100% virtual this year. We're doing a throwback to COVID. Usually that's not a cool thing and no one wants to go back to that time and shelter in place and all that. But we did a Self-Directed IRA Summit during COVID We had to cancel the hotel, all the contracts, and we were bummed out. We wanted to be with everyone, but it was a really good event because we focused on the virtual audience. It wasn't just like a live audience and we're, you know, we're, we're filming it for the virtual. We're going to focus 100% on the virtual audience. We're excited about it. That'll be Friday, April 17th, a full day, A to Z, how to self-direct your retirement account, take control of it, invest in the assets. You know, one of the options, of course, is crypto. So put that on your calendar. If you are an account holder at Directed IRA already, you get to attend for free. If not, you have to pay. It's SDIRASummit.com. Where you can register. And if you are an existing client, check the newsletters, the client newsletter. There's a code in there you can use, or you can hit up our team as well to get that code so you can register for free. Okay, Aaron, announcement or—

well, yeah, I have more of a question just from like, um, more of like all the rumblings and grumblings that come on because of the volatility and different things and forums that people are plugged into. The crypto space is just very different than other traditional financial services, I would say, especially in forums. It's pretty interesting to read. Anyways, I'd be curious your thoughts on just kind of a take on Gemini as an exchange, So Coinbase, Kraken, others, we obviously have a strategic relationship with Gemini. That's who we've chosen to work with for lots of reasons. We've used them for many, many years now. We like that they're a licensed trust company. We're a licensed trust company. And they have audits and exams. They put it publicly in their trust center. They put status and system updates as well, just like Coinbase. And others as well. But what are some things that you could say? Because there's been different headlines and user errors, and that's always the case, but it tends to like tick up a lot more when crypto is going down. And when it's up, everything seems amazing. Like all the exchanges up, their stock is all high and everything's just like peaches and cream. But when it's not, it's like everything's wrong. Wrong, you know, maybe Coinbase is going bankrupt, like, who knows. Like, what are some of your thoughts? Uh, because, you know, you have your algo with, you know, um, you know, with Gemini as well, and that's how we even made the connections.

Good.

So can maybe you talk to that of some of your insight and experience, um, and how maybe people can, uh, view that?

Yeah, I mean, I, I look data from a factual perspective. And if you look at what happened, what happened with the Gemini Earn program, that was a black swan event. FTX literally deceived tremendous amounts of players in the market and it caused a cascade of, of defaults. Gemini made good one for one on every Bitcoin. They didn't take the easy way out and paying some discounted rate. So number one, New York City, very highly regulated, have passed the scrutiny test. Like you said, have structured themselves in a way that provides a lot of trust. So I just think it's sterling. And I think at this point in the crypto space, if you still are around, You have gone through the necessary trial by fire that should make everybody feel warm and fuzzy. And, you know, if you look at even the FDIC puts a cap at $250,000 on cash in banks and there's bank failures around the US every year. I think 8% of banks have failed over the last 20 years. That's— you're not immune to institutions companies going out of business and making bad decisions. But when you look at some of the biggest players in the crypto space, Gemini being one of them, you're talking about insurance being issued to some of them north of $100 million for deposits and, and things that are really groundbreaking from an industry standard perspective. So I have a lot of faith in Gemini's deposits. I have— I know that Tyler and Cameron have a lot more Bitcoin than I do. And I think, you know, that bodes well for the— they trust Gemini, it's their firm. So yeah, I think it's a— just like you said, I think, you know, when price is down, you hear a lot of noise and congestion, but it's not indicative of really what's going on.

Yeah. And I'll say this, when we started working with Gemini, I mean, when we started our crypto IRA product, and I know there's people in the chat, I guess, talking about this.

There is. And it's valid. People's concerns are valid.

There's no reason to not ask those types of questions. And there's lots of other good crypto companies out there, but Gemini and being able to do the retirement account structure we want to do, have a high level of service and give clients options besides just Bitcoin because they can do other types of cryptocurrencies. It's pretty unique. But I'll just say the companies we were looking at at the time was Voyager, FTX, and Gemini. Those are the 3 companies that we went down the path with. And Voyager went into bankruptcy, the Canadian company actually. FTX, we all know the story there. Despite being the cool, hot company, everyone was like, we need to use them, we need to use them. We use Gemini. Why do we use Gemini? They picked a highly regulated way to go about it, the hardest way to structure their business that protects customers. You have to understand, as a trust company, there's the company's assets and there's the customer assets. When you're FTX, it's all the same. Sure. When you're Voyager, it's all the same. When you're a trust company, it's different. You have your assets as a business, you have your customer assets that are not your assets that your creditors can't come after. So the trust company customer assets are always protected from the business assets. That's what we are for our customers and our accounts. That's what you have to be to be a retirement account custodian properly. And there's a reason for that, right? If the company fails, they don't want customers' retirement accounts affected. It's the same thing for how they approach being a custodian and holding people's cryptocurrency. And so, we like that from 5+ years ago when we started investigating that, audited by Deloitte in terms of their practices and how they do things and licensed. And so, we like that type of stuff. It's how we do business and we saw someone that approached it in the same way. So that's if you want the backstory on us on them.

Yeah. And let me add just this. The truth is Gemini's been forward-thinking enough and customer-centric enough to allow the API bridges to be built to allow for this. You can't get this anywhere else. So there's a question in the chat, who other, what other exchanges do we work with? We work with all the major exchanges. But not on the IRA side. And that's where this is a huge differentiator, huge distinction point, huge advantage that you really can't ignore at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Great, guys. Thanks for everybody for your input. Thanks for those for being on and your questions. If you missed portions of this, you want to come back and relive this amazing time with Tilghman and Andrew, get to directedira.com/webinars. We'll post the recording there. Make sure you're signed up for the newsletter as well. We'll have announcement about other upcoming webinars, of course, our Self-Directed IRA Summit, other things going on we want to keep you up to date on. We will see you next time. Until then, stay calm, self-direct.