Digital Asset News interviews iTrust Capital's Jared about crypto custody, Roth IRAs, and an upcoming AI trading product
A Digital Asset News host interviews Jared from iTrust Capital about institutional crypto custody, tax-free investing through Roth IRAs, and a forthcoming AI-driven trading strategy product.
Summary
Recent hacking incidents — including the ColdCard breach — frame a discussion of self-custody risks, with Jared from iTrust Capital making the case for diversifying how assets are held in light of recent hacking incidents, including the ColdCard breach, and make the case for diversifying how assets are held — including through iTrust Capital's institutional custody partnerships with Fidelity Digital Assets, Coinbase Prime, and Fireblocks. He explains that social engineering and AI-assisted attacks are making even sophisticated investors vulnerable, and that institutional storage provides a meaningful layer of protection. The conversation covers iTrust Capital's Roth IRA product — including crypto staking for ETH and SOL, and the recently completed addition of stocks and ETFs — with the host highlighting the tax-free compounding benefits, citing Peter Thiel's use of a Roth IRA to grow PayPal stock to billions with zero tax liability. He also previews an imminent new product: AI-formulated, rules-based quantitative trading strategies that clients can opt into within their accounts, designed to create alpha over a simple buy-and-hold approach without the emotional pitfalls of manual trading, expected to launch within days to weeks of recording. The episode concludes with a viewer Q&A covering ALGO availability, SOL staking reward mechanics (manual restaking required, with auto-restaking on the roadmap), clarification that ALGO and Flare cannot be staked on the platform, and confirmation that iTrust Capital now operates in all 50 US states including New York.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Custody, security, and the risks of self-storage
Host: Thank you for doing the right things during 2022, because out of everybody that crashed, you guys did not. You guys weathered the storm, did the right things, and now here we are picking up the slack and things are looking good. I appreciate it.
Jared: For sure. We really appreciate you. It's been a long, fun journey. Our focus is just transparency. Our CEO, Kevin Maloney, talks about it all the time — just being really transparent, honest, and being in the same ship. Growing with our clients has always been really important to us. And if you do the right thing and be honest and transparent, it really does go a long way. It's just helped us have longevity as an organization since we were founded in 2019.
Host: Yeah, and we've done pretty well moving forward. As a quick reminder — I talk about this every couple of days on the show — I am concerned about safety. I'm concerned about people making massive gains but losing those gains, because it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep.
And as far as diversification of investments, it's a good idea — especially if you know which ones to get into. It's also a great idea for diversification of storage. We're using Tangem for this charity event. All the donations coming in are going onto the Tangem wallet, which will then be put into Kraken. It's great to have Tangem, but there's only so much we can do there.
After the ColdCard hack, Jared, I just want to talk to people about this — getting your funds out of the custody account is a major pain. It is very difficult, and it's set up that way deliberately. And I've got to tell you, it's a good thing you guys do that, because to get funds out is very difficult, which means if I get hacked or something, I don't think there's a way these guys can take it out. Can you touch on that as far as the custody service?
Jared: Unfortunately, we've heard story after story from our clients who have been socially engineered and phished. Even the smartest, most sophisticated, well-earning professionals get phished and socially engineered. Maybe they beat the first five attempts and then the sixth one gets them. They didn't realize it wasn't Google calling them, or they didn't realize it wasn't Apple sending them the two-factor authentication code. They thought maybe they were signing in from another device automatically, and then they got the two-factor code while they were really busy, and ended up talking with someone they thought was from Apple but really was not. People click on malware all the time. We've heard from clients where the hacker was in their Gmail account looking at their activity for years, took information from Gmail to eventually get them to give access to their cold storage device.
So our platform emphasizes institutional storage. We utilize Fidelity Digital Assets, Coinbase Prime, as well as Fireblocks, and our clients get to take advantage of our institutional relationships and access them as regular retail investors.
Host: Yeah, and a lot of our—
Jared: Sorry, go ahead.
Host: No, go ahead, Jared.
Jared: It's a big point of emphasis for us. A lot of people really believe in cold storage. I just want to double-click on that for a second, because we respect people who want to manage their own keys, but ultimately there are a lot of risks — and what we found out this year are a lot of unknown risks. Our clients simply want to diversify not just what assets they hold, but how they hold their assets. Having some assets on a Tangem or a Ledger and then having some in institutional storage ends up being a good formula for people.
The one thing we always talk about — and that you always talk about — is 100% no scams, 0% exchanges, 0% leverage. And why is the 0% exchanges concept emphasized? It just means don't necessarily trust other people. What a lot of people don't realize — and what they've learned the hard way this year with cold storage — is that if you're not a Solidity developer or an engineer managing your own wallet on-chain, you are trusting other people with your money through any of these cold storage devices. You're trusting someone else's code, someone else's company. And if they're breached, if their code has flaws, if AI cracks their code, or if they have some sort of data breach, you are kind of back to square one.
Host: Yeah. And it's one of those things — I was at a Bitcoin conference, and one of the guys there, who's been in the crypto space since around 2016, got phished while he was there. His guard was down, he was in a location where he was a little more tired, maybe had a little too much to drink at some point, and then all of a sudden he clicked on something he shouldn't have clicked on, and then all of a sudden he's asking, "Where did all my funds go?"
And this is the thing you just talked about, Jared. You can be okay for the first five times, the first ten, twenty times, but the scammers only need one time. That's why they are the best investors out there. They don't need to invest any crypto or digital assets or any money. They just have to invest a little bit of time, and at some point they're going to get you. I actually had my MetaMask wallet hacked a couple of months ago, and I've been in this space since 2017. These are the things we go through.
So it's a good point. And again, when we're talking about these things, diversification of storage is, to me, a must. Just like what Jared was talking about with the ColdCard — it's not about what you know. It's not about the things you know you don't know. It's the things you don't know that you don't know that get you. And these are the reasons we're trying to stave off these different risks. Jared, thoughts on this one?
Jared: It touches on the points I was just making about putting your faith and trust in other people to make sure their technology is good enough to fend off not just attackers, but machines. We're in a new age now with AI, and a lot of these bad actors who were already pretty talented are now utilizing artificial intelligence and LLMs to cast a wider net — and a net that is more adept at catching their prey. That's just the reality.
The ColdCard situation was really sad. We had some people who were impacted by it. We had a lot of people who heard about it and moved their funds from ColdCard into iTrust Capital into our Premium Custody account. You can send crypto to a Premium Custody account in-kind directly to us. You can't do that for an IRA unless it's coming from an existing IRA provider. But for our non-IRA product, the Premium Custody account, you can just send over crypto in-kind. That's the long story short when it came to the ColdCard situation. Trusting other people doesn't always work out, and that's why it's important to consider diversification in terms of how you hold your crypto.
It's kind of like the person rolling around in the 1700s with all their gold on their horse and buggy. There are a lot of things that can happen in the Wild West. So you want to have some buried in a ditch, some hidden in your home, maybe some in the local bank, and then maybe some on your person. You want to mix up how you hold your assets.
Fees, the Roth IRA, and the Peter Thiel method
Host: Hey Jared, remind me — how much does it cost to send crypto in and to take crypto out of custody?
Jared: We don't charge to send crypto in. If you're putting money into a Premium Custody account, we're not charging you for institutional storage. We will charge you if you make a transaction. So if you send in Bitcoin and then later want to diversify into ETH, SOL, or XRP — we have over 100 digital assets you can allocate into — we charge a 1% transaction fee to get out of Bitcoin and then another 1% to get into another asset. If you want to withdraw your crypto from a Premium Custody account in-kind, we charge 50 basis points for that.
Host: Got it. I just wanted to bring that point home, because people say, "If it's premium custodial services, it should cost a lot." No — you send it in, it gets protected, you don't pay anything. When you want to take it out, you pay. It is a business and an open economy, so I can see that.
Just to switch gears real quick — iTrust isn't just for custody. When I first got into it, it was all about my Roth IRA, because as time has gone on, I'm coming up rapidly on being able to take things out at 59 and a half. For the Roth IRA, it was crypto, you guys had gold, and now you're coming up with traditional equities, stocks, and ETFs, which I like a lot.
And of course, this is what I always talk about — it creeps up on you. Before you know it, you're like, "Wow, it's about that time." I'm pretty sure Peter Thiel, when he did this same thing, didn't really think his PayPal stock would be worth billions of dollars. And guess how much he's paying in taxes? Zero. Because it is tax-exempt when you hit 59 and a half years old.
Jared, remind me — for staking, which you're able to do within your Roth IRA, is it just Solana and Ethereum, or have you added a couple more?
Jared: We have ETH and we have SOL. We would love to add Cardano at some point — we've looked into it. It's a little more complex to build for us. We can certainly do it, but we're a very ambitious company and we have to prioritize things based on client demand. We ended up having a lot more clients who wanted to see stocks and ETFs on the platform before we did ADA staking. We have well over 100,000 funded accounts, so we've had a lot of clients make different requests. People want to see stocks and ETFs, so we got it done. People want to see crypto-backed loans, so we're going to work on that next after the other product I'll talk about in a second. And then hopefully we'll be able to get around to adding some more staking assets at some point in 2027.
The upcoming AI quantitative trading product
Host: There was a post you guys put out that said, "For years, crypto investors had two choices: buy and hold, or try to time the market. What about a third option?" Can you talk about this, or is it just a teaser coming soon?
Jared: I think this will be launched this month, if not sooner. Sooner than this month would mean in the next week or two. We're really hoping to have it launched sooner rather than later.
Since I started working at iTrust Capital in 2021, clients have asked, "Hey, how do I connect my third-party trading bot to your account?" We've never had the ability to do so. Clients have asked for it throughout the years. But what's happened over the last six years is people love crypto — they love Bitcoin, they love ETH or XRP, whatever they choose. They believe so much in crypto, but they've round-tripped a lot.
People last cycle were saying, "Oh, it's going to be the super cycle." And I think now people are starting to have that conversation again. But the truth is the super cycle narrative — really more of a meme — is just coping with the fact that crypto is very volatile. Over the last couple of years you could make an argument that stocks and ETFs have provided a better risk-adjusted return and have almost eaten crypto's lunch in a lot of ways, just because of how they've performed. But here's the truth: our clients and crypto investors love and believe in the asset class. It's not just about performing or outperforming other asset classes. They believe and want to be in this asset class because they think it's going to be part of the financial future — tokenization, real-world assets, being on corporate balance sheets, and so on.
So how do you find that in-between? A lot of people find it by trading. But trading is hard. Most of the time you lose when you trade. However, there are a lot of people who do well at it. We all follow them online. We all see people that call their shot, draw triangles, and figure out when the right time is to buy and sell. Even if they don't nail the move exactly, they're generally correct about Bitcoin being overbought or oversold.
So what we've worked to create is a product that utilizes AI-formulated quantitative trading strategies — rules-based, built on predefined metrics that utilize indicators, signals, and triggers that you see a lot of people use online — that end up outperforming buy-and-hold over time and create alpha and an edge. That's what we've come up with: the ability for our clients to opt into strategies that partake in that world.
Host: You know what, this is something me and Jerry were talking about as far as the goals of the individual investor. He's getting up there in age, just like we all are, and he says, "I have to look out for myself right now." And I think for some of the people that have a Roth IRA — even if you're younger — it's worth remembering that anytime you trade within your Roth IRA, there are no capital gains taxes. For example, if you would have sold Bitcoin at $125K within your Roth IRA and bought back in at $60K, it essentially doubled, and there's no capital gains tax on that. So when Jared talks about using a bot to do that, I think that would be a very big win, especially for people getting up there in age and close to 59 and a half. And that doesn't matter if you're 59 and a half, 50, 40, or 30. If you do something like this, I think that would be a pretty big win.
Jared: And it's just all about how you manage your own portfolio. Our clients are self-directed, autonomous, independent people. They're making their own luck. That's just the kind of people that listen to your show and onboard to our platform. The truth is you don't need to go all in on any asset or any strategy. You can take your portfolio — and once again, we don't provide financial advice — but we're going to see a lot of clients take their portfolios and put 90% into what they normally do and then put 10% into the trading strategies. Some will do 50/50. Some will do 75/25. People are going to do whatever they want to do. They're going to stay with buy-and-hold for some of their assets. But part of diversification is also how you deploy capital. I think we're going to see a lot of people want to partake in the trading aspect of crypto but take out the emotion — just because of all the emotion that goes into buying and holding.
Viewer Q&A
Host: Well said. So I'll just say this — if things are a bit unclear, the great thing about iTrust is that they have a staff of real people there if you'd like to have some questions answered. You can call somebody and talk to a real person. But before we get out of here, Jared, we've got some questions from people.
Jared: Let's do it.
Host: First one — is ALGO available on iTrust?
Jared: We've had ALGO for a while. If you go to itrustcapital.com and click on Markets, you can see all the assets — cryptos, precious metals, and stocks. If you click on cryptocurrencies, you can see all the ones available: Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, ALGO. You can also search in the top right.
Host: There we are. ALGO. Very nice. Okay, got it. Mary says, "Hello, Jared. I like iTrust." Not really a question, just a shout-out.
Jared: Appreciate you.
Host: When staking SOL on iTrust, does it work like a drip? Does it auto-stake the rewards earned, or do you have to go in and manually restake those rewards?
Jared: You get the rewards deposited into your account in SOL, and then you would need to manually restake those assets. I know people have asked for auto-restaking and we certainly take that seriously. It is on our roadmap to provide, but for now you need to manually restake it.
Host: Gotcha. Hey, just to verify — Bogdan says you can stake ALGO and you can stake Flare.
Jared: No, you cannot stake ALGO and you cannot stake Flare through our platform.
Host: Okay, it's listed — let me see. Flare — okay, so Flare you can buy.
Jared: We have Flare, yeah. You just can't stake it. We don't have staking for it.
Host: Here's a good one, and it's timely. "When is the BitLicense? Been waiting to use the platform in New York for five to six years."
Jared: We onboard clients in all 50 states.
Host: Oh, well, great. There we go. And I think that's all we've got. Well, Jared, I think that is it for today — almost 30 minutes or so. I don't want to keep you. I know you've got a lot of things to do. Thanks for stopping by and thanks for revealing what that big mystery was. Looks like it's going to be a trading product. That would be a good video to do around that. Any last words of wisdom for these guys before we get out of here?
Jared: Just stay patient, stay motivated. We're very lucky to be in this space and to have crypto as an available asset class. Keep an open mind — the world's changing very quickly. Make sure you're not staying too stubborn when it comes to your investment philosophy. Keep an open mind.
Host: Well said. All right, Jared, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll get you on the next one.
Jared: Thanks for having me. Take care, everyone.