Speaker 1: All the keys, all the key material that's essential to
authorizing bitcoin transactions on the actual network all held by
one based in their custody and so when you're navigating
through their app and trying to transfer bitcoin out that
they get it inside their application and then somehow their
structure to work to authorize and sign a key for
of you. You can't pick poin uniquely self custody it right,
So there's options to hold your own keys. That's been
that's advanced a lot in like the last decade plus
where from the very beginning, self custody was optioned for bitcoin,
but now we have things like Harbord wallets, more consumer
friendly devices. You have apps on your phone that you
could run that will hold a key on your phone.
So really the idea is to take that key and
move it as far away as possible from attack points.
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Speaker 1: And welcome.
Speaker 3: You are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network.
I'm your host, Carrie Leutz. Well, bitcoin's been in the news,
it's headed back up. We hold a small interest in it,
and mainly to stay in the game, keep track of things,
and security is a huge thing. Who do you trust?
Who can you trust? And Joseph Kelly is with us now. Joseph,
you are CEO and co founder of Unchained. You've got
over six billion dollars in bitcoin in custody. You do
iras with bitcoin all these things. Hey, I wanted to
ask you before we get into it, the way to
do it IRA with bitcoin. I guess it's similar to
of gold. IRA set up a checkbook ll C which
holds custody. It's a disregarded entity. It's owned by your
your self directed IRA. Is that how that works?
Speaker 1: That's been a common pattern. That's actually not necessary today.
We we partner with a bank that is technically the
IRA custodian. The bank is Fortis out of Colorado or
underneath Ortis. Our clients can still hold their own keys.
Uh so uniquely with our our IRA, you can still
self custody. We'll soon have options available to if if
you don't want to hould your own keys. But yeah,
that that was a that was the common practice for
how to go about holding big coin was was yet
through that self directed IRA route. But now there's some
adoption at a few custodians that that work in. Other
companies in the space like I Trust and others have
used Fortis or may may still so that's made it easier.
Speaker 3: All right and interesting. So, you know, my biggest concern
trusting anybody, whether it's coinbase, you name it is how
do I know we're not going to get hacked? How
do I know it's not going to get stolen? Do
you carry insurance? Will? Who in their right mind would
write an insurance policy for this? Probably aig or Lloyd's
of London, if I had to take a guess to
share with us how you protect your clients.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there it's important probably set up at this
point at a distinguishing principle operating for like an unchained
custoding model versus a coinbase. So coinbasoud be something like
a centralized custodian that they hold the keys to the bitcoin.
So for the you know, many billions of dollars worth
a bigcoin they see you here today. All the keys, all
the key material that's essential to authorizing bigcoin transactions on
the actual network all held by coin Base in their custody.
And so when you're naviating through their app and trying
to transfer bitcoin out that they get it inside their
application and then somehow the structure still works to operize
and sign.
Speaker 3: A key for you.
Speaker 1: You can't pick poin uniquely self custody it, right, So
there's options to hold your own keys. That's been that's
advanced a lot in like the last decade plus where
from the very beginning, self custody was optioned for bitcoin,
but now we have things like harbor wallets, more consumer
friendly devices. You have apps on your phone that you
can run that will hold a key on your phone.
So really the idea is to take that key and
move it as far away as possible from attack points
by their partyers and an infiltrator. So people like a
phone is pretty good or some secure enclaves on it,
but if you did lose your phone or you had
something else like, you can probably believe your your key
is lost at that point. See, harbor wallets are are
really good warm factors for storing key because you can
you can also back the weapon ways, and you can
through multi sig, which is down chain. Worse, you you
wally start to have more of a redundancy. You have
multiple keys that you need to access in order to
spend your bitcoin. It's a frind chain simply. You know
the ball that a clipical client has With Unchained, it's
a two or three multi sake. They have two keys
that they get to keep themselves, maybe the one in
an office, one at their home, and then Unchain has
a third key, and so if they lost the key,
they can come to Unchain and ask us to sign
while they signed one. But uniquely for Unchained, for that
you know, six billion dollars for the bigcoining helped secure.
We're not unilaterally in control of it. So it's guess
there's really this kind of unique hybrid model that says
you could hack everything at Unchained to the ground and
I can't move into this client's bitcoin now I don't
have subbficient keys. So it's really kind of a partnership.
But we got a collaborative custody model with our clients
and that helps always be more secure together.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you know when when you're looking at all
this stuff. One thing I saw was the SIM swapping,
and it's a way that hackers. They go to the
Verizon store, the T Mobile and they say, I lost
my phone. What can I do? And they show some
fake ID and they get they get you. They actually
get a new phone with all of your credentials on it,
and then they go through your wallets and they grabbed
the money. And I saw that that coinbase. Recently I
changed phones, I upgraded. Man, I'm still cursing it. I'm
still cursing it. But hey, you know, it's part of life.
You know that, you know, one of the biggest things
in computers. No upgrade shall go unpunished, right, and you
know it's it's kind of pony. But basically, you know,
it's not funny because the people I knew somebody actually
had a friend who lost nineteen thousand dollars from her
wallet and was suing was suing T Mobile and the
holder of the of her crypto account. So it's really
not funny at all. That serious.
Speaker 1: Yes, SIM swapping. The vector there I'm most familiar with
is you know, when you have set up like a
two factor authentication with a Coinbase or someone else that
goes to SMS, it goes through text messages. Uh, that's
a that's a common practice still with other financial solutions
as well. And so yeah, when you when someone is
able to port your phone number onto a different device
that they control and then they receive text messages on
behalf of you, they can circumvent uh, like you're maybe
your pre existing passwords or long ends at these at
these websites. So it's it's really a practice, like we
don't support any SMS authentication mechanism that unchained. We do
have a to A, but it uses the authenticator app.
It's Google Authenticator. There's others that's more. We're usually scanning
a QR code and so runs as an app on
your phone, which is way less susceptible or not likely
to then be like ordered to copy the other copied
over each other phone unless you're okay.
Speaker 3: So so you've podcast that because it seems like that's
a really hard way to do it. But then again,
I think the carriers are also having liability for this,
so they've tightened up the ability and someone to walk
in right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then that's been I mean there I think
I would say, Michael Turpin, is that a big public
lawsuit with with T Mobile or the main major characters
if he was an investor that lost a lot of this. So, yeah,
some shoppings and majorly on the rise over the last
few years and these days a lot more of the
things we see are matters with fishing and spear fishing,
people impersonating at coin base or impersonating and unchained and
to people and greating fear and urgency around. Hey, your
coin Base account is hacked. Work with me to log
in with you, and you know we'll help you move
your your funds. That kind of a pattern is something
you know, people really need to be watching out for that. Really,
you know, no really good, legitimate financial institution is likely
to be calling you with any kind of version instructions
or security issues. You a lot alone, like Google and
others of the world. But that's the current generation of
like heightened attack vector that we see. Yeah, because that's
you know, that is the right, right, the eight hundred
pound gorilla. That's the first thing I'm sure any new
client asks you, Right, it's about security, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's essential to our value proposition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So if you can't do that, so, Hey, tell us,
if I wanted to set up a self directed IRA
with you, how would I do it?
Speaker 1: So we've done a lot of work to make this
onboarding very streamlines. We've had this product line for two years.
It was really really inherited. We'd acquired a gentleman and
small business that had done this for many others, and
so we've been agate that in our platform and basically
go unchained dot com slash IRA I want to believe,
and there's a sign up button right there. You can
work through the flow to sign up for an account.
We're down to where within a day or two we
just have to submit some of that information to our
banking partner Ortis, and then depending on where the person's
at and how comfort they are setting out the vault
themselves with their own two keys, or if they'd like
us to guide them that we can do that. That
takes a few days if we're helping out with that,
and then yeah, right now, we change our pricing so
the first year is free, there are some trading piece
when people purchase bitcoin with us, and then there's two
hundred fifty dollars of annual fees starting in the second year.
So yeah, it's pretty pretty streamlined by now. Thirty forty
percent of our thousands of clients have an IRA with
us as well.
Speaker 3: All right, so we want to find out more about you,
connect with you, set up an account. How do you
do that?
Speaker 1: Unchained dot Com is the principal URL a lot of
ways to navigate from from there. A lot of our
specialty is in helping people with education. We consider our
role here as really as navigators. I think bitcoin can
be a personal journey. It's both an investment, but for
a lot of people it's also a new new way
maybe looking at the world, looking at money, and so
we have a lot of experts here that are able
to help people walk them through security solutions for self custody,
answer a question about irase. We also have a rest
Investment Advisor affiliate, so actually a fully in subsidiary that
does financial planning and advice for people that want to
know answer questions about, for instance, how to balance our
traditional portfolio versus bitcoin as either grows or changes over
time in their porfolios makeup. So you know, we really
try to be a comprehensive Picklin financial service, the solution
for the long.
Speaker 3: Term older all right, Hey, well, we just appreciate your
coming on sharing with us all these new developments, a
lot of which none of you out here knew about.
I didn't know about it. And well, if you got
a question for Joseph for myself, shoot medi email kl
at Carrie Lutz dot com and you'll find a link
in the show notes to the site. And while you're there,
please just to sign up free free newsletter. Got a
lot of great info in it and shooting one off
tomorrow in fact does Its been a pleasure. Thanks so much.
We'll talk to you again for sure.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Kerry, thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial
Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest,
go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now
more than ever