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Onramp Finance Deep Dive with Bram Kanstein: Preserving Wealth in the Digital Age
00:53:13
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What you're telling me is that music
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is about to stop and we're gonna
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be left holding the biggest bag of
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odorous excrement ever assembled in the history
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of Daft Desert, 1974-1987-9297-2000, whatever we want
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to call this, it's all just the
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same thing over and over.
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We can't help ourselves.
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I say when we sell. Hey, I say when we sell.
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B
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, some point in the future or the past. And Brian Cabellis, who leads our strategy and research efforts. Brian, nice to see you as well. And then Bram Constein, 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 hosts 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. Excited for this conversation, the best place for us to start. And I'll pull up the presentation as I hand it over to Micha. We want to talk about the why. So we're talking about On Ramp Finance today. This product was launched officially almost three weeks ago now. And in my opinion, before Michael, you go ahead 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 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 Onramp 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.
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A
Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for anybody joining and who's going to tune in. And then also Bram, because I know it's later and Braum's been A great partner. I think we started similar times with his journey kind of building his podcast and following in 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 Posh Fair. An individual that's super sophisticated on the gold side. And I'm bringing it up because a, it reminds me of very early days when Cam and I were building out Unchained. 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 done 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 our own itch. 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 the team here has all grown. Their families have grown, their personal responsibilities have grown. And custody had really not done that. And we had been onboarding 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 Brahm, who's an extension of our team, we want to build products and services that are fundamental to the value prop of bitcoin, but also help existing holders navigate life. But then how do we expect the next ten thousand, hundred thousand 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 Ribeye 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 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, unquote mousetraps Ways for individuals to participate in OnRamp's ecosystem in an introductory way. And that's really what spurred on Ramp finance was this notion of post genius act. All the different administration like introductions to favorability or feeling okay with this asset class allowed for a bitcoin company to provide dollar and cash equivalents next to bitcoin financial products along with a bunch of other things. And that's really the confluence of events that was around honor and finance. It ties into people not being able to preserve their 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. Onorm finance. 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.
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B
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, 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 onramp. 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?
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A
Yeah, so I mean this really really was an inflection point that 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 that lost credibility. Around 22 it was Q3, Q4 with FTX, Celsius and block by those entities blew up. And the acknowledgment 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, file distribution wides, 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 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 looked at its 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 and then ultimately where it fell it 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 where we were headed down that path. And we've kind of seen this already with the amount of assets centralized and 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 one component preservation opportunity and the other other component for, for greed or preserving wealth. 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 potentially a generational business off of the backs of standardizing effectively custody and then offering this to a larger market once it becomes the normal.
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B
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 and A because we' 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 Onramp, 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 over time, 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?
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D
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Jackson. I think and Michael sort of touched on this in terms of the foundation to the business being centered around custody. I think a large disconnect and, and I sort of learned this from my prior experience in the tradfi world and then spending a year at Coinbase before 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 timeframe will 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, remint 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 competence. 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. They hear the stories of exchange hacks and they say how could I ever get a material exposure to this asset and know that it's going to be there in 50 years, pass it along to my kids, et cetera. 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 people in the bitcoin camp to look at all of this development and progress and say, well, this, 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 had 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 RAN Finance also rests in basically what we're not doing. And it speaks to sort of the broader financial wins of the rest of the market. So whether you're looking at a Coinbase or Robinhood or any of these other platforms that are also trying to be, you know, your financial platform 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 of these things that we hear about that are becoming popularized because people don't think that they can actually just save money. And so we're taking a very different stance in that 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. 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.
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B
Yeah, well said. I mean, I definitely resonate with Brian. The theme that you spoke to just in terms of gambling being one of the soup du jour is 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, unquote, 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 business, but we also want to build the best money business. We want to build the best business where people can use their dollars, save in bitcoin, allocate to gold, save in gold as well. To Michael's point, we just had an interesting conversation that will be released tomorrow with Josh Ferrin, 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, a 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 five, 10, 20, 50 years, then 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 Bram, 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 to be more precise. We'd 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, et cetera. I know it's a vague question, but would 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 there, further down the road there.
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C
Sure. Thanks. Well, I think it kind of starts with, you know, whenever someone discovers bitcoin 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 Tradfi 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 what bitcoin could bring. And logically I think tradfi is late to the game in terms of getting, getting to bitcoin, but also for, for the wrong reason. So I see there's a huge opportunity for bitcoin native financial companies like, like onramp with people at the helm that truly understand bitcoin too. It's deepest level to kind of like take over that role, I would say of tradfi and kind of like usher in this, this new age of bitcoin. And you know, obviously this is going to take a long time. So I hope Michael is. How do you say that? Like enough stamina 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.
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A
Right.
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C
But eventually I think most people will diversify the way that they are storing their bitcoin. That's one I think. And the next thing with what you guys are launching now, and I talked with Michael about this before, right. Like I have an international business I'm using for example, wise, which was a transfer wise, right. Like they have a card. I'm using stripe. I think there's a stripe card coming. I have, sometimes I have bitcoin, et cetera. 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 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 over time, you can actually move away from tradfi more into actually planning and living on a bitcoin standard. And that is something that I think should be built. Now, obviously there's a lot of competition with all different kinds of storage solutions, but I think in the case of Onramp, it is a very unique approach that I think you guys are slowly also perfecting. Right? Yeah, I just think it's a very interesting option for people to actually use when they're moving toward the bitcoin standard.
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A
Yeah, appreciate that, Brahm. 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 try to remain as objective as possible. And in a case like an example is 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 that control, but also not trusting a third party. And through the years and a lot of the experiences 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 SD card. It was done like we lost the whole, the whole setup. And it wasn't just that experience, but 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 bear 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 you're going to get everyone in, you have to standardize it where they don't have to think about it in 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, aren't necessarily there themselves. Would you rather just like take an 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 Brahm's point, being diplomatic is like where we're interest interesting is we solve. So we solve things for people that have 3,000 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 onto 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 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 the volatility, the liquidity, the hacks and then people will ultimately go to the most fault tolerant, trust minimized solution. And that's what I think we're building here.
- [20:50]
B
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 this space for a number of years, everyone that we've spoken to pretty much, unless it's someone who's net 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 exist and effectively have 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 success with ETFs. It's why you saw so much interest with the treasury companies. It's why the Charles Schwab the fidelities are launching 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, a thousand 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, et cetera, as the stakes just grow over time. I think that's an aspect that a lot of people don't 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 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 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?
- [23:29]
E
Yeah, thanks, Jackson. It's, you know, definitely doing a walk down memory lane as Michael was 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 you all need, what's working for you and what's not. We feel like we have a better lens 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 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 realized 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 IRAs, we we've added bitcoin backed loans, we've added inheritance planning and insurance all within to one account. And then this honorable finance is really the expression of now kind of that third layer where clients can add dollars and gold in one account and further consolidate their financial life. So I had X post go out recently and usually my posts 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 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.
- [25:34]
B
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.
- [26:10]
E
Sure. So this really, this is an example of the on ramp dashboard. 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 into 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 chain multi institution custody account, we've got our earn A product. So if you're looking to buy Ribeyes 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 earned account as well. We have an excellent loan partnership with the Arch team. We had that 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 view the health of their loan right in this account 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'd be able to see as a fast follow the gold exposure. So we have a partnership with Argo in Canada, world class gold firm holding physical gold which you can also request delivery of. So 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 could say here. There's inheritance built in. You can see that the multi institution custody vaults are insured through Lloyds 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.
- [29:10]
A
Yeah, just a few quick things to touch on. We easily gloss over some of these aspects. I think it 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 that's generally how best practice from an IRS perspective. So you have to throw that trust there or there are products that let 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. And similar to loans, we fundamentally believe the best loans in the future of loans will be on multi institution custody. We've experienced at our previous firm not one single dollar on loan loss. It was built on this architecture. That's what we're working on. But one other example just to call out is Kim rightfully said 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 and the type of experience you get all the way to the wires are part of the solution. You don't 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 okay, if you hold bitcoin well, you have multiple bank accounts, well, 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 coming in the future.
- [31:52]
B
Just one final thing, Ken too. Well, 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.
- [32:01]
E
And I thought of two other things that I figured we would get questions on in terms of buying Bitcoin. You can place market buys but you can also place limit orders now. So. So this is huge. When I think about my own experience. You know, 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 were on river or another platform and we'll be adding recurring buys in the next, call it four 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 two, 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 the front end. So what I mean by that is if you want, you can create an on ramp 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 an on ramp finance account, start buying or selling bitcoin, use earn, sign up for the card, roll over an IRA that's all available to you. Okay. 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 part of this design service of multi instit custody. And what it enables and what it enables is your wife, your spouse, if you die they can just call us. It's that simple. Like just being able to explain that to your, 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, 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 possess here. What you do is you within a matter of a few minutes, you designate a primary and or 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 Bitcoin's $500,000 on the day that you pass, that is the new basis that that your beneficiaries benefit from. So inheritance comes with all core and private client accounts. Accounts with multi institution citi.
- [35:12]
B
Excellent. Thank you Cam. So we can pivot to Q and A. 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 Onramp 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 SATs deposited. Michael, perhaps we could do a special code here webinar and Michael can determine how many more sats you'll get as part of the webinar 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, 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 onboarded 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, et cetera. 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 and A box down below, just submit them. So is it possible to roll over an existing Roth IRA to onramp and then also someone asked traditional IRA is listed. Is there a Roth IRA option as well? So yes, we can support traditional IR, we can support Roth IRAs solo 401ks. 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 valuable. 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 heard of IRA accounts already being opened in one day. And so relative to the market, I think we have 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 five, 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 you already have access to everything on the account. So you have, 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 existing clients. If you want to reach out to me, Jackson Ramp Bitcoin. Com I'll make sure I get you on the list for some swag on ramp swag that Michael will personally ship to you. He'll deliver it on on horseback. And so that is another thing that we could give you as an existing client is some of that exclusive on ramp swag that's highly coveted. You can see Michael got a nice jacket on today or vest. I 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 roadmap 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 min. That's a few clicks and be able to name your spouse as the primary, your children as contingent beneficiaries and percentage allocations in terms of how you want to manage your inheritance plan.
- [39:19]
E
And just to add to that too, 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 account and then list their beneficiaries.
- [39:39]
A
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 in. 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 any open source tool to know it's always there. Takes on ramp trust out of the equation if we ever disappear. Those assets are secure. Sure. But also you get the ability to have multiple vaults because that's a user experience. You can imagine where you add multiple vaults to that and then you can label them and have those assets secured for other participants in the family.
- [40:16]
B
Thank you. We've got a question here on timelines around additional banking features such as bill pay, direct deposit, DCA et cetera. I believe some of this is already live and then dca. But Michael, if you want to speak to it.
- [40:29]
A
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 two 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 deposits. So think of this as 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 life 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 bidirectional partnerships. 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. A 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 you 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 a million 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 it a step further, if you wanted a card that 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 okay 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 across before it's publicly announced.
- [42:24]
D
Announced.
- [42:24]
A
But that's a similar construct 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 a hundred million dollars for clients of a firm to be able to actually put some of that BTC in a segregated wallet. 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 actively working on a lot of this for anybody that is just deeply interested or falling in the 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 scared 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, there's still tentative guidelines. They're waiting to be opened up again. Maybe too much information, but it has to do with collateralization ratios around dollars and then the Bitcoin that they would hold on a balance sheet. So we're actively having conversations. 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.
- [43:53]
B
Thanks Michael. Appreciate that. 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 that 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 a liquidation and then this question is asking about top up 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 15% drawdown day where I thought the world was going to end, when Bitcoin moved briefly, even below 60k I want to say. But even through the extreme volatility, the benefit you have working with us is 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, calls and we did not have any clients that were liquidated on their Bitcoin backed 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.
- [45:42]
A
You know, anybody that's listening knows I have to throw like one, a little, little jab at Jackson. This is the one. Jackson really aged himself there because you know, that was like a dip for ants. You try to go from 67 down to 18 or 14,000 in 22. And even that wasn't the scary one. It was 2020 going down to 3K thinking that this could actually go to zero. 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.
- [46:24]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well said. Bram. 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, et cetera. And I'm just curious like from your vantage point, how you kind of think about 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.
- [46:59]
C
Yeah, I saw, I saw the question about, you know, are Dutch citizens really liable now for taxes on unrealized gains? If so, how might Dutch on ramp clients be affected? I think this is a very interesting question. 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 through some people with, to very well known Dutch billionaires, like tech guys who are actually really rounding people up 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, there's really something going on. But why the question is interesting maybe. I think Michael could allude to that too. I think from an Internet professional 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 Onramp 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 company. So there aren't really any barriers there. But I think Michael can at some nuance.
- [48:19]
A
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 adgm, 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.
- [49:37]
B
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, 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, duration 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, et cetera.
- [50:04]
A
Yeah, I think it's a good question. There's different Flows we're refining. We've always taken the stance of like we, we get the product out there and then we ultimately refine it based on the client feedback and 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 execute a trade and there's just a fundamental clearing which is anywhere between 24 to 72 hours before that ACH transfer from like a compliance risk mitigation. We can collapse that somewhat. It's relying on our counterpart wires are generally best if you're going to do larger transactions. But the benefit to all of that is as we get more demand, we can go and refine that process to either tighten it or where we want this all to go is if we build the best experience for clients dollars to manage their cash, meaning 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 in a 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 following this space, tokenized deposit sits as like anybody who looked in the T's and C's of your bank, money is not your money. It's also over leverage. How many, however many times to one one versus if you have a stablecoin 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 systems. 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 analytics around the money movement from those three days, we can start to collapse that into two days to one. 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 comes with risk. So we have to be able to get better analysis on that before we kind of.
- [52:17]
B
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 Brian, thank you for those who joined the webinar today. Hope you got value out of it. Again, if you're not a client already, you can sign up for the Genesis program. And if you're an existing client, reach out to me jacksonrampbitcoin.com make sure we'll get some swag shipped out to you for being a loyal client of Onramp. And thank you again for joining us. Appreciate your time and we'll talk soon.
- [52:43]
D
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 On Ramp 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.