Building Bitcoin Wealth Through Trusts, Insurance & Inheritance | Bitcoin 2026

Welcome everybody. Day three of the Bitcoin conference. How are we feeling? I love it. I love it. Enterprise stage always brings the energy. Thank you guys for being with us here today. We're going to get in some awesome stuff. My name is Wyler Earhart. I'm the founder of Basil Financial. We're a Bitcoin focused wealth management firm and Pax Partners is a private credit fund invest in a Bitcoin collateralized loans and these gentlemen will introduce themselves. Morning, morning, morning. Hopefully you guys are having a good conference. My name is Jake Klaver. I am the chairman of Digital Asset Group. We are a multi-family office. We specialize in digital assets. So all the things that you'd expect from that wealth management, estate planning, taxes, all the fun stuff that everybody loves to talk about. I also have fun stuff. So uh I'm Zach Townsend. I'm the CEO of Meanwhile. Meanwhile is a life insurance company entirely in Bitcoin. Uh I'll tell you more about that later, but if you love Bitcoin and you hate taxes, you want a life insurance policy. >> [clears throat] >> I'm Jeff Vandrew. I am CFO and Chief Legal Officer at Unchained. Unchained is a diversified Bitcoin financial services company. We offer multi-signature custody. We offer lending, trading, and our newest business line is Gannett Trust Company, our wholly owned subsidiary where I also serve as CEO. Uh amazing. Thank you, gentlemen. High power group up here. We're going to get into a lot of quantitative nuts and bolts, how we can make our Bitcoin work for us, how we can take care of our Bitcoin, but I want to do a little level setting, you know, up front so we really kind of understand the the moment and and what we're getting into here. And you know, one of the things I talk to my clients a lot about is really understanding the moment and understanding your responsibilities as a Bitcoiner specifically when it comes to you There's a lot of unique, you know, attributes and um of Bitcoin and we really want to make sure when we're dealing with a finite scarce asset that we're good stewards of our wealth. You know, we've become very accustomed to, you know, outsourcing responsibility and you know, when we're talking about passing on Bitcoin and making sure it gets to its intended, you know, destination, we have to be very intentional about how we do that. We're we're all called to to do that and and be intentional with our actions. And with that said, you know, Jeff, I want to kind of start with you. Maybe we could do like some level setting. We'll kind of work backwards on the inheritance side of things, making sure our stack secured, it gets to where it needs to go. Why don't you kind of walk us through some basics, some blocking and tackling on trust structures, what kind of trust structures that you see work very well for Bitcoiners? Yeah, so this is a bit of a loaded question for me. Uh as Unchained employees will tell you when I get asked what a trust is, usually I start by going back to the Norman Conquest of England, William the Conqueror and all that. Uh I'll spare you guys that here today despite the captive audience and the where I'm sure you'd all be enthralled. Um the most important thing to understand, I mean, even just taking a step back from trusts about Bitcoin and inheritance generally, is a lot of Bitcoiners have a misconception that all that needs to happen is their loved one that they want to take their Bitcoin upon their death has to find their private keys. And that's not true, right? I mean, that is important, but it's just table stakes. Because if your loved ones can find your private keys when you're gone, but you don't have the appropriate legal structure on the back end, which is usually a will and also some combination of trusts, um what's going to happen is that loved one that finds those keys, they may have possession of that Bitcoin, but they don't have legal title to it. And that can be a problem because what it means is their possession may not be rightful and you may have other loved ones that could sue them and they could start fighting over who that Bitcoin really belongs to. So that's the most important thing I like to start with is just making sure that Bitcoiners realize there's really two pieces to this. There's the physical side with keys and then there's the legal side making sure everything is documented properly. One of the other questions that was sort of you know, I think most people are probably familiar with what a will is but sort of buried within Wyatt's question there was you know, the idea of what is a trust. Um a trust, the short definition is that it's a division of legal and equitable title between two different parties. And what that means is you're designating a trustee as the legal title holder. That's the person that manages the person or entity of course that manages those assets and sort of faces the world. That's who third parties deal with with respect to the assets held in trust. And then there are the beneficiaries which are the equitable title holders. They're the ones who the assets are mandated to benefit. So the trustee has to manage those assets not for its own benefit but for the benefit of those beneficiaries. It must always consider the beneficiaries ahead of itself. The reason why and I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit more as we go along people create trusts to create that division between legal and equitable title. There's a few reasons why people tend to do that. So number one, it could be because you just want independent third-party management of those assets. Uh that would be one particular reason. Number two, or there could be tax benefits to doing that. Um it can actually reduce the amount of taxes that your loved ones pay as those assets pass down through generations. And then number three, it can also provide asset protection benefits. Um and that can take a lot of different forms. So when I was uh a practicing estate planning attorney a very long time ago uh one of the you know, most common concerns I would see from parents was you know, I got this piece of crap son-in-law and I want my daughter to get you know, whether it's my Bitcoin or other assets or whatever the case might be, but I want to make sure that no matter what happens her son-in-law isn't going to be able to benefit from those assets and that if he divorces her someday or she kicks him to the curb, you know, he's not going to be able to get a piece of it. And trusts are an effective mechanism for both that type of asset protection as well as protection from you know, other types of creditors and things of that nature. So they're a really flexible mechanism that we use and again at Trust Company we can actually act as what's called an institutional trustee which means instead of having to name a friend or family member as trustee which they may not be super well suited to do that. They're not professionals. You know, Gannett Trust Company can act as trustee over not just your Bitcoin which is obviously a unique selling point of ours because very few trustees are able to handle actual real physical Bitcoin but also over all of your traditional financial assets as well. Amazing Jeff, that was a phenomenal overview and you know, I think it's some really good insight on why we need to you know, plan be intentional with our planning. You know, we can't predict the future. There's a lot of different things that come up that you know, we need to take into account. Jake, you have a high net worth clientele. You're helping them with these very same questions. You know, Jeff already kind of scolded us on why we shouldn't create like a treasure map and bury it in the backyard. How do you walk your clients through estate planning? Well, we we work with a variety of people, right? So across the spectrum. We have multi-family offices that are already very familiar with trust and estate planning and then we also work with a lot of high net worth individuals or people that have a significant allocation to digital assets, whatever that means to them. And really it you know, it's a value proposition. If you believe this is going to go up over the long term, you probably again want to be a good steward like you mentioned. Most of the demographic we deal with is somewhere between 45 and 70 years old. They have a spouse. They have children. They want to make sure that this stuff is perpetuated and when we have those conversations, there's a lot of unique circumstances that come up. You might have a child that has disabilities and you want to maintain their SSI. So, you need those considerations in the trust. Your children might be older and maybe they aren't as good a fiduciary as you or they don't understand this technology and so you might put a spendthrift provision in the trust. There's a lot of different things that you can put in your trust um to make sure that certain circumstances are navigated well um and you want to work with, you know, a good estate planner or trust attorney to make sure that that's structured the way that you want it done. Um most of our clients are looking over the next 100 years, right? How do we make sure that this last the next five generations as these assets appreciate. And that's a really different framework. Many people will come to the conversation thinking about, well, my kids, you know, or my grandkids and we help them structure a family charter or constitution that allows them to you know, kind of step back and look at their great grandkids and their great great grandkids and how they're going to be looking in at this asset class and navigating those things. And I think that's really important to take that holistic picture because if you are short-sided on that and you put things that work today in there, those things may be inflexible later on. You want to be dynamic enough that as technology shifts and regulation shifts, you're able to deal with those circumstances but at the same time rigid enough to make sure that your, you know, um principles, core beliefs and the values that you want to pass on to your children are disseminated uh and upheld over that time frame. Yeah, that's that's that's beautiful and Zack, you guys have done something very unique in the industry. You have developed this whole life insurance, you know, policy fully denominated in in Bitcoin and walked the audience through what it's like having an investment product with exposure to Bitcoin but some of the, you know, traditional finance, you know, mechanisms of whole life policy and specifically how that, you know, cashes in with an inheritance and making sure, you know, Bitcoin gets to your heirs. Yeah, great. Um well, I guess the the headline is that life insurance, uh like trusts, is are like a go-to tool for wealthy people to sort of get assets, um sort of out of your estate or make sure they're transferred well to beneficiaries, also the word you use in life insurance. But let me explain some of the terms you used cuz people are going to be like, what the hell does that mean? Cuz what is life insurance? So, um first off, uh Meanwhile is a life insurance company, we're entirely denominated in Bitcoin. So, you pay us in Bitcoin, we pay all claims in Bitcoin, we're regulated uh in Bermuda, not the Bahamas, where FTX was. Uh Bermuda's the insurance capital of the world, um very well-respected regulator. Our financial statements are audit, um our actuarial math, everything's in Bitcoin. And uh the reason that's important uh other than just ideologically for us, one Bitcoin is truly one Bitcoin. Um why it's important is that the price of Bitcoin doesn't matter and doesn't affect our ability to meet our promises. Um so, uh we've I've been running the company or I founded the company, I've been running the company, you know, the price of Bitcoin is I don't know, it was 60, it it was 15, you know, 130, it doesn't matter because the way our whole life policy works um is that you pay us a certain number of Bitcoin over 10 years, and then we make a fixed guaranteed promise to you. So, that might look like you pay one Bitcoin a year for 10 years, and then when you die, we pay your beneficiaries depends how healthy you are, 13, 14, 15, something like that. So, um that's whole life because it lasts your whole life. So, you're guaranteed a payout. Um we it's like what it's an investment product. Um and then there are some benefits with that. Uh the first benefit is um actually you don't have to remember where your keys are cuz we we make sure we are under a a legal obligation to make sure that your beneficiaries get your Bitcoin. The second thing is it goes to your kids tax-free. Or your kids' trust or uh frequently these things are put together. So, you'll uh Well, that that'll be very exciting. But, there are things called irrevocable life insurance trust. Your trust can be an owner, blah blah blah blah blah. But, like these things get combined. Um but fundamentally uh there are ways to get your Bitcoin to your kids tax-free. The third thing is that whole life um has a policy value. It has like an account value in it. And you can borrow yourself or the trust can borrow against the whole life policy also entirely tax-free. So, what you're doing is you're putting Bitcoin in. And let's say you need some Bitcoin in the future. You want to buy a big house or whatever. Um and you've put the Bitcoin in now. But, then later, you know, Bitcoin's at 700,000 or 7 million or whatever you think it's going to be. You can borrow it out. And that's new Bitcoin to you. So, that is a way to avoid the capital appreciation, the capital gains tax between now and then. Um and again, these are very like well-known tools. This is a a like the go a go-to tool just like a trust um is these large life insurance policies. Um and we just do it entirely in Bitcoin. Yeah, it it's awesome. Something I talk about all the time. And obviously I'm biased, but I think Bitcoin financial services is the most exciting sub-industry of Bitcoin to be in right now. I actually use Meanwhile as an example of that because you have this traditional finance playbook that you just need to apply to Bitcoin. You don't actually need to recreate the wheel here. And you know, one of the things I really want you guys to take home, you know, from this talk is being intentional. And Jeff, I want you to give us some more insight on this cuz something I hear, you know, a lot is you know, I don't need a financial advisor. I have Bitcoin. I don't you know, Bitcoin is my financial plan. It's like, wrong. Uh Bitcoin is money, you know, and so there there are services and professionals like you can utilize, and I want you to kind of take the audience here as acted a great job kind of teeing it up there a little bit, but how, you know, if you do take the time to be intentional and work with a professional that knows what they're doing, how can you kind of build or, you know, add on these structures on top of each other, you know, like a whole life insurance policy on top of a trust, and how does that really, you know, benefit not only you while you're living, but also your heirs when you're gone? Yeah, so as you mentioned, we do have a wealth advisory practice as part of Gannett, um where we can help people plan and design these structures to be both tax efficient and also just to fit their goals and their needs, right? Uh it could be retirement planning to make sure that you don't run out of money. When can you actually can quit working? That sort of thing. Um you know, to the more immediate question I think that was in there regarding how sort of life insurance can have an interplay with trusts, and Zach touched on this a little bit. Uh one of the more powerful estate planning mechanisms is what's called an irrevocable life insurance trust, and those of us that practice in this area refer to it as an ILIT. The benefit of that is like in a in the sort of classic life insurance scenario where let's say I own the policy, I'm the insured life, and I name my wife, uh let's say my wife and kids as as beneficiaries. When I pass away and those and those assets pass down to my wife and kids, they'll be free of income taxes, but if I'm over the applicable estate tax threshold, they'll still count towards my estate estate tax bill. An irrevocable life insurance trust sort of uh eliminates that problem. So, what it does is I'm still the insured life on the policy, but the policy is instead owned by a trust, and the policy beneficiary is also a trust. My wife and kids then act as the beneficiaries of the trust rather than as the beneficiaries of the policy directly. The benefit that that creates is now when I die, not only will there not be income tax, but there will not be estate tax either um when the uh policy benefits pay out upon my death. Those policy benefits will also the other benefit is they'll pay out into the trust for my wife and kids instead of my wife and kids directly. Um and by doing it that way, A, those assets are not subject to the claims of their creditors, they're asset protected, including any divorcing spouses or whatever the case might be. And then B, when the assets pass down another generation, say say that generation passes away, and there's still assets remaining in there, and those go down yet another generation, they won't be subject to estate tax again. Because otherwise, if you would just, you know, paid out the the death benefit in the standard way, whatever death benefits I didn't spend uh during life, those would be subject to estate tax again a second time at my death. So, it obviates that sort of multi-level taxation. Yeah, we also have fo- I mean, people have all sorts of structures, so we have folks who um you know, they have three kids, they're then they set up ILIT, they make their kids the insured, they set up ILITs for their grandkids. So, there's all sorts of structures you can use um that sort of depending on your tax goals. Yeah, well, it's uh particularly important for us cuz, you know, as Bitcoiners, you know, when working with clients and we do the forecasting exercise, it's probably more money in the future than you initially expected when you got into Bitcoin. So, you know, it's important you're really starting to to think about these things and you know, Jake there are trade-offs of, you know, utilizing some of these structures, you know, kind of specifically on the the custody side. Okay, I have a trust. I need a qualified custodian. Something Bitcoiners are obviously hyper-focused on is custody. Kind of want you walk us through like what some of those trade-offs may be, how you work with clients to maybe kind of give and take a little bit. Yeah, so, you know, the whole point of Bitcoin is to be self-sovereign. Right? Um at least for most people. You you want to be able to move with that money whenever you need it. Um but that also comes with some inherent risk, right? Many of which have been described by the other panelists. Um and in circumstances where you're no longer or maybe you're under duress, maybe uh you've passed on or you're incapacitated, uh you need some transfer mechanism or some, you know, multi-sig or governance around how you custody those assets. We do that at Anchorage. They are institutional custodian that we partner with. Uh we are signer on the wallets. So, there's the client. So, there's the custodian, very similar to what Unchained does. Um which I think is a great way to go about it. You still have a lot of control over those assets. Again, depending on what type of structure you might have it in. If it's an irrevocable trust, you're likely going to have a distribution trustee, a trust protector, you're the grantor, uh and then you know, here you'll have the beneficiary, which is either the life insurance trust or uh direct to your your kin. So, you know, again, it's always a give and take. It's never going to be a perfect solution and you're going to have to weigh and balance what's best for you and your circumstances and how much control or little control you want over the assets. Um I think most people just want to protect it. They want to make sure that it grows. They want to make sure that they have access to it when they need it. Uh and all of those things work in traditional finance and like you talked about, just applying that to Bitcoin, many of these things already exist. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just apply those same tools to this asset class. Um we have a product that we've launched. It's a fund for Bitcoin. We partner with two Prime and Fidelity, so they're our custodian for the Bitcoin that we hold for our clients, and we're able to generate somewhere between 6% and 8% on that Bitcoin depending on the year in that strategy, and that's in-kind returns. Um and then, you know, we have Meanwhile, which can do, you know, pretty similar to that and then in their strategies to be able to generate the turns to pay out over the long term. Um little less than that, little less than that. But, that's all you need, right? And you want it to be safe and conservative. So, um you know, depending on your risk tolerance, there's suitability standards for that product. Sometimes it's not a fit for everybody, but, you know, we wanted to bring that to to market, and we have some more products we're bringing to market as well. But, you know, you can blend all of these things. You could be holding your assets in an irrevocable life insurance trust while it's participating in one of these products to be able to compound that Bitcoin and then pass more of that Bitcoin down to your heirs. Um the other thing I'd mention is, you know, today the uh estate tax here in the US applies to anything over $30 million if you're a married couple. So, if you think your Bitcoin is going to be in excess of that at the time of your passing, it's probably a good idea to start looking at a lot of this stuff. Welcome to Predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. >> [music] >> Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. >> [music] >> Bet on your instinct. Your prediction, your edge. Dual bets. Predict, where everything is a market. Well, absolutely, and it's a great transition here, too, cuz I want to start talking about, you know, wealth generation with Bitcoin. And one of the most common questions I get is, how do I earn yield on my Bitcoin? And, you know, can I wrap it on, you know, this protocol? I'm like, no, absolutely not. Please never do that. Zack, I'm in all of like Meanwhile's product is it's very, in my opinion, like a genuine Bitcoin denominated yield. And you know, I think you guys just fully denominating the the company and your your policies in Bitcoin was really kind of a an unlock and something that like first and unique in the marketplace. So, why don't you walk the audience through how your policies generate yield and and how you think of yield generation in general in Bitcoin? Um Thank you. Yeah, I well, first off I'd say six or seven, that's that's beyond our risk tolerance. So, we target sort of two to three percent returns in Bitcoin. Um so, as I mentioned, the way the policy works is you pay in and then we make a a guaranteed payout. Um and that the difference between those two numbers, as I said, like 10 to 13, um depends on your age and your health. In some ways we're we're making a promise to you of something like two percent returns a year every every year. And the way we do that is we use the unique status of being a life insurance company to enter into long-dated really Bitcoin for Bitcoin loans. And that probably sounds like why would someone borrow Bitcoin against Bitcoin? And the reason that folks do that in the we have these long-dated repurchase agreements is because you're also resetting your basis. So, this is our other product. So, let's say you have 10 Bitcoin, you post that Bitcoin into an account in Anchorage, and then we lend you new Bitcoin against that. So, the common use cases we have is actually imagine that you want to do this seven percent fund. If you're super conservative, a lot of folks think that's taxable. Like making an LP commitment to a fund, actually there's debate about whether wrapping Bitcoin is taxable. It's like all I don't >> a tax letter that makes sure that that's not, but yeah. But, so we we find that there are folks who want to do something with their Bitcoin, um but then that would incur a huge uh tax event. Um so, you post the Bitcoin the low tax basis Bitcoin you have as collateral, and then we lend um Bitcoin to that that user to go do that things they do. And that's how we get actually all of our yield. We have more demand for that than we have insurance liabilities. Um and the reason it works is because uh we have we have duration like everything we do uh like we're not the a trading desk. Like, we're all about like this is going to take a year. So, that's how we get the yield. Um and then how we make money, that's often asked, is you know, we promise 2% and we try to get 2 and 1/2% returns, and then the difference between those things is is how we make money. And that's how all life insurance companies work. Uh the last thing I'll say uh about the company is that we have to have a lot of our own Bitcoin. Just like any normal life insurance company, we have a bunch of capital, and then there are tons of rules about what sort of investments we can make, what sort of risks we can take. We uh as I said have gone through two full audits um by a, you know, an actual audit, which can be rare of our Bitcoin life insurance company. Um so, there's a lot of mechanisms to make sure um that we're doing what we're supposed to do. In addition, that we ourselves have over 700 Bitcoin like as first loss capital in these entities to make uh these firm promises. Um The last thing I'll say it uh on the custody question is we often find we we don't think that you should take all of your Bitcoin and put it in a life insurance policy. Like that's not our pitch. Our pitch is like this is a tool in the toolkit. And we we have folks who have Bitcoin at Unchained. They have Bitcoin at Anchorage. They have Bitcoin in the ETF. They have they and we often find that folks then put a certain allocation into often irrevocable trust. And we have tons of people who then buy two policies. They buy one that isn't in a trust so that they can borrow against it themselves during their lifetime and they buy another policy in the trust like for their kids. So it's all just about like having that portfolio, that balance. Um and you know, I started this company because I was having I had this realization. My children were or my first child was born in 2018 and I bought a life insurance policy cuz I knew life insurance is this amazing tool. And let's say I have like a million dollars in coverage and then time passed and I was like, wait, the purchasing power of this million dollars of life insurance has gone down 20, 30, 40%. Like I want to pass on to my kids the greatest, most durable store of value in the world in the form of Bitcoin. And I started meanwhile to be able to do that for my children. I was the first user of the company and now for for you know, everyone who you know, believes that Bitcoin is the future of sound money. Well, and thank you for doing so. And Jeff, curious in your opinion, you guys have a wealth, you know, advisory business as well. How are you talking to to clients about building Bitcoin wealth? Yeah, so again, it I mean for clients of ours that do want yield on their Bitcoin, we do have strategies to accommodate that, of course. And there definitely very good reasons to do so. One of the things that we always point out to our clients though too is like when you're looking at your risk profile in terms of what your yield target is, given how much we think the capital appreciation in Bitcoin is going to be over the next coming years, it doesn't make sense to take a lot more risk to grab a few more percent in yield, right? That's That's not generally a good trade-off. So, A, you want to be very careful about that. And B, not all clients, but some clients when we explain a unit trust to them, um they realize they don't necessarily need yield. And a unit trust with with that is for those that are unfamiliar, uh if you have a struc- a trust structure that needs an ongoing annual income stream to pay some specific type of expense, uh what you can actually do is in the trust instrument itself, you can just say, "Hey, 5% or 2% or 1% of the US dollar fair market value of my Bitcoin holdings at the end of the year, that is just deemed income." Just sort of out of the sky or like if I have a, you know, uh a hundred thousand dollars in Bitcoin, right? I'm just using it cuz it's a nice round number, and it's a 2% unit trust, that just means that that trust had two thousand dollars of income in that year that is then distributed out or used to pay for expenses or whatever the case might be. And that's just attacking the problem from an accounting perspective, right? Which is on one level is just shuffling money around, but a lot of people when they see that, they realize, "Okay, maybe I don't need real income. I just need accounting income." It all depends on the individual. Amazing. Well, gentlemen, thank you for your work. Let's give them a big round of applause. >> [music] >> Every year, this community comes together >> [music] >> to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. >> [music] >> And every year, the stage gets bigger. >> [music] >> Sound money center stage. So, where do you go [music] to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. >> [music] >> Nashville, July 2027.