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Earlier this month at Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit in New York City, Matt Trudeau, chief operating officer of ErisX sat down to discuss the exchange’s move into retirement account products and what to expect on the regulatory front.
In March, ErisX announced that Midland Trust clients would be able to invest in digital assets through their self-directed Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), including bitcoin and ether.
“The IRA market in the US is massive and there is a whole market of self-directed IRAs,” Trudeau said. “There is the typical 401(k) that you get through your employer, but anyone who has changed employers, they typically roll this into an IRA.”
As people have started to change careers more frequently, IRA investments have grown. ErisX started receiving inquiries from IRA providers that wanted to give clients exposure to cryptocurrencies, Trudeau said.
“They were seeing increasing demand from their customers to add crypto assets into their IRA portfolio, and they were struggling to find a path that enabled them to do that in a way that they felt comfortable with that had the right level of security and regulatory compliance,” he said.
ErisX saw the potential and built out the technology to work within the IRA space and has since expanded to partner with several different IRA providers, including IRA Financial and The Entrust Group.
“The IRA investors tend to be more sophisticated,” Trudeau said. “These are typically people that have assets and they are looking at the long run, these are retirement accounts, they are looking 10, 20, 30 years out… their trade sizes tend to be larger.”
These investors are excited about expanding their portfolios into a new asset class, Trudeau said.
From a regulatory standpoint, Trudeau said that ErisX is already well versed in keeping within required guidelines, and he looks forward to watching the conversation evolve to bring more clarity to the space.
Watch the full interview below and all of the panel videos from DAS here.