 I've got to tell you, the longer that I'm in the crypto market, things just never seem to surprise me. And today, we're going to talk about yet another custody custodian company that is insolvent, allegedly. And when I talk about this, you have to just remind yourself that they've really just had one job and they couldn't even get that right. And the question really then becomes, what the heck happened? So what I'm talking about is there's been a story that's been, it's old. It's actually two or three days old now, and this is about prime trust. And the whole thing that this came about is because Bitco came out and said, we're going to help prime trust and we're going to buy it, and they did their due diligence and they found out that this is not a good buy. So they let it languish and now what is coming out, allegedly, that everything is insolvent. So this is what's happening. Prime trust can't honor customer withdrawals, says the Nevada regulator. I am a proponent of regulation, but I have to tell you, the regulators, it seems like maybe they're missing on their job, not for sure. A little dig at Gary Gensler. So this is what we got. June 21st, there was a cease and desist order from Nevada's Department of Business and Industry claim prime trust financial condition had considerably deteriorated. And the firm is now in an unsafe or unsound condition. This is what they state. On June 21st, respondents, prime trust, was unable to honor customer withdrawals. I think we're all aware of those and we've all felt those Celsius, Voyager, FTX, list goes on. Due to a shortfall of customer funds caused by a significant liability on the respondents balance sheet owed to customers, the order added prime trust has materially and willfully breaches fiduciary duties to its customers by failing to safeguard assets under its custody. And the thing that kept coming to mind is like, how does this happen? Because again, you have just one thing to do, custody. And then on their website itself, prime trust, it says very clearly, prime trust is a Nevada registered trust company regulated by the financial institutions, division of the Department of Business and Industry. We are required to maintain regulatory compliance with Nevada revised statutes, chapter 669. And if you are interested in that, there is a great website. You can pour through this and it's a multitude of pages. I've linked that in the description. But this is where it gets interested. Because again, very simple thing to do. And what I'm going to talk about is what's happening there. I don't want to say the F word, but it might be fraud. Because prime trust assets and its customers assets are kept separate. If that was the case and there was no coming of funds, there shouldn't be an issue with withdrawals. Additionally, our customers assets are either kept separate from the assets of other customers or otherwise specifically identified as belonging to a particular customer pursuant to NRS 669. Again, you can check it out right there. So if this is the case and they can't do withdrawals, really what it should be is that the company itself, if it goes through bankruptcy, it's because they did something. They overpaid for, they had too many employees, they overextended on their marketing budget. They did something where they just did poor business practice as far as due diligence and where they were set up. Whatever it is, but the customer's funds should have been safe and apparently they are not. And I thought to myself, this was like, well, maybe this is like a fly by night place because I've really honestly never, I've heard of prime trust in passing, but never really paid too much attention to it. Prime trust has been around for quite some time. It was founded in 2016. 2016, let me do some quick math. It's like seven years. So what happened to where it just all of a sudden had this issue? Because we've already gone through a brutal bear market in 2022. That's when everything was exposed. So what happened from then until now? Well, I think what it comes down to is, first of all, they actually did some pretty good things. Prime trust cut ties with crypto lender Celsius. They did this on June 24th, 2021. This was at the height or near the height of the bull market. And that was when everything was going crazy. And then when people saw this, they'd say, that's fud. You shouldn't spread fud. That's fud. And you know what, in all honesty, from now on moving forward, I don't care about whoever says you're spreading fud, Rob. My job is to inform everybody. And it's everybody else's job, whoever is behind these entities, to come out and say, you know what? This is why this is fud. Here's the data. Here's the information. So when I see stuff like this, I'm like, you know, we should have really talked more about this. That's what we're going to do moving forward. However, they did the right thing. And it was unremarkable. Didn't really make too many waves. So then I thought to myself, well, what happened? What happened from 2021 till June 24, 22nd, 2023? What happened in that short amount of time? Because it seemed like things were doing pretty well. This might be a possibility. The founder and former CEO, Scott Purcell, says his old firm is in receivership, incredibly sad to see. This is on June 22nd, 2023. In 2021, Purcell exited Prime Trust to launch a new firm called Fortress. That's going to be a big play in a second. Just hold on. So again, if we're taking a look at it, 2016 to 2021, looks like Purcell was there. He stepped down. And after that, something happened along the way that got Prime Trust in trouble. This was a statement, and he states that Fortress has no exposure to Prime Trust. He says, while George, Kevin, Amanda, Bruce, and I did work, did used to work there two and a half years ago, we left when the company was profitable and doing well. Ancient history with a subsequent management team did with the company is incredibly sad, heart wrenching. Prime Trust raised over $180 million since I exited as CEO. And how they could screw it up is beyond me. But it was after we left. So that is just one person's statement. And this all came about, there was a great video. Scott Melker, Wolf of All Streets, he's on this really good show called DCA. You should check that out. Really good, much better without me. And he had this great video. It was about 15 minutes. I put the link in the description and he took a look. I don't know if he used Wayback Time Machine, but he could see all the different clients or customers for Prime Trust. And a year ago, just a year ago, they had some pretty big clients, Binance US, gone. Swan, good one, OKCoin, Dapper Labs, Kraken, Strike, Ave, Republic, Abra, Bitrex, T-Zero, Securitize. And then moving forward, just a couple of days ago, this is their client list, very small. And there was one that was crossed out and Scott said that Swan was not involved. I'd take a look at that. And this is Corey Clipston. Good guys, he was a good guy. There's a link in the description. You can follow him on Twitter. And he said this, this was on June 22nd. All Swan Bitcoin customer funds were transferred from Prime Trust to Fortress and Bitco. Again, Fortress. Who's Fortress? Again, old CEO, Scott Purcell from Prime Trust. He says, unlike the unsecured creditors of Celsius and FTX, Swan client assets have always been held with qualified custodians. Separation of Baroque and Custody as per financial industry best practices, client assets are required by state and federal law to be segregated from business operations. So again, I don't know what happened here and why they weren't separated and why they're being used and why they can't do withdrawals. To me, it just kind of makes no sense. And then lastly, Corey gives stage advice, always take self custody if you can. So this is the thing. I started to think about this. Fortress, can we trust them? Well, we really shouldn't trust anybody, right? We should verify a little bit. And they have got the same stuff on their website as did Prime Trust. It's true. They are a qualified custodian, which is exactly what Prime Trust says. Which even though you're a qualified custodian, it just means that you kind of went to the legal rigmarole to kind of say that, yeah, okay, I'm a custodian. Regulatory security, and it says here again, assets are not on balance sheet, assets are held FBO. Same thing that Prime Trust said. I'll be honest with you. They said it right here. Prime Trust assets and his customers are kept separate. Saying that here. There is a difference though. And I couldn't find this over on Prime Trust. Sock 2, type 2 certified. What the heck is that? To me, it was just a bunch of jumbly words. Sock 2, type 2 certified. Sock 1, Sock 2. Sock 1 versus Sock 2. There's a difference in how this is audited. And the Sock 2 is this part, security control focus. There's a type 1 and type 2. This is organization system and controls. They're both the same. Type 1 is at a specific time point, which you could say, you know, Bions could say, hey, audit us on January 12, 2021. Tell us if we're good. Okay, you're good. And that's it. And for type 2, it's a period of time. So a period of time they could do that. This is focused on security. This is the opinion on design and operating effectiveness of controls. Again, for security, all for security. So they do that. You know who else does that? It's Coinbase. You know who else trusts Coinbase for custodial services? Couple of different people that are out there. BlackRock being one of them. Hopefully that Bitcoin ETF comes through. Also a small little company you might know called MicroStrategy. They do the same thing. They complete initial prime broker, Sock 1 and Sock 2, type 2 reports. Who does it though? That's the question. Who does these reports? Sock reports are industry standard certifications governed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. So it's an outside organization. They come in certified, say, this is good. This is bad. This is what you guys should do to fix it. So what does this all come down to? Well, it kind of comes out of this. I trust. Now, as you may know, got this thing right above my head. Open a crypto IRA. You have to understand, they are an affiliate of this show. I have affiliate links down there. I have affiliate links for AliPals which is gonna come through. I have affiliate links for a ton of things. So when I talk about these things, I wanna make sure that we're doing the right thing. Here's all, here's what I know. I trust capital, use a little bit of coin-based custody, type one, type two. They also use Fireblocks. They also use, like we just talked about, Fortress. Fortress and Fireblocks. Fireblocks has a couple of different individuals who they work with or institutions. 4 trillion transaction security, 130 million watts, blah, blah, blah. Revolute, BNY, Melanie, Toro, GCK Capital, MoonPay, Vanaq, Avaleps. And they're using them for custodial services on top of Swan Bitcoin as well. So this all leads down to this. I cannot beat this in everybody's head as much as I possibly can. I'm not your dad. You do whatever you wanna do. This is what I'm doing. And I preached about this for quite some time. You don't have to diversify. You can put everything in a Pepe coin and write it all out and be a Pepe coin billionaire by 2032. I don't think it's gonna happen, but maybe. So when I talk about diversification, I'm not gonna move my money out of I-Trust. I'm not gonna go to another different organization. From what we just talked about, probabilities. I'm not gonna move too much out of crypto. I'm gonna stick pretty heavy into Bitcoin, 75% of my portfolio is Bitcoin. Of the crypto portfolio. 15, 10 to 15% is Ethereum and the rest are alts. Now, overall, my portfolio is this. 5% are in stocks. I got a bunch of cash sitting around just waiting to be deployed because I'm waiting for me personally. I think there's gonna be a commercial collapse of real estate. Not retail, but commercial. I got 1% in stables, 5% in some D-Gen plays, 4% in master books. In the bulk, roughly 40% is in real estate. Short-term, long-term rentals, 35% but five, which is land, 35% will we have. Amazon is the, my drop shipping business, which does pretty okay. And the sports facility which we have here in El Paso, Texas, 15% are in crypto and 1%, 1% is in I-Trust. Now, people are gonna say this, but why would you just take it all out and put it into a cold storage and go from that? There's multiple reasons for that. But I will say this, can we trust anything? Seriously, it kind of feels like we're playing whack-a-mole. Remember this whole charade that we came through with Ledger? That's right now is Charles Guime. I think I said it right. He's a nice guy. He's the CTO of Ledger. And he came out and said, look, we're gonna do this part with Ledger at $9.95 a month and we're gonna be able to store your private keys for you. And he said, don't worry, trust us, bro. He's gonna be on the show July 4th. So if you got questions for him, put them in the comments below. I personally don't have a problem with this. If they would have separated it and put it into different devices, like a Ledger baby for like the new people and a Ledger OG, which is just what we have right now. That'd be great. And before you say, well, Ledger is the greatest thing and cold storage is the greatest thing. It's been like that for a long time, but don't forget this. Ledger on November 15, 2022 said this, high your private keys never leave the secure element chip, which has never been hacked, which is true. Ledger has never been hacked. Now they have been hacked for your personal information, but not your private keys. There's a big difference. The secure element is third party certified and is the same tech as used in passports and credit cards. A firmware update cannot extract the private keys from the secure element. Let me read that one more time. A firmware update cannot extract the private keys from the secure element. November 15, 2022. Then in an AMA, on May 17th, they said technically speaking, it is and always has been possible to write firmware that facilitates key extraction. You have always trusted Ledger not to deploy such firmware, whether you knew it or not. That's a good way to put it. So again, diversify. You can do whatever you want to do. And I will just say this lastly, Elipal, thank you for sending a cold storage device. I'll be reviewing this and make a video later. I think it should even diversify in your cold storage devices, but that's it for today. So look, if you liked today's video, give it a thumbs up. Consider subscribing. I don't care who you subscribe to, just get your news from somebody that you like and trust may not be me, maybe it's Tom Crown or some other people that are out there. That'd be great, but that concludes everything for the news today.