 So with everything going on with Prime Trust as it relates to Fortress, there's been a lot of questions of how this relates to one of the individuals and institutions that I talk a lot about, which is iTrust. So to make things crystal clear, I had to reach out to the team and just ask them what exactly is going on. And thankfully, Kevin Maloney came in as the CEO of iTrust and he's going to answer some questions. Kevin, welcome back to the show. I think this is our second appearance, maybe third. Yeah, hi, Rob. Thanks for having us. I appreciate it. We're always here to chat and nothing to hide. I think the more transparency we can offer to our clients in your audience, the better off everybody is. So thanks for having us. Yeah, let's get into it. We've got four questions and it really just comes down to transparency and what's going on. Now, you can't obviously speak for Fortress. Fortress will come on later. We'll see how that works out. But there's a couple of questions. And the first thing I had is because beforehand, you guys were using Coinbase and Fireblocks. They might have been somebody else. And now we went over to Fireblocks and Fortress. So my question is, how many custodians did you guys actually look at and why did you guys decide to go with Fortress itself? And then also, what are you doing to verify this information? Because, let's be honest, in this industry, we've seen a lot of failures. And a lot of things just go down because people get ahead of themselves. And we can talk about Voyager and Celsius and FTX. So how are you guys verifying this, not trusting with Fortress? And then the next question is, what's now with the ideal situation? And of course, what's on the horizon for you guys? So the first things first, how many custodians do you guys look at? And why did you guys pick Fortress? What is so special about them in general? Yeah, hi, Rob. Thanks again. Well, first of all, I think just this is all my perspective. I'm not here to malign other people or other businesses that maybe may have failed in the past. But just I'll give you some of our perspective. But I think most of this, most of these debacles we read about or have heard about over the last year particularly, and they've been going on since crypto began. But I think most could have been avoided or most of them are due to fear, greed, and stupidity. Every time these could have been avoided, these debacles. And how do we do that? Well, transparency and trust, right? That helps build and rebuild credibility in the marketplace. So how do we get there? It's one of the reasons we chose Fortress. We looked at, you asked, how many trust companies did we evaluate? We looked at 10 or 11 different trust companies of the last year. Some of them literally could not answer our due diligence questions. Some of them had massive balance sheets. They raised a ton of money. But we didn't trust the team or the deep tribal knowledge that we wanted in place. We looked at prime trust. And we went with our gut on that one. And based on our due diligence, they didn't have a few infrastructure things in place that we needed to have in place. So we did a lot of deep dive on, like I said, 10 to 11 companies. Some were great technology platforms. Some were about to get their MTLs, money transmitter licenses, and chargers. Those never came. Some had balance sheets. Some had great because we believe and we still believe that they have deep tribal knowledge in this space. It was very clear that they had been in the business for decades and wanted to grow this business and do the right thing. They had a clean charter. Their charter was issued recently from the state of Nevada within the last couple of years. They had an excellent technology platform they referred to as Core. We knew that we were going to have access to really good information. We weren't going to control assets. We were not going to initiate and distribute assets. That's not what we're allowed to do. But we feel very confident. We stand by them in our decision as a qualified custodian. They are compliant. They are audited. They are regulated. And they are run by former banking commissioners. Albert Fortner, their CEO, is highly credentialed and very trustworthy person. I'm also have board observation rights at Fortress Trust. I said, look, we need more transparency and access to information than we've ever had before. They said, how about complete board observation rights? Again, we don't control assets. We don't execute the trades on the assets, but we have access to the information. Because as you mentioned, we need to treat everybody with kindness and trust and respect, but you can't trust everyone. And so we have to trust, but also verify. And that's what we do. Our systems, which I think would be interesting to note, are connected. And we, our teams communicate and work together on a daily basis. And I think a lot of people don't know that. We're not just a brand, a marketing engine and a client service platform. We work with Fortress Trust and their team on a daily basis. So we have a lot of transparency to the data. That gives me comfort. And it doesn't guarantee anything. I know that won't mean much for your audience, but we do get a lot of transparency and access to information. And that's key. I was in Austin this week at Fortress meeting for, we had 11 hours with the meetings over two days. And I met with their independent board members. And we had really great conversations about why their comfort level is high with the team, what they're doing that's unique, better and different from Prime Trust and why we continue to stand by these guys from a qualified custodian perspective. Got it. So like just to catch everybody up, we actually talked about this. There was a video that we did. And this was going back, oh, just a couple of days ago. And the whole thing kind of started with Prime Trust collapsing, or potentially, I'm not going to say it is that we'll see what actually kind of comes out. But the problem was this gentleman, Scott Purcell was the former founder of Prime Trust. And then two and a half years ago, he moved on to Fortress. And we took a look at what that was. Actually, Scott has come out and talked about that. But that is kind of like where we're coming from. And of course, because with iTrust itself, you guys using FireBlux and Fortress right now, this has come to light. But again, it really depends on your view of things. I mean, if you think that two and a half years is not enough time to move on. But from what we can see, it looks like the management that that took over, there's been issues in that direction. So that would lead me to my next question is we, there's a lot of people to actually take a look at, you know, to see where it is. But what exactly are you guys doing to verify that stuff? Because he talked about, he said, okay, we've been to the office 11 hours or so, you're able to see it. What are the kind of verification you guys doing? Yeah, so let me just make a comment on sort of the management. And again, this is all our perspective. We don't have more information than others that are right, you know, researching publicly available documents. But from the petition, the banking put out there from a public document perspective, it looks to be pretty clearly stated that the events leading to the customer losses at Prime Trust were in quotes, new management, right. So I think that language helps absolve any wrongdoing involving this matter and points to the new management who were fired very publicly in December 2022. Not surprisingly, there hasn't been a lot of scrutiny on the leadership team that inherited the wallets and the key management in early 21. It looks like there was a press release that this new executive team was hired, promoted within. And there's another press release that says, when Purcell left Prime Trust, I'm not here to defend Prime Trust and Fortress, but I'm just giving perspective based on publicly available documents. And the CEO that took over, the individual that was promoted, this is a former secret service agent who had expertise in financial or cyber crimes, right. And this team went on to raise $150,000,000, $60,000,000, $70,000,000. It's really hard to raise that kind of money if you're not handed over a decently clean ship. If there are a bunch of holes or leaks in the ship and it's sinking, it's hard to raise that much capital. I'm just curious why people aren't really looking into the team that took over, the experts that took over. Not only did they have client assets sent to wallets marked as inactive by the previous leadership team, but they never tested to see if the funds could be withdrawn from those wallets. And that's a huge fumble from our perspective. I'll just note, let me give you our exact I trust capital experience. We migrated from curve wallets to fire blocks and coin basin at the start of 2022. And I think this is really helpful perspective. The custodians that sent I trust capital crypto in kind still had instructions to send out crypto to old wallets that were inaccessible curve wallets. How they have these old instructions to old wallets, not sure. It's on us. ITC received client assets in these crypto wallets that were legacy and we couldn't access them. We reached out to coin cover, one of our partners, and began the wallet recovery process. This is a responsible approach to retrieving client assets. ITC swept the dead curve wallets. We were able to get into those wallets with coin covers help. And we swept them into a temporary wallet to recover the crypto and send it to our main fire blocks wallet. It's happened before. This has happened before, but there is a way to a test it. Can you get in and can you get out of these deals? And we took responsible approaches to in the event that these in kind assets were inadvertently sent by custodians that didn't see our updated wallets or whatever for whatever reason assets have been sent to wallets that were closed legacy wallets. And we had wallet management steps in place to recover the passwords and retrieve those assets. These people are secret service, financial, cyber crimes, experts with deep experience. They didn't test the wallets of the assets flowing in and test going out. They activated legacy wallets and took on what looks to be tens of millions of dollars. Didn't say, hey, let's just see if we can get $100 out first. Nobody tested them. And there was no backup recovery. I don't know how that would be on the new team. And again, the commission clearly states that steps taken were leading to customer losses were new management. So it's so what is that? That's something that will get battled out in court. It's unfortunate that they didn't have wallet management systems in place. The meeting we had in Austin this week with Prime Trust independent board directors, executives, general counsel, their lead technologies. We were also dialing in on partner calls with the other cold wallet and trading providers, liquidity providers. Really good insight. I feel like we're getting the transparency that we need to keep our comfort level high in this time of uncertainty. The markets are skittish, a lot of uncertainty. And everybody's pointing fingers at everyone else at some point. We do have to trust that our partners and vendors are going to do the right thing. But we do have to verify that the audits are clean. They are compliant. There is enough transparency on our end without breaching fiduciary duties, giving us access to information but not access to control assets. That's a very fine line. And we will continue to push for that. So we are working with Fortress and closely as they are looking to engage independent auditors. It's not going to check the box for everybody. Whether it's a weekly independent audit or a monthly independent audit, it's a step in the right direction. Their board supports it. I support it. We want it. Customers want it. It's a step in the right direction. But it's not going to check everyone's boxes. At the end of the day, our systems talk to each other and our teams work together daily. And we look at balances to make sure they're reconciled and accurate. And while we can't control assets, the system is working. Clients are depositing assets on a daily basis. Clients are requesting distributions on a daily basis. And those distributions are getting sent out on a daily basis from the FinOps team at Fortress. We think they're doing a good job. We're also looking to improve some things. Fortress is what we believe to be phenomenally clean on the regulatory side, very compliant, SOC2 type 2 with bank regulators, not just as advisors and board members, but running the company. The CEO of Fortress Trust is Albert Forkner. It's not Scott Purcell. And we think these people are highly credentialed and qualified and very transparent about their strengths and weaknesses. We actually appreciate that. They asked us to sit on the board and have observation rights. So I'm on the calls with the auditors. I see the financials. I've looked at wallets. I can't control them or push buttons or send them out. But we can see those. And I think that is a step in the right direction. We are looking for more transparency and more access. It'll never stop, but we want to make sure we don't cross the line because we are not the qualified custodian. But we are also, I think it's important to reiterate, are not just the brand. We're not just the client service. We do work with them on a daily basis. It's not blindfolds on. We, you know, clients click buttons on our website, buy it, set it, forget it. We hope Fortress takes care of it. It's a daily interaction on the phone by email, Slack, you name it, and that won't stop. But we are happy to say that after, you know, it hasn't even been 90 days of onboarding yet, but we are and stand by the team and our decision to choose them as a qualified custodian. But again, we're going to trust and verify every single thing, every step, every day. And we've been doing this for four years. Clients can lose their own money, but we cannot, right? It's a self-directed program. They're going to trade, buy and sell and trade, they may be up, they may be down. We can't control that. But we can control a few things with our partners and our own behavior. We can't lose assets. We can't lose them in a wallet. We can't lose them in lend amount, right? One of the reasons that I think it's a really important to reiterate on why we chose Fortress is that under, you know, Nevada State Law and regulatory law, you know, we can't commingle. We can't lend. We can't rehypothecate any of these. And Fortress seems to take that very, very seriously. I don't know where the wheels fell off, where the moral compass stopped pointing north with anybody potentially on the prime trust side of the equation. But from what I read and the chronology of events, it looks like a clean, profitable entity with proper wallet management systems were in place and handed over. And somewhere the wheels fell off after that. It's very unfortunate because this is a black eye for all of us in the industry, all of us. Yeah, I will say this. It just comes down to, I think mostly just, I actually, I'm not going to say anything about what's happening over at prime trust because I don't know enough information. I know some things were done that were not precise. And now we're in this situation. I will say one thing. And that is, since this whole situation has happened, there's been maybe one or two people have reached out to me and said, Hey, you know what, Rob, there's something, there's something wrong with distributions with I trust. I don't know, I, you know, for something something that is a hiccup. Okay. So I will take them and I'll reach out to you guys. And within 24 hours, things are, you know, rectified. And that's, I mean, that's from just the last week or so. So even though there's like people who like, you know, it's like, Hey, I haven't gotten a distribution in 24 hours. Like, well, it does take a little bit longer, but I still will reach out to them. And then things get, things get done over time, last six months, I mean, we've been together for now, like a year and a half, I think, maybe two years. No, it's been over two, two years. And we're still there. So we're not perfect. We have systems in place, processes in place, and people that we have engaged with that we think are trusted partners. At the end of the day, we have to trust that people are going to do things by the book. It's unfortunate that this is happening. It's not surprising. It is unfortunate. And we're going to continue to have small glitches here and there. But I would encourage people to reach out. Jared Feldman is not a bot. It's our real client service expert. He leads our entire team of client service experts with passion and vigor and transparency. And sometimes he's a punching bag. Sometimes we've screwed up, but, but we really try to offer that safety security and peace of mind by picking up the phone, answering the emails and walking people through. It is not perfect. It is not an overnight process. But if there is an issue that hasn't been resolved, and there is a small cohort of really valuable clients that have had some issues stemming, you know, a couple of days, couple of weeks, and that is really painful for us to see. But we have nothing to hide. Forrest doesn't have anything to hide. It is unfortunate that the management team came from prime. But again, it was two and a half years ago, but we're working together through the glitches that happens through Fortress and the LPs. We want to make sure we get best pricing, best execution. We have a custodian through Fireblocks and Bitco. We want to make sure it's really safe and that the recovery steps are in place. We have qualified custodian boxes we have to check. And they are regulated and bank chartered. And we want to make sure that the SOC 2 type 2 compliance stays active and in place. Those are the reasons we chose Fortress because we know their strengths, but we also see their weaknesses. They work with us to overcome any of those weaknesses, sort of with a lot of transparency. There's not a lot of bloviating and no, that's not us. That's you guys. It is, wow, thanks for pointing that out. Let's get that fixed right away to get that customer experience back up to four and a half five stars. And to us, that's the most important. We looked at, as I mentioned, a dozen, up to a dozen different qualified custodians or people that were going to get their charters. People with big balance sheets and lots of experience. Some ran out of money. Some had lawsuits. Some lost client assets. Some had no experience. Some didn't get their charters. And we had three recommendations that we made. Our board said no. We went back to the trenches, evaluated all of these companies multiple times. And it became very clear that Fortress was one of the few in the space that could help us achieve with the infrastructure and technology that what we wanted. And we are working on improving the trading experience, improving security on the custody side, and for us, improving the transparency through third party audits and our own visibility into client assets, which is really key. Again, we can't touch it or control it, but we can see it. And that's really helpful. Gotcha. Which, you know, I think that's why a bunch of different companies that when they jumped ship from prime trust, when they figured it out, a lot of them did go to Fortress. I think there's a reason behind that. Which I guess we'll leave it to our last couple of questions. I'm going to roll these together, which is, I mean, you talked about it already, but just to overview what's the ideal situation moving forward. I mean, you talked about, you know, sitting down with the management team, going over the books and things like that, having an independent auditor, but in all honesty. And then the independent auditor, it doesn't matter if it's a month, you know, an audit every month or a week, every three days. I mean, a lot of things can happen within those time frames. We've seen it already. So is there anything ideal that you can think of right now? And then lastly, what's on the horizon for iTrust? What's in the books that it's actually coming through? Yeah. So from an ideal situation, we can do, we would all continue to get more regulatory clarity. We are already, you know, working with a qualified custodian who is audited and regulated and can have site visits at any time from any of the states through which it has MTLs and other licenses through. They have an annual audit with the state in Nevada. And I think those audits are going to become more difficult, more stringent, more challenging and with more transparency, more scrutiny. And we and Fortress both welcome that. It's the same, likely the same auditors that we're auditing Prime Trust. I think they don't want this to see this happen again. I think people are going to come down hard on the players that remain. And we and Fortress actually welcome that. Because if you get through these audits with a clean slate, doing the right thing, putting clients first with good service and not overcharging them, I think the cream will rise to the top. Right now it's kind of been a tough time in crypto the last year and a half. Fear, greed and stupidity led to a lot of defunct companies. Some people had good intentions, but they had bad business models. Some people got greedy and maybe started off with decent intentions, but the moral compass started pointing elsewhere and the wheels fell off. It's hard to get back on track. Some people lost keys to wallets and were figured potentially, I can speculate, maybe people won't notice and we'll find those keys and we can fill it with this customer funds. You can't do that. It's all illegal and nobody here wants to go to jail or lose client assets. We take that seriously and Fortress trust the culture, the DNA, the people they put at the top, the money, the millions we've all spent on compliance and trying to do the right thing seems right now like a good fit. We stand by it. It seems like the best fit. There wasn't a lot of other options when we looked at the other 12 going forward. What does a perfect picture look like? There is no perfect picture, but I would love to have more regulatory clarity from the SEC, from FINRA, from the bank regulators as it relates to crypto. Make it stringent, make it difficult, make it expensive. Let's all step up our game and do it the right way. We do believe that at some point the SEC and others will see that having the qualified custodian or trust wrapper around client accounts with third-party attestations or audits that these assets are segregated, ledgered in individual accounts, held one-to-one off balance sheet, not lent out, not rehypothecated, not co-mingled with other company operational expenditures. I think that will go a long way and I look forward to that. Regulatory clarity, more scrutiny is going to come out of this. We're all going to come out cleaner for the players that are doing the right thing. If people are off and they think they can hide it very long, you can't. The market is too efficient. You can fake people out a little bit here and there, but eventually you can't hide very long. The rules get tougher and tougher. The few people left with strong balance sheets and good people with a moral compass pointing north, my background is compliance. I was a compliance officer at a $2.5 trillion asset management firm, PIMCO, many years ago. It was one of the best things on my resume ever because it made me really appreciate it's a hassle. It is a lot of work, but it made me appreciate the compliance and the nature of it and truly what it's there for, to protect the little guy, the little gal, the crypto moms and dads out there, anybody in traditional finance. I have a deep found appreciation for compliance. We had a great record. We had a great rapport with FINRA and the SEC at PIMCO, and I took that to heart. It was part of the culture and DNA from the top down. One of the reasons I joined this firm is because the compliance and regulatory side was so critically important. We spent millions without a lot of clarity trying to do it right and by the book. The moment we get more clarity, the moment most of us doing the right thing will step up to that as well. In the meantime, we act like an audited regulated firm because our partners are, and that's really important to us. Going forward from an exciting perspective, getting away from the drama, I have a crypto mom and crypto dad hat and all these fun hats. I'm going to make another hat. It says, handle your scandal. I got to get another one that says, handle your crypto scandal and another one that says, save the drama for your mama. So ridiculous out there, but if you get to finding good partners with the moral compass with transparency, trust and verify everything. Or as you say, don't trust anything. I say, treat everybody with kindness and trust and respect, but don't trust anybody until you verify. And we're going to continue to do that. It was part of our discussion on Wednesday over 11 hours with Fortress Executive Team and their independent board members. Why are you comfortable with this group? What are we missing? We want more transparency and access that will never end without breaching duties and jeopardizing their rules and regulations. And I think we're getting to that place. From a new product and service perspective, we're excited about adding some access to private equity deals here in the near future, a real estate on blockchain with yield from real assets. We are looking at cash accounts now because I want to compete with the big boys out there, you know, finance, crypto.com, Kraken, Coinbase, but our clients are asking for cash accounts. They like us and trust us. We pick up the phone, we answer their calls, we hear their consternation and we address the issues. We're not hiding. We're not perfect. We're going to mess up, but we're not going to lose your assets due to nefarious behavior. And so I'm excited about those new products. Some of those are in the pipeline for the second half of this year, but right now it's not about launching new products and services. It's about getting people to a place where they feel they have some safety, security and peace of mind. And the only way that's going to happen is with third parties diving in, more access to information, more transparency, more regulatory clarity. The bad guys will weed themselves out. You can't hide for long. It is expensive. It's going to be difficult. And we welcome that because we are here to build a long-term, you know, very transparent and viable business where we can create value and help millions of Americans participate in a blockchain economy and traditional finance opportunities as well or alternative and make their own decisions in a tax advantage environment. Right? That's what we're here for. We're not here to make a quick dollar. We lowered our fees. We lowered our percentages. We lowered our monthly fees. It's not about making a quick dollar for us. It's about building a really cool viable business that people can say that's the way to do it. We can be one of those poster childs on how to do it the right way. Again, it takes a lot of trust and transparency and we have to start trusting each other a little bit more after we verify and demand more third-party access. That was great. You know, the thing you were talking about just a little bit ago and this is then we'll wrap this up, which was you talked about how the bad guys can't hide forever. At some point, things will come to light and it's amazing to me and I'll just leave this with everybody to ponder, which is it's amazing to me that the only time you see all the bad guys exposed is during the bear markets and how we not just had one of the worst bear markets ever in crypto history. And it reminds me of a quote, which was from Warren Buffett. Very simple. Only when the time comes out, you discover who's been swimming naked and you guys have come through. I don't think just this one bear market. I think you've actually gone through two and you're still here and things are flourishing and you're still around and I'm still with you and I'm not going to take my funds out. I will be with you guys until something changes. So Kevin, I want to say thanks for coming by anything. Any last comments before we get out of here? No, thank you for your time and just look, sometimes you want to say to people, action speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying. I know a lot of the narrative out there is just lip service, but we try to remove some emotion from the equation and that's difficult. The human emotion in the equation, that element is critical. When you have nefarious actors and you have people inadvertently screwing up and pointing fingers elsewhere and losing keys to wallets, whatever it is, whether they meant to or not, I think people generally start out trying to do the right thing and then fear, greed and stupidity kicks in and bad things happen. But we're here. We're not going away. We are accessible. Jared does a phenomenal job on our client service team. Email him, call him, email me, call me. I'm not the expert these guys are, but I'm in there putting on my regulatory compliance app for my PIMCO days and demanding that we all get to a place, all of us, not just us and portraits. We don't want any of our competitors or any of their competitors to stumble like this again. It's very true. And when the tide goes out, we have our trunks on. We have our suits on. We're not swimming naked, come and swim with us. So I think we're in a good place as long as people continue to trust and verify and do the right thing. That's what it comes down to. Kevin, really well said, thorough explanations. We appreciate it. Everybody, if you're looking for, well, first a couple of things, if we're looking for the video that we talked about, we took a look at Prime and then Fortress and I Trust. There's a video link in the description. Also, if you're looking for the team that Kevin was talking about, I will link this website in the description and also you can check out Fireblocks and who they work with presently. And again, links in the description. So Kevin, again, thanks so much for stopping by. Excellent response. We appreciate it. Rob, look, we're here for transparency. Call or email anytime. If we don't have the answers immediately, we'll get them to you. If there is a glitch that you see or hear about before we're notified, that would be rare, but it's certainly possible. Just call us. Text us. Email us. We will get on it and we will fix it. We will respond to it. And because we're here to build long-term viability and sustainability. Sounds like a plan. All right, everybody. So that's it for today. All right. Have a good day. Thanks again for having us. Thanks, guys. I'll see you guys in the next one.