Prime Trust Crypto IRA Leaves Beta as Bitcoin Volatility at Historic Low

When Prime Trust launched its beta test for a crypto IRA product, the financial infrastructure firm said it was just following the money. The trend hasn’t changed, so the firm has moved forward with its official launch.

“Half of US wealth is in retirement funds,” Sara Xi, chief product officer at Prime Trust, said. “Even if we have 1% penetration, we’re talking about $500 to $600 billion.”

Prime Trust in March announced the launch of its beta program for the Prime Trust Crypto IRA, a first-of-its-kind retirement account with a single application programming interface (API). On Monday, the company said it was ready to offer the product to the public.

The IRA offering includes traditional and Roth IRAs with options for exposure to bitcoin, ether, solana, litecoin, cardano and avalanche tokens. Market volatility has not deterred investors, Xi said, even for smaller tokens relative to bitcoin and ether, which are more commonly seen in traditional portfolios.

“I think people need access to a diversified portfolio right when the market is not good,” Xi said. “Everyone is looking for all the different ways to diversify, and crypto might be volatile in the short term, but if you’re investing in a longer term, it’s a fairly attractive diversification vehicle.”

Security has been a top concern for clients, Xi said, and the product will offer a warm-hot storage architecture supported by multi-party computation technology.

The Prime Trust Crypto IRA is backed by the company’s institutional-grade financial API technology, Xi said, which includes compliance, custody, payment rails, crypto trading and settlement resources. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for business-to-consumer clients to offer the services, she added.

Prime Trust’s IRA product comes less than a year after ForUsAll, a retirement investment platform for small businesses, partnered with Coinbase to launch its Alt 401(k), an investment vehicle that allows employers to offer crypto exposure through 401(k) accounts.

The news also comes as bitcoin finds itself in an unusual position: It is currently less volatile than major equities. For the first time since 2020, bitcoin’s volatility has dropped below that of both the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 equity indexes, according to data from Kaiko, so investors suffering from the market turndown might find some respite in crypto.

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