Making better on chain financial decisions - Miguel Kudry

foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you right now [Music] foreign [Music] all right let's kick this off uh good afternoon my name is Miguel kudri I'm the CEO and co-founder at L1 advisors where we enable fully on chain wealth management uh we do that by allowing financial advisors to work with self-custed individuals and allow them to receive financial recommendations and transaction recommendations on D5 protocols without ever having to give up custody of their assets um so let me dive in a little bit of um uh history on on how this all came together uh basically I've been working uh in uh in in cryptos in 2016 but before that I was working on um well the the the wet Point 1.0 the 2.0 transition uh in 2013 I was working on a online tutoring Marketplace and we had tutors from 40 different countries and naturally we were looking at paying those tutors um and that's how initially I started looking at Bitcoin and then ethereum and then in 2016 I started investing in crypto and built my first uh startup with my current co-founder uh it was a non-custodial um uh wallet for Bitcoin and ethereum that had a chatbot embedded in it and this was before D5 uh and and before gpt3 so we were a little bit early to Market um after that um I ended up joining uh did some Consulting for adapter labs and I was at bitso uh for three years and so over the last uh five and six years um I've been focused on bringing people into crypto uh so bringing newcomers and and helping them get educated and over time uh these people become more invested and what we see is they they tend to go with self-custody they tend to uh go entirely on chain they they dive into defy and their needs change fundamentally they start to need um support around financial planning they start to need support around tax planning and um I also went through that process myself as a as someone that has most of their assets most of their their liquid assets on chain I tried to um over the last few years start to make some better decisions so so these are the two uh full crypto cycles that I've been through um which means that I've made twice as many bad decisions uh over the last few years and I I wanted to essentially make better decisions and as I did that I tried working with different Financial professionals financial advisors uh certainly CPAs for for my tax planning and I was a bit frustrated because they just didn't have the tools to work with someone like me and uh I mean some of the things that I would hear uh were like okay go go come and come back when you've sold your tokens uh and and we'll get you set up on a brokerage account or uh they would give me a list of things to do to diversify away from crypto that had absolutely nothing to do with me as a crypto native individual or my assets um some people would even suggest that I should look at gold because I like crypto and uh some of the some of the advisors that I would speak to uh gave exposure to crypto to their clients through hedge funds um that I mean they didn't really know how they operated and we know how some of those stories ended up unfortunately and it's no uh surprise then that uh almost 60 percent of financial advisors in the United States report uh having clients that are investing in crypto on their own many of these are self-custed individuals and so the needs of these investors are actually not being met by their financial advisors who are currently managing their traditional assets and so there's a huge opportunity here um and and that's precisely what we want to fix so we we are on our on a mission to help crypto native individuals make better financial decision and and and and we have to do that and we have to meet them where they're at they are on chain most of them are self-custody most of you are self-custed and so Financial advice wealth management should not be any different than using our favorite protocols and our favorite dapps so here's how we envision it you should be able to connect your wallet immediately you should be able to connect with financial advisors and right away you should be able to get defy native transaction recommendations without you ever having to give up control of your assets without you having to move assets around or trusting someone um with your with your assets and so that's what we're doing that's what we're building and so L1 advisors is an interface between registered investment advisors and other Financial professionals and their clients clients can be individuals like all of us they can be Dows and their treasuries and so we allow these advisors to basically build transaction recommendations directly on D5 protocols this is this is a great way for them to tap into a really powerful set of financial products and services powerful liquidity and we're not recreating Reinventing their wheel we're plugging into what's actually proven to work centralized platforms have blown up over the last couple of years over the last year it's been turbulent but D5 protocols haven't anyone can see what's going on and we want to bring that transparency uh to the world of financial advice and wealth management and so we're very excited about three opportunities the first one is the massive shift towards self-custody I think there's I mean the the everything that's gone on with the centralized lenders uh a lot of the new regulation that's coming for for custodians uh are making people uh more and more interested in in self-custody so so huge opportunity this is this is only going to continue to grow then you have D5 native advisory I mean why build uh new products uh for advisors where we can tap into D5 we can get really good at being that interface and providing great user experience for advisors and clients alike and then um last but not least uh very related to the last uh panel we're very excited about not just crypto as an asset class but asset classes being crypto I think there's there's the next 10 years we're going to see all of these assets coming on chain and I mean guess what advisors financial advisors are are responsible for hundreds of trillions of dollars so those assets are going to come on chain and um we want to be the platform that they use to to provide advice on those so let's dive into a demo so we uh we just launched our product uh about a month ago a month and a half ago uh we're in private beta with five rias and uh this is this is what the product looks like so I'm going to show you um what things look like for a client so and then we're going to show you uh what what they look like for an advisor so this this is a client that just signed in you can go to l1advisors.com and connect your wallet um we we allow people to connect multiple wallets to their account and so this is why we we we request a local message to be signed just so that we we know that you own that wallet as soon as you sign in um we pull all of your assets across all of your wallets into a single dashboard we show you your uh wallets in your assets in your wallet we'll show you assets locked in any protocol we'll show you nfts and of course your your um your aggregated net worth and um and so at the surface it looks like a like a defy aggregator but then there's a few layers to it the first one is our risk core so it's the score from one to a hundred that looks at chain and protocol risk as well as fundamental analysis uh we also allow you to create uh goals one goal is tied to one wallet and so that way we can track uh how you're doing this is the foundation of financial planning and then on the right hand side you can see your advisors these are people that you're working with and that have access to your portfolio read-only access and you can chat with your advisors you can you can share files um and now let's let's flip back to um an advisor account so um also you can invite your advisor so if you're working with an accountant you can you could bring them on so this is an advisor account we're looking at all the clients linked to this account and much like I showed you on the other side this advisor has the the same level of access uh to the information that that we've shown you before so the same dashboard um they can they can really keep an eye out for for this client's portfolio the same risk score um but it's it's read only read only access they can't actually uh move those funds they don't it's not it's entirely non-custodial where things get really interesting is uh with our transaction Builder and this is how we we interface between advisors and clients and and D5 so you can see the clients uh wallets and balances and we're going to put together a transaction recommendation for this client so um right now we support swaps and liquidity providing we're we're adding new Integrations every week uh or every every couple of weeks um on your favorite D5 protocols so we'll start off with a swap so I I want this client to um have a new position uh so we're going to swap some eth for die we are for the purpose of this demo on testnet so the the quotes are not going to make a lot of sense um but I can I can select which wallet I want this client to transact from I can save this and immediately add another recommendation so let's claim some fees because this client is pulling some funds or liquidity on unib3 pool so we're gonna we're gonna withdraw those Rewards um and then we're going to take that and um okay I can see how many um pending rewards that are available we're going to take those rewards and deposit them back into the same uni V3 pool and so as an advisor I'm obstructing all of the complexity away from uh basically having to figure out which protocol I should use um I mean whether I'm getting any slippage or not uh with the technicalities of the price ranges Etc and so off I go I'm sending three recommendations to this client uh the client is notified I can see now they're they're pending uh signature we're going to flip over to the client side I mean at this point I would also check in with my client if I was an advisor I can see that there's three new transactions and we present them very simply and and in a clean interface to to the client uh we tell them which wallet they should connect to so that um they they transact from the right wallet and that's all they need to know from there they just click swap or whatever the the transaction is they sign again the client is self-custed they are the only person uh with access to those funds uh we wait for confirmation and then that transaction will be marked as uh completed and then that way the advisor is notified that the transaction was confirmed and so they will be able to do this with uh every one of these recommendations now we are working on basically bundling these transactions together in the future so that instead of having to sign three times for each of these uh steps you're gonna be able to sign once for any number of transaction recommendations and so ultimately uh that's going to allow advisors to make pretty complex recommendations even strategies across their entire book of clients um so so we're going to be able to to do some some more complex uh recommendations uh then then swaps and providing liquidity but but this is this is addressing already a a pretty big need from from from what we've heard and and what we see are our rias and um their clients uh working on so once these transactions are signed we tell the client they're done and uh they are now marked as accepted and completed on the advisor side uh here we go so they are accepted we can check on uh etherscan we're on gorley so let's just change that real quick um and that's it the transaction was um signed so uh this is actually going to bring the next 100 million uh and more we hope um Americans into into defy and crypto uh which which um these people are already working with advisors and and I mean hopefully uh for many of us uh here uh we can we can get on the right track of making better uh financial decisions on chain um so we're excited to also talk to people building uh products and and on-chain uh products and services for for financial advisors let's chat about how we can integrate them into our platform um so uh for the for the second part of um the uh this talk we're gonna do a a panel uh and uh we're gonna bring on Eric tamasheski a financial advisor at vertical Capital Management and we had a last-minute addition to the panel coming up um Bryce from a test your immense assessment attestation service so grab a seat guys um so why don't we why don't we start with a quick round of intros uh Eric do you want to kick it off yeah I'd love to happy to be here um my name is Eric thomaszewski I'm a financial advisor with Verde Capital Management out in uh Metro Detroit and uh we manage several hundred million for clients these are individuals these are families these are institutions so this could be things like foundations endowments and even administering retirement plans um uh at a very high level this is looking at not just stocks and bonds and even beyond that into different types of Alternatives but it's also looking at things like crypto or let's call it digital assets rice hey everyone I'm Bryce nice to meet you I'm with ethereum attestation service we're a public good for making attestations on ethereum in its most simple form and access station is just an entity saying something about anything and that helps build more trust so in the example of financial advising we can help build the reputation layer for how advisors build their reputations and how they trust certain contracts and systems to make those better on-chain decisions Unchained decisions excellent uh so so why don't we start off with the difference between a traditional advisor and and in an on-chain or a crypto native advisor I think I think there's there's there's uh things to be said both on on on on how advisors are working with clients directly and how clients are trusting uh and finding out about advisors um Eric do you want to kick it off yeah I'd love to um I I think um when you look at the difference between traditional and sort of crypto native advisors I I think it's important to start at sort of the fundamental base layer and what I mean by that is there are hundreds and thousands of different Financial Professionals in some form just around the us if you break it down further about 99 of that part of the industry approximately is made up of Brokers and insurance people they are governed under one rule which is the suitability standard which basically means that they are there to broker the deal it is very transactional the other side of the street that you don't really hear about is the one percent sliver that is in essence what Verde Capital does we are a registered investment advisor or an Ria is the short acronym uh we also go by fiduciaries and that is arguably the highest standard within Financial Services uh this is exactly what you would expect from let's say your accountant same thing would apply with the standard of care you expect from someone like your doctor um so we're very proud to announce that background but I also want everyone to understand the distinction now what's important about this Dynamic rias have the ability to Traverse and look at things from a very different angle when you look at a brokerage side there are certain things that from an agnostic standpoint they can't be done they can't jump onto a bunch of different custodial platforms they also can't do everything with Investments hell they might not even be able to talk about ethereum or Bitcoin or even be willing to dive in because of compliance from our standpoint we have the ability to really dive into any topic known to man if it stocks it's bonds it's Alternatives it's helping you with an Airbnb your business or diving into crypto native things like tokens um I'm sorry I think that hopefully gives some context on this background Bryce how how would I um come to trust a financial advisor I mean at the stations on chain I can I can see them being directly linked to Performance and and and and previous interactions with a client or an advisor walk us through like how that works in the in the traditional world uh which is based on a lot of trust and and how you see that changing um on chain so to build trust in ethereum you need to really understand so there's the our the Ria has a registered database of advisors that you can trust but when you venture into the decentralized the decentralized realm how do you actually identify who to trust and what to trust and the way that we see that being solved is through relative trust it's not so binary where someone might have a credential to be an advisor it's a makeup of all their on-chain activity and their reputation that's built from their clients that they've interacted with maybe it's the complaints that people have made on the other side so let's just say Eric I trust Eric right now but what if for some reason he turns to be a bad actor and I need to attest to some sort of complaint and have that registered to help other people feel more safe to to transact with Eric even though he is registered in a database like that cool uh anything to add uh there Eric I do trust Eric by the way I'm glad he trusts me I I appreciate that um I I don't know if there's anything that I want to add I I think there's this unique Dynamic with are you using attestation is it soulbound tokens what is the dynamic I think it's important for people who are being brought in on chain if there are going to be advisors there that are there to support you for you to be able to distinguish how they're structured what they've done uh maybe how much they have in assets under management how many clients they work with so we could start to draw uh some form of Distinction of oh this is preferable for me versus someone else same thing applies in like the traditional Market we can see how much they have in assets we can see what they've done we can see what people have potentially even suggested about them from um announcing that they're working with an advisor so no I love this I think it's uh it's well well overdue and one comment Eric so trust is relative so you might find different aspects of an advisor more trustworthy than others but how you define what's like how you value trust with that advisor is going to look completely different and with these access stations you're able to compose a really unique kind of like Lego like structure to figure out what matters most let's let's dive into um non-custodial wealth management that's that's the that's a the the topic we started on um and and non-custodial wealth management so for people in the audience um that are that are uh listening to this and and who who may be self-custed and and want to remain that way um how does that even work how does non-custodial wealth management work let's let's break it down it's it's a good question I think first and foremost it's it's an acknowledgment that you as the end client have all of the control Point Blank you have all the control you are doing the final signature at the end of the day it's just having an additional third party to give you some context on what you might not be considering within the whole dynamic of what's happening on chain within your assets but also possibly what you have to deal with in your normal world like if you have a spouse or children and really that's when you start to get more creative with all these different key areas of financial planning uh but I'll give you a brief high level background um of how I would sort of go through this process with a prospect um or someone that I just met so you can get a sense of the step by step and imagine yourself being that person the first part is basically diving in and having just a conversation it's that simple so being able to just get a sense of your values your expectations your goals your vision for the future what you Aspire for everything right um this is very much about life fulfillment so we want to get at the core of like how do we tie your money to life fulfillment that's far beyond just money that's just a tool to do the things we love with the people we love but how do we get more into the weeds so from there it's then diving into specifics on okay what are you working on with some of these different goals and is it short term is it intermediate is it long and actually have you considered goal posts if we don't have a goal post that we're actually trying to strive for the reality is we're just wandering around aimlessly right so it's being able to give you some context on how you could um more Define that fully right and if you don't have an idea it's us being there to support you it's also getting a sense on like what our previous experiences you've had with other professionals and if you haven't worked with other people and this is your first time at 18 20 30 years old to speak with an advisor is being able to basically give your perspective on what are you looking for what are you truly needing out of an advisor so we can actually see if we could deliver on what you are intending to get from this relationship and then from there the more fun I think is getting into you grading yourself so if you're looking at a one to ten scale one being Eric I have no idea what the hell I'm doing 10 being I have everything figured out leave me alone I like being 100x with my leveraged position through my okay the reality is you get to grade yourself and Define why you're that number and then take it a step further for us to be able to give you some context on okay what could actually improve that um and then I would say last but not least is sort of entangle all of this it takes it to the last part of basically saying okay now that we have this idea of what you're wanting to Envision for the future and your goals and your passions how do we put all this together and tie this into the six core areas of financial planning let it be risk management Insurance retirement planning estate planning um or even budget and cash flow things that are relevant on change but obviously in our regular world as well anything to do that there Bryce as as Eric was talking I was really uh thinking through when when people are choosing their financial advisor one of the things can you hear me one of the common things are the values that you have as well as the performance so you might care about certain aspects like environmental sustainability or other things you could attest to that as a value and then easily be matched more with advisors that have proven on chain that they've actually shared those same values as well as from the selection process or the discoverability for an advisor to find projects that also match your um your investment preferences do you think I mean as somebody who's self-custrated I I I haven't it's it's it's it's it's my power to basically choose which application has access read only access to my assets um do you think that will shift um the the the kind of the the part not just the power dynamics but like the the way that clients interact with uh one or more advisors um if if if I don't have to basically trust someone and send them my assets before I can I can see that I'm getting value from from them um do you how do you see that uh changing the these Dynamics traditionally I mean uh registered advisors have some of the lowest uh attrition rates uh with with their clients like they they if when a client starts working with a financial advisor they they work together for years and years and years do you see that changing in in this new world uh of of a non-custodial and unchain uh Wealth Management whoever wants to kick it off go ahead Eric I don't even know where to start there I I think from what I've seen more from the traditional side relationships don't just start and end um it is a different Dynamic if arguably an advisor in this case has a lot less control right typically I would have an account open at Schwab or TD or Fidelity and we're taking on that approach of using that as a custodian we're making the trades we're doing everything for that client in this case it's quite different I I think when people find that they're not considering things like estate planning which sounds maybe boring but how many of you have tokens that have actually even considered this I have a wife who thinks I'm a little crazy when it comes to crypto she has no idea how to run my ledger and I have instructions but will it be abided by will it be understood maybe not so it's an eye-opener for everyone in the room because I think we all live in the same life the reality is are you considering that as well as you should and then it starts to pick at all these different layers of planning to where I hope and I think people will realize holy there's a lot more that I'm not really fully considering with my overall plan if I want to work in web 3 or or truly have the life I want with my tokens and to do things where I have that much control there's a lot that you have to really account for and we're noticing that this is a unique Niche where there's a gap and from everyone I've been speaking to even at the conference there's a lot of I think aha moments I hope some of you are having that today I see uh financial advisors as being co-pilots with a lot of people that have self-custody assets because it today I mean if you just think about your own social networks a lot of people uh have financial advisors because they don't want to make those investment decisions alone you might you might try to make some with like a robo advisor or other but it's really powerful to have an A registered investment advisor with you to make those decisions but how do you trust them and that comes to reputation that's built over time and we see that as attestations become adopted as a technology that people will be able to see that Eric has clients that they trust and you're not just trusting the advisor who says that they do a good job and they have that type of performance for their clients completely agree we're coming up to time any any any last bit of alpha to share with the audience before uh before we get off the stage oh my God 23 Second Alpha oh my God all right I'll I'll try to run through this as quickly as I can a lot of what I suggest to people is to have three to six months of living expenses in reserve somewhere think about your situation right now do you actually have that and you know are you doing that off chain this six month treasury are you doing that in a high yield account that's getting four plus percent are you doing that through some other method on chain through uniswap um when you look beyond that at even cover are you doing cover on some of your positions are you considering your risk with certain type of firewalls that exist or different ways to have things that are legible when you're actually signing so you actually know what you're signing all these things exist in this space I would say uh feel free to find me later I could give some more of this Alpha where we have more time uh off stage and I would say last but not least consider looking Beyond today but looking into the future and think of some of the solutions where you can actually set up beneficiaries gnosis safe is working on this for some of the conversations I had yesterday they're looking to set things up where you can actually set up this chain reaction for beneficiaries um and and that would be amazing um same thing applies with what's being done at webassee much more to share not enough time but definitely appreciate for everyone coming today 10 10 seconds uh do your own research make sure that you find advisors that you trust and my advice is to focus on education as well the more educated you are then the better decision to make regardless of if it's an advisor that's helping you do that or not so education is probably the most important thing that's lacking and our last minute Alpha is uh we just launched on mainnet today thanks and we have a happy hour at the bar and grill which is right here at the front entrance between four to six pm if you want to learn more about attestations and our public good for that thank you Bryce thank you Eric for joining us and thank you to the audience for having us foreign [Music]