Crypto and Insurance: Wealth Management Made Better togETHer | Boston Blockchain Week 2026

GM, thank you for being here. So, why are we here? Because we're bringing focus and energy to something that should be talked about more, crypto and insurance. Most people don't know. Most people don't know things about insurance that they should to combine with crypto.

Not many people understand insurance as a financial or inheritance or safety vehicle and the same goes for crypto. We are here together um to help explain that story to you. So as we move into intros, I'd like to spend a little more time here to help us understand how these highly intelligent individuals are building in this space daily. So for myself um I lead TCIG which is crypto education with partnership services and strategies um for uh a long-term outlook for real estate and insurance policy tokenization. Um so I am a an advanced market strategist and licensed life and health insurance agent.

I started in real estate and landed in insurance for multiple reasons, but um mainly because real estate is tied to fake fiat inflation. Um to be blunt, it rots and uh it will be tokenized at some point and insurance is just about the only way to create a tax-free asset. Um and we will get into that of what that that entails. Um and insurance at some point again will be tokenized. So um legacy and estate planning is evolving quickly and crypto assets are changing the way that we we level the playing field with wealth management.

So here you go Joe.

Hi Joseph Lombardi, owner and founder of Ironhawk Financial. Um I specialize in IRS code 7702. that just allows my clients to build tax-free, sue proof, divorce proof type of accounts that average double digit returns. Uh lean the money out, saves my clients millions of dollars in taxes and market loss and also interest by being your own bank. One of the three five-star rated books I've written on Amazon.

Um and we I basically believe that crypto is going to be a huge player in the insurance field. I believe that the wealthy store all their money in insurance companies because it's very safe. Uh when you put a dollar in insurance company, you legally have to keep it there by law. Unlike a bank that can fractionally lend every dollar that comes in, I also believe that the fact that insurance companies legally have to pay dividends, it's going to be very smart of these insurance companies to take those dividends and use that as an option to the investor to purchase crypto. And I'm seeing it in my business currently.

We have uh Delaware Life that is now offering Bitcoin annuities. We have other companies that are taking shape to allow crypto to come into the IL space to invest in as an asset. And what I see happening is just from my personal view, when I roll money from my client's uh funds or account over to an investment insurance company, it could take 14 to 30 days. And then the client has to sign a form, send the money over, insurance company gets it, then they have to send that to the seating carrier, then the seating carriers to send the money. And it is such a old barbaric way of doing business.

And what I foresee happening is there will be a time where somebody says, "Joe, I want to roll this million dollars into a fixed index annuity and they hit a button and the money transfers just like that." And I'm a big believer, as I know Jay is, of XRP. And I believe that it is going to be a huge um revelation in our financial situation and our financial markets. Hi, Alex Krano, DeFi lead at AON. Uh, we are building out risk control standards and insurance solutions for DeFi for vaults, RWAS, tokenization.

Um, so very high level ensuring the rails that will enable so many of these transactions.

Jake Claver. I am chairman and founder of Digital Ascension Group. We are a multif family office that specializes in digital assets. We manage exclusively crypto. Uh, obviously we have a large you know, spotlight on insurance, developing insurance products, bringing those to market and um working with other cool people up here on the panel to make sure that those are safe and insured.

Uh and you know, the same stuff that you would have in Tradfi exists in crypto. Right now, those are very separate. Uh and I feel like we're the ones that are the conduit or bridging the gap um in that experience for, you know, high net worth individuals and also retail.

Hello everybody. Thank you for your interest in this session this afternoon. Uh my name is Andrew Podourney. I'm with Realm Insurance. So Realm has creative solutions to transfer risk out of businesses and we create specialized risk transfer solutions for web 3 organizations.

Great. Thank you. So Jake, we'll start with you. So tell us a little bit more about DAG, the launch of DAG insurance recently. um you know you opened an office recently in New York City um you work with family offices so tell us a little bit about you know what you've built in the last few years and anything else you'd like to wrap into that

yeah so kind of back to Joseph's point you know what we do is we work with high net worth individuals family offices to be able to secure their wealth over multiple generations and and you can use the technology itself uh building different rails and different capabilities to be able to provide that continuity very seamless way. Uh, and you can also utilize the assets on these networks to invest in so that your your wealth grows inside these types of policies. Um, you know, we cut everything from your traditional property casualty all the way up to PLI. uh we have a product launching in the near future uh that will allow somebody to put that capital that you would normally invest in like Sally's or Spearhead or you know maybe you have a bespoke policy that's managed offshore or domestically here in the US um into crypto because that hasn't existed up to this point. So here in the near future that'll be a possibility for people and there's obviously a lot of regulatory components and diversification that's required for that.

Uh but you need a wealth manager to manage that account for you. it has to be separate of you. Uh just like he was talking about, you know, insurance, there there's really three wrappers that you can put your assets or money inside that grow in a tax advantage way here in the US. Uh you've got tax advantaged accounts, either an IRA or 401k or there's the SE and all the other things, HSAs. Um you've got endowments.

So if you have enough money, you want to start a foundation and spend all of that money in order to be able to set up an endowment, you can go that route. Uh or insurance. And insurance is the most accessible outside of your traditional, you know, rappers for 401ks and IRA that people have access to. And I was actually I was Jake from State Farm for a very short period of time. And when I first started, I got insured, you know, for life and health.

And I looked at the policies that were out there for the average person. I was like, whole life's a scam. Like this doesn't make sense at all. Why would you why would you do this? The financial regulations here in the US are built for wealthy people to utilize insurance contracts to be able to perpetuate their wealth taxree across generations and be able to leverage that capital and borrow against it during their lifetime.

Like that that's the whole premise that a lot of this was set up by I think the Rockefellers had some pretty significant influence on that. So, but how does that apply to crypto? How do you bridge that gap? like obviously it's used for pretty much every other asset class at this point and this has just been kind of outside the regulatory confines of most advisors. So kind of to your question, why did we start this?

I made a bunch of money in crypto in 2021 and I couldn't find people to help me. Um, you know, I called all these different advisor firms across the US, and very few people actually understood the technology, how it was going to be used, and and most of them were like, just liquidate your crypto that you made the money in, and we'll help you mitigate the taxes, and you can come over here into the products that we have that we can manage for you. And I was like, no, like I want to maintain my exposure to this asset class. So, I sold some, but I, you know, consolidated my portfolio. you mentioned XRP, you know, not financial advice.

Do do your research, you know. Um, but anyway, I consolidated and then I I was able to find five people that I worked with to help structure my estate, mitigate taxes, and do things the right way. And then I got on uh social media in 22 and started talking about that. Started consulting for a few family offices. Over the past three years, we've scaled a full end toend um solution for people that make their money in crypto, estate planning, help you mitigate taxes, insurance, the wealth management piece.

Uh we started taking capital at the end of 24, you know, betting on Trump getting in and that we would have a friendly SEC. Uh and it ended up working out for us. We went zero to a billion dollars in about 10 months. um kind of hung out there with where the market's at now, but I think we're turning a corner.

Thank you, Alex. We'll go to you. So, tell us about your journey from insurance sales to now a DeFi lead at AON. Um and what that encompasses, you know, um AON is considered the largest book of digital asset um insurance clients in the world. Uh 500 offices in 120 countries.

So can you speak on you know what what was your journey like there?

Yeah absolutely. Uh so I started insurance in 2021 um property and casualty insurance, business insurance you know whatever was available um and quickly saw there were very few insurance professionals and even fewer insurance carriers uh specializing in the space and offering coverage. Um, and so I I quickly jumped in and I wanted to find what I thought at the time was going to be the big digital asset sector, which in 2021 sounded like the metaverse. Um, missed on that one a little bit. Uh, but as we kept evolving, um, it was really, you know, meeting the companies, seeing what the needs are, um, and growing from there.

So last year um actually with with Pods and Realm who are one of the you know top if not the top digital asset insurance carriers in the space uh we created what was at the time the first DeFi hedge fund insurance policy which was a third-party smart contract insurance um which protected this hedge fund's assets as they earned yield in DeFi. Um we then evolved that into our focus now which is DeFi vaults. Um, and so we've actually created a consortium of 35 plus of the leading firms in the space to create the industry's first consensus around what can be deemed institutional level risk control standards for vaults that we'll treat as prerequisites to qualify for a cost-effective DeFi vault insurance program. So we're talking smart contracts, oracles, governance, um, our actuarial data is loss history. Um, so what's gone wrong in the last few years?

How can we learn from that and grow? Um, so it's been uh a fun seven months at AON. It feels like it's been a week and five years allin-one. Uh, but I would say we're months away from cost-effective, scalable D5 vault insurance programs, which we're really excited about.

Great. Thank you. So Joe, we'll go to you on this one. Um so one of the promises that crypto has or you know um brings to light is that to being to be your own bank, right? Um and so from a traditional side over 20 years in Wall Street and building what you have with Ironhawk.

Um if I wasn't wearing my logo, I'd be wearing his logo because I do work with Iron Hawk Iron Hawk. Um, so tell us how 7702 plans wrap into being your own bank in traditional finance and how we could help people protect themselves.

Yeah, so um, as you alluded to, I worked in Wall Street. Um, I've won 42 awards, thousands of clients, billions of dollars in my career, protection rollovers. And uh what I what I have found is that the traditional investment when you look at the components there was collusion in the federal government and in Wall Street in the late 70s. 401ks used to be taxfree. 401ks used to not have any type of risk.

They worked exclusively like pensions. They secured people's long-term retirement account. And Wall Street saw a big fat cow of cash and they said, "How do we get our hands on that? And when that happened, that basically allowed risk to come in uh Wall Street. It also allowed it allow federal and state governments to come in taxes.

And when you look at it, if you own an IRA or a 401k, half of your money is stolen by Wall Street. 12b1 fee, class A share fund fee, money management fee, annual account fee, mutual fund expense fee, or you have a flat AUM fee of 1 to 2%. So you're losing 50% while you're accumulating. Then if you look at the flip side, when you take distributions, you have federal tax and state tax. So that's another 25 to 40% 45% if you're a high net worth person.

So I looked at that and I said, if you go the traditional route, you get less than a quarter of the money that you put into your IAS, 401k, SE, simples, pension, deferred comp, 457s, 529s. Then I realized, why do so many people invest in something they don't know what it is? I've asked this question over 1,000 times. What is a 401k? Nobody knows.

Oh, it's a retirement account that my employer matches or I'm mandated to have it. Well, if it's so good, why are you mandated to have it? So, then you take a look at what is a 401k? It's an IRS code. Then I started looking at 529, 401k, 403b, 457.

Huh? Those are IRS codes. So then I looked at it and I said, "Well, all the wealthy people I work with," because I worked at Wall Street, I worked with people worth $100 million, I worked with billionaires, they don't own that stuff. They don't own IAS. I said, "What do they own?"

They owned 7,72 IRS code. I'm like, "What the 7,000? We don't talk about that." Then I realized the government owns educational system. ed educational system tells you to invest with the government.

And I was like, huh? Then I talked to a bunch of accountants. Where do the accountants tell all the clients to put their money in a 401k or or a SEAP or an IRA? Because you're going to save money. Well, that's a bold-faced lie because the word save and the word deferral are not synonymous.

When we watch the first NFL game today in three hours, at least I am. The nice beer, there's going to be a coin toss. Well, that coin toss, team's going to win, team's going to lose. What happens if you lose the coin toss? Do you defer to the second half?

Did you save anything? No, I still got to do it. Then I looked at our debt, $40 trillion in debt we just passed, and I'm like, huh? Then I looked at the last hundred years of federal tax brackets and I said, "What were the highest brackets? What were they?"

Oh, I was born in the 80s. Highest marginal tax rate in the 80s was 70% federal. 60s 92%. I'm thinking, why are millions, tens of millions, over a hundred million Americans investing in what I call this crap, hot, illliquid, sewable, can lose when the market goes down. And I'm like, uh, there's got to be a better way.

That was my second book. There's a better way than a 401k. And then I realized that, why isn't this stuff being talked about? Well, when's the last time have you seen a financial commercial on TV? Uh, never.

Financial companies, insurance companies, we sponsor Northwestern Mutual sponsors the NCA tournament. Metife sponsors the New York Giants in the New York Jets stadium. But why? But they could show us commercials of what? Medications that kill you and give you bloody stool.

But they can't they can't show you a commercial that teaches you how to build wealth, have a legacy, have long-term care, keep you out of a 10x10 jail cell known as a nursing home. So, I just realized that the game was rigged and I just spent the last 20 years screaming from a rooftop trying to wake people up to say that traditional vesting isn't the way to go. And then I found crypto and I said, "Well, that's not a bad idea." Why? Because it eliminates the government.

And I believe that if you eliminate the government, you have a better better financial quality of life in your everyday life.

And combining crypto with life insurance is something that we want to get the message across more of. Um, it's really how you create a tax-free asset and leverage the two against each other. Um, and it's completely legal. So, we'll get more into that, but Andrew, I want to go to you obviously. Um so tell us where the demand is right now and what your take is um with Realm.

You know obviously you're at the helm of a lot of very unique insurance products and the coverage that you have. So where's the demand and where you where do you see the coverage going from here?

Yeah, thanks. The demand at the moment actually there's a lot of inquiry about theft of assets and whether that's theft of assets as a result of smart contract manipulation, oracle manipulations or failures. Uh there's also interest in stable coin deping insurance as well with the numerous stable coins that are being released at the moment uh as well. Uh but typically what we do see is that organizations in the web three space they obtain their funding a lot of the the foundations in the Cayman and they buy the directors and officers insurance to protect the directors and officers from lawsuits by shareholders because they've made representations about when they'll take their product or their service in web 3 to market or that they may have made other representations there. Uh then once they get to market, they buy a cyber line of insurance, a technology errors and emissions line of insurance, a crime line line of insurance.

Uh and so they also then want to enhance those insuranceances as Alex mentioned before where we're talking about defy specific solutions and so we have been developing some very specific solutions as I mentioned to do with smart contract manipulation, oracle manipulations uh and also the the stable coin digging insuranceances. Uh but as the web 3 uh community and activities continuously evolve and there are more risks and exposures that are also evolving um we're having to develop more bespoke and specific solutions to transfer the financial risk out of organizations.

Thank you. So we're going to stay with you. Um where do you see because yesterday we were a couple panels were talking about it. Uh wallet failures, operational failures, different crimes, different hacks. So, um, how do you see insurance?

It's kind of, it kind of seems like cyber insurance is like the savior of this industry in a way because we need these things in place. Um, specifically with holding your assets in self-custody or I mean any institution that's holding these assets has an enormous amount of risk. So, how do you how do you how do you even begin to price something like this? and like um where do you see the biggest pitfalls?

Yeah, so it's a great question. It depends on the opportunity. So uh underwriting web three risks and exposures you can start with more of a general market approach to that. So by that what I mean is in web 3 we still have a technology stack. We still have actors within a transaction.

we still have reliance on third parties and infrastructure providers. So you start with that and then you begin to understand how transactions take place in web 3 onchain as opposed to offchain. And then we often as opposed to the general insurance market where you fill in an application form, you send it off to the insurance company and you receive a quote. We often like to have a meeting um with the organizations that seeking insurance and to talk to them. And it depends on the opportunity, but if it's an organization that's providing some infrastructure, it could be about the testing of their of their product and what they experience during the testing in relation to any failures or any uh pitfalls or vulnerabilities, how they address that.

And with technology, if it's developed properly, tested properly, deploy deployed properly, it should just really be self-executing. So, we'd want to be looking to see whether or not it's likely that there's going to be any of those errors that were discovered in testing would uh materialize or that you would see them in the actual deployment in a production environment of their product. Uh so, you start off with you know a general identificate a general methodology to identify risk and then you begin to research and adapt it according to the specific opportunity of the web3 organization looking for insurance.

Okay. Thank you. Um, Alex, we'll go to you. So, um, explain to us what is actually insurable, like you know, smart contracts, Dows, treasuries, funds, all these different things that we deal with in crypto. What is actually insurable and where do you see the next opportunity for coverage?

Everything. No, I'm joking. Um, you know, what's insurable is once what's quantifiable. um who we can attribute some type of blame or failure to. So I'll I'll speak to DeFi for example.

The only liability that we that I can say foot down probably never going to be insurable is like a market level risk. Maybe pods can can uh can push back if he disagrees but market level risk. We're not going to ensure that your investments going up or going down. We're not going to recoup your your funds if you choose a bad investment. Now we can ensure you against the liabilities of improper due diligence from a certain investment.

we can ensure the theft of the assets in your control, in someone else's control. There's uh custodial default insurance has become increasingly popular when a lot of the major custodians have a few hundred million of insurance and a hundred billion dollar TV lauum, whatever term you want to use. Um we get asked unique insurance questions every day. One of the popular ones in DeFi recently is socialized losses. um in the event that a protocol has a bad liquidation event and they have bad liquidity and the governance says everyone's responsible for X, could an insurance policy potentially play that out?

Who knows? Um so again, as long as we can quantify and understand who has liability, that's it's an entity and we can either prove there was a failure in the technology that led to the loss or prove that there was a loss of assets. we can get creative and that's why I'm very fortunate to work with Pods and Realm and a lot of our other carriers um who really understand the space and are willing to be at the front. So come to us with anything. We'll we'll tell you if it's possible or not, but um we're we're building the plane as we're midair in a sense.

It seems like all of crypto. Um I thought we had a little more time here, but uh we'll try to get through some. So I want to go to Jake. Um you had mentioned PLI in your intro there. So tell us about PPLI private placement life insurance um and what the details are that and then if you want to go into uh your experience at Bitcoin 2026 um you were on the panel of building Bitcoin wealth through trust insurance and inheritance.

Yeah. So private placement life insurance raise your hand if you've heard of that before today. Okay. Okay, so a few people for for those that don't know it's it is a product that's primarily for high net worth individuals that have a lot of discretionary income. So majority of the time you need at least $5 million that you're going to be putting in these policies.

Um you can't just lump sum it in there otherwise you'll mech the policy and then you know and that becomes a modified endowment contract just so you know what the acronym is. But you wouldn't be able to borrow against it. You'd still be able to ensure the life of whoever you you cut that on. Um, but a lot of the benefit is being able to borrow against it. So, you know, you'll have to fund that over a period of time.

Meanwhile, has a really good product for Bitcoin. Their whole life product out of Bermuda. Um, you know, they've come up with some innovative ways to be able to generate additional interest all in kind in Bitcoin. Their whole balance sheets in Bitcoin. I think that we're going to see some more companies uh and solutions brought to market in in that capacity.

and maybe you know to the social benefit maybe there'll be captives or or other things where people are able to participate in kind um and ensure across an ecosystem. But back to the PLI um there are a couple different marketplaces. So let's say you do come into a lot of money in crypto and you do want to liquidate a portion of that and get it into a life insurance policy here domestically in the US or Canada. It has to be cash that goes into those policies. Uh you can't move assets in kind.

Now, if you're anybody here outside of the US, okay, we got a couple people. Uh, if you own a large amount of crypto and you are not a US citizen or a Canadian citizen, then there are ways to be able to move the assets in there in kind. Um, you're not going to be able to keep sole allocation to that asset because there is some diversification standards. No more than 55% of the policy can be made up by a single investment. Uh, there's look through.

So, let's say you wanted to have Bitcoin and a bunch of Bitcoin ETFs. That doesn't work either. Uh, it has to be differentiated inside the policy. But um again, they've built these things out in a way where you can grow wealth tax-free inside of this. You don't have full discretion over what the investments are in a PLI policy.

You do have to work with a wealth manager. Um there can be discourse. You can make suggestions. Um there has to be, you know, some proof that they told you no, we can't do some of those things. Um but you rebalance quarterly, right?

So, as long as no one investment makes more makes up more than 55%, then you can leave it as is or you can rebalance if something outperforms the other assets and diversify inside of that. But it's a really cool way to be able to grow your wealth over the long term, uh, if you do have a substantial amount of money, uh, and get it out of the tax system. And then obviously you have your beneficiaries. You can make it the beneficiary to trust. You can make it another individual.

Um but it would pass to them you know upon your passing and you would still get the liberty to borrow against it over your lifetime working with the right providers.

Thank you. So we only have over a minute here. So we'll do a little bit of a lightning round. Everyone likes a little lightning round. Um either one.

Pick one. um what's an important question people should be asking today as we go into the future of like um PQ and um the other one would be what's one important thing that people should take into consideration

I uh lived it with my dad falling getting disabled my mom dying at 52 and my grandmother losing $4 million to a nursing home so I would say making sure your financial foundation is set before you get into speculative investing One of Tony's questions earlier was actually interesting. Is is cyber going to be the the catchall? Is that the main policy? And and the answer is no. Um for for any for any industry.

Um I think what's really important is to understand what each policy actually does. If you have a cyber policy, straight cyber without anything added and you have a theft of your funds, you may expect that policy to pay you back. It will not. That's a crime policy. If you have a technology failure and you get sued but didn't actually directly lose funds, you'd expect maybe a crime policy to pick that up.

It wouldn't. An errors and emissions policy would. So, I think it's really important to just ask the questions of what does the policy do? And once you understand the infrastructure and the goal of each, then we can get creative and see what's possible within the framework of cyber, you know, crime, DNO, so on.

I would just double down on that to be honest with you. I I think a lot of people over the next couple years are likely going to be moving a portion of their crypto into institutional custody. Obviously, an advocate for, you know, self-custody, having multiple ways that you're holding your assets. But if you are working with uh an exchange or an institutional custodian, to his point, ask what type of insurance they have because there's a lot of claims that are made out there in the market that, you know, we have $300 million worth of insurance, which sounds sexy. It sounds really good on the surface.

Uh but if it is just cyber and it's not crime insurance and there's an exploit or an issue, you're not getting that money back. Um, and like I said before, I think that there's also going to be a transition and the people that that do this will do really well if you can figure out how to end kind uh insure people for their crypto because right now it's all cash and we've seen what happens when you know somebody goes under, there's a default or bankruptcy. If there's an insurance policy, that's great. you're going to get the cash at some point, but the value of your assets could have s changed substantially uh from when they were lost to when you're going to, you know, repurchase them. So, um yeah, great great points.

And I'll just quickly say to ask yourself the question when something goes wrong, how have you designed resiliency to make it through that period? So whether that is a spread of service providers, whether that is certain risk management practices within your own business and whether that's buying some insurance to transfer the financial risk out of your business as well.

Can I say one more?

Absolutely.

So we we also work with providers like the ones that are up here to offer species insurance. So they didn't mention species, but if you need additional insurance or want separate insurance of what's provided to you, you can ask for species policy and work with that custodian or whoever has the policy to be able to cut something specific for you and your assets.

All right. Well, we learned a lot of interesting things today. Um, I appreciate you all being here. Um, I think as this market continues to scale, we just need things to be more measurable and for risk to be more predictable, and that's where we're working to. So, thank you.