In an interview with Cointelegraph, Ryan Radloff, the CEO of the crypto-friendly $13 billion custodian Kingdom Trust, asserted that a “generational change” will soon open the $28 trillion United States retirement fund industry to crypto assets.
“Right now, the single largest addressable market for Bitcoin is the 28 trillion dollars in the U.S. retirement market,” Radloff asserted, “There is no single more addressable market for Bitcoin to penetrate, or all digital assets, for that matter.”
“Right now, all of that money is about to go through this generational change, and there has been hardly any penetration of Bitcoin into that market today,” he added.
“From a stock-to-flow standpoint, that is a massive deal, because now what you’re doing is unlocking a massive amount of new dollars that can in-flow into our industry. And that’s what that's why it's so important.”
7.1 million Americans own Bitcoin
Radloff predicted that the first wave of capital from moving to crypto from the retirement market will come from the 7.1 million Americans who already own Bitcoin (BTC). However, he noted that few crypto asset holders realize that they can hold BTC in their retirement accounts.
“When the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] decided to tax Bitcoin, consequently it [...] directly enabled [Bitcoin] to be held by qualified custodians and in retirement accounts,” he said.
“I think that what you're going to see over the next three years, is as that the 7.1 million of us that are already [invested in Bitcoin] are about to wake up and realize that there’s an opportunity to get [their] savings out of the Fed’s rattrap, out of the endless Keynesian cycle of money printing and stocks,” Radloff continued.
“What we will consider success is that we make sure that all 7.1 million Americans that have bought Bitcoin already and have a retirement account know that they can buy Bitcoin in their retirement account in a regulated regulatory approved structure.”
Mainstream investors warm to Bitcoin
Radloff emphasized that “Bitcoin’s brand” is becoming increasingly “validated” as leading economists like Paul Tudor Jones look to it as “a good hedge against an inflationary environment.”
In March, Travis Kling, the chief investment officer of digital asset investment firm Ikigai Asset Management, likened Bitcoin to “hurricane insurance.”