Welcome to Treasury's Unchained from Stock twist and FinTech TV.
I'm Katy Perry.
This is your definitive destination for major crypto Treasury news announcements and insights from transformative Treasury allocations to bold strategic pivots.
We go beyond the headlines to understand the motivation, risks, and long term visions behind this new era of capital management and today.
We're here at the New York Stock Exchange joined by Zach Townsend, CEO of Meanwhile.
Zach, thank you so much for stopping by.
Really happy to be here, Katie.
I'm so excited to learn more about this business.
It wasn't on my radar previous to getting to know the company ahead of this interview.
How did you end up as a CEO of this company and give us a little background on your journey there and what you guys are all about?
Well, I ended up as CEO of the company because I started it, but I started the company because we really believe that there is going to be a Bitcoin economy and just like any developed economy in the world, there are going to be regulated financial institutions, so there's going to be banks and there's going to be assets asset managers and there's going to be payments companies and in our case there's going to be a life insurance company.
And life insurance sounds really boring to most people, but really it provides like two critical functions.
One is we sell life insurance to people, and that's like one of the oldest financial services in the world, and we can talk about all the reasons that people buy life insurance.
And on the other hand, actually many of Long duration assets in the world, mortgages, infrastructure, many physical buildings are owned by life insurers.
They are permanent capital vehicles.
They have really sort of long dated obligations.
They think in the long term, and we think that's exactly what crypto needs.
And so break this down a bit because I know there's different types of life insurance.
You all meanwhile offer whole life insurance.
Why was why do you focus there and not on the term life insurance?
Yeah, so whole life is called whole life because it lasts your whole life.
So one of the key things about that is because everybody dies.
Which I hope isn't a surprise to anyone, then we're, yeah, yeah, breaking news exactly.
People die so that means that we pay out on every single person we have and our concern with term life was that most people who buy term life, the normal outcome is you don't get a payout because you live now.
You did get something which is you got like mortality protection.
Uh, but we just didn't think that was a great look.
There's not a great history in Bitcoin and crypto of people paying you and you not paying them back.
So we really wanted to have our first product be a product where every single one of our policyholders is going to be made whole, um, and also.
Whole life insurance is a better business.
Yeah, so who's your, who's the, I guess who's the current customer like the early adopters with Mehi and also who's the target?
I believe so you think about life insurance, it's like an old school kind of conservative financial tool, and then you have crypto.
Who are the people that are most likely to be using it and who do you think it's actually a great product for that might not be considering?
Yeah.
So the two sets of people who are buying it right now, you know, primarily we sell pretty chunky policies, pretty big policies.
So our policy minimum is 1 Bitcoin paid over 10 years, so that's like, you know, 10 $100 to $120,000 right now depending on the day.
And then you know our biggest policies are in the 30 to 40 Bitcoin range, so that's like 3 to 4 $4.5 million.
So these are like big policies.
Our current customers are basically we have one set of customers that you could think of as like Bitcoin native folks, and we have another set of customers who are more like traditional.
They might like run a family office or have made money here on the New York Stock Exchange or whatever.
So in the first group of people.
Basically they're growing up.
They're now in their 30s, they're getting married.
They're having kids.
So the idea of this tool of life insurance, and it really is a tool, it's not just about protecting your family, but it's also about like tax and estate planning.
Like that's what life insurance is used for by like high net worth people.
So they're just growing up, they're maturing, the space is maturing and like we're a mature company that sort of like meets them where they are.
And the other set of people, the high net worth, general high net worth individuals, they, they know about all these like tax and estate planning tools.
They've probably bought life insurance like in dollars or have sort of all these sorts of tools and then we show up and say like, hey, you've decided to own 1020, 30 Bitcoin.
Like here is a A like a structure that works for that.
OK.
And so the tax implications, can you break those down a bit in terms of what that would look like if you pass and you have a regular life insurance versus if it's in.
They're exactly the same.
We follow all the rules, although I want to caveat that I'm not your tax adviser and I'm not giving tax advice, but I'd say how it is expected to work from the legal opinions we have and the analysis that we and others have done.
It works like a dollar policy.
It's just in Bitcoin, right?
So that's what's special about like our whole company in Bitcoin.
Like we're not just a Bitcoin treasury company, like we're an operating bitcoin business, so people pay us premiums in Bitcoin, we pay all claims in Bitcoin, then we do all the insurance mumbo jumbo, the solvency calculations, the regulatory filings, the audited financials all entirely in Bitcoin.
So what that means from the perspective of our policyholders is they get the same tax treatment as they would with a dollar policy, but it's in Bitcoin.
So you pay in, I'll say like 10 Bitcoin.
I'll pick a round number.
We promise when you die you'll get 15.
Depends on your age and your your sex and and whether you're smoking and you know all that like normal insurance stuff.
Well, let's just like for the sake of this conversation, say like you've paid me 10, I promise you 15.
OK, one.
Uh, you get protection, right?
You get hit by a bus, your loved ones get 15.
The second is we're turning 10 into 15, and then we'll talk about how we do that.
But if you were doing that yourself, you'd owe interest income tax every year.
So you're having that compounding sort of in a tax-free way.
The third is that you can borrow against the policy.
We follow all the rules to make sure that you can take a policy loan, but the amazing thing about the policy loan is it is also tax free, so you don't pay any capital gains tax even though you might borrow Bitcoin and liquidate it, and we don't expect you to ever pay back.
We expect you to die.
So instead of paying you 15%, if you borrowed 2 out during your lifetime, you'll just get 13% instead.
Right, so you, it's like a loan, a tax-free loan if Bitcoin goes to $10 million or whatever, but you know, it's not really, there's no margin calling.
There's no possibility being blown out, none of that.
And the last thing is we are doing like basic legacy management.
It goes to your kids tax free, and we are. to make sure that your kids or your wife or your niece and nephew, whatever that they are getting your Bitcoin and that is a big problem like it's all these sad stories of people die and their wife doesn't know how to use the keys and like all that's avoided we handle that, you know, as a normal life insurance company that could be denominated in dollars or euros or yen or Swiss francs.
But we've chosen to be denominated in the greatest currency, the greatest store value in the world, Bitcoin.
That's interesting because even nowadays you think about the list of things you sort of go through if someone passes on.
Looking up their crypto keys is not there.
Like it could be some cases where they just didn't even know this person.
Oh, we have, we have people like that who buy policies and it's not clear to us that Like anyone in their family knows cause there's like a whole culture, right, of like don't tell anyone how much bitcoin you have except your insurance company.
OK, very interesting.
A lot of questions to follow on from that, even when you talked about the specific customers.
Uh, I want to talk about from when you started the company to today because a lot has changed in terms of just it becoming more closely linked with traditional finance.
You have people like BlackRock owning 5% stake and strategy now.
There's a lot of, so how, how has that impacted your growth over time?
I saw an interview with you a couple of years ago and you were saying we aspire to be the boring, the boring guys in crypto.
Do you think that's benefited you to this point?
Yeah, I mean, we started the company in January 2022.
We sold our first policies in like November 23.
We got fully licensed last year, in the middle of 2024.
I think one thing is we've been at this since for a while and like FDX happened, Block 5 happened, Celsius blew up, and we just kept building this thing, and we believe in Bitcoin, whether it's at 30,000 a day or 16,000 or 130,000.
Um, and we've been sort of building like through ye, but yes, it is the case that like as there's been more institutional interest in Bitcoin, I think we are a very institutional company like I mentioned like we have a full financial audit entirely in Bitcoin terms. like we're running a sort of like somber like sober company that takes you know, governance and compliance and risks incredibly seriously and all of those things add up, I think, to being like really aligned with 2025, which has been a Sort of truly amazing like institutionally focused year.
Yeah, and what regulatory landscape for this?
You're the first Bitcoin first and only.
OK, what I'm sure this is like.
Be its own hour long explanation, but what what what do you?
I'll come back whenever you're.
I'll make 80.
What do you have to?
What hurdles do you have to jump through?
Why, why is it so difficult to get that level of, you know, the stamp of approval that you have going in, but maybe others have not?
Yeah, well, others are trying.
I want to say that like running an insurance company is no joke, right?
So we have a chief risk officer, a chief compliance officer, we have an independent board, an enterprise risk management framework.
We have to find an auditor.
Um, all this stuff sort of adds up and candidly, the people who are often good and excited about Bitcoin and crypto and the people who are good and excited about like risk and compliance like don't always entirely overlap.
So we really consider that like part of our competitive advantage as a company is like having that culture that can like bring those disparate pieces together.
But yeah, we're domicile. or the insurance company is domiciled in Bermuda, not the Bahamas, which is where FTXL is, and Bermuda is like a legit place to have a life insurance company like Apollo's life insurance company is there, like KKR's life insurance company is there.
Like you go there and it's like Munich and Swiss and Chu.
Like it's the insurance like capital of the world, and I think they have.
Foresight to realize that it's also where coin-based offshore operations are.
There was a way to mix their expertise and insurance with their expertise that they had been developing in crypto.
But yeah, we have, we're, we have all like we have to follow the insurance code, we have to file, you know, these huge spreadsheets around our solvency calculations.
It's a lot of hard work.
So I think it's a, it's a mode for us, but it's also what allows our policyholders to know that like we're trustworthy.
Yeah, we talk about mot the law on these shows and some, you know, some businesses you could just vibe code apps that does a similar thing and you can set it up and try to start selling it.
Other things much more, yeah, vertically integrated life insurance company hard to vibe code.
We do do some vibe coding, but And why, why Bitcoin versus Ethereum, other, other assets?
Is there, is there any appetite to build outside of Bitcoin?
Look, I think for us we have to make promises to our users that are measured in decades 1020, 30, 40, 50 years plus.
We have written policies already that will outlive me, may well outlive every single person in the company, and the only currency, the only cryptocurrency we feel comfortable with right now making that promise in is Bitcoin, and I'm not like a Maxi and I think like Ethereum's a can I say Bitcoin anyway is a Sitcoin.
I just don't know if it's going to win, right?
Like you can have an opinion about Ethereum versus Sellana versus Avalanche versus whatever.
The point is those aren't really stores of value.
They're like utility tokens or they're related to like computation platforms and ledgers, like all amazing important technologies, but for us, Bitcoin is a store of value.
It's a currency.
It's going to persist over time.
Um, so we're not prepared to do a life insurance company in anything but Bitcoin.
I think if we were going to do a second insurance company, it actually would be in USD stablecoins, because you asked me a question earlier actually, which I didn't answer, which is like, what's the aspirational user and the aspirational user is if you are a middle class person in Argentina, you do not buy life insurance because you are going to live longer than the Argentinian peso.
So our fundamental idea is there are about 100 million people in the world who have life insurance or deferred annuities or like products from a long-term insurer, and we want to 10x the market by using digital money.
And if that digital money is Bitcoin, which we consider a great store, like the best store of value.
Or the digital dollar, which we consider maybe the, you know, second best store of value in the world, um, like that, that both of those work for us.
Like the mission is to help people save, save for themselves, save for their retirement, save intergenerationally, and that's what a long term insurer is all about and that's what we're all about, but in Digital currencies.
Yeah, that's an interesting point because just talking about the types of use cases you have high net worth, you have people who are maybe Bitcoin maxis, but then you've introduced another global audience in highly inflationary.
Region.
I just say the potentially, so I have an 8 year old.
I bought life insurance for myself in 2018.
I've seen the purchasing power of that policy go down 25% because of inflation in the United States.
So it is both like anyone who has concerns about inflation risk or currency risk or Political risk or jurisdictional risk like we think that Bitcoin life insurance is like a great product for them.
OK.
And then let's talk a little bit about you raised around in the spring $40 million in funding.
You had some early investors, Sam Altman being one of them.
Uh, what, what is the sort of strategy from this round you plan to raise more money?
Do you need to, or are you just kind of going to build from from this point on?
Yeah, well, one thing about the $40 million round that's really important is actually to your you mentioned like there are maxis, there are like D5 people, and we really were conscious of that because our customers bridge those communities.
So we actually have two different Series A leads that participate in that $40 million round.
One is a firm called Folger.
And they are Bitcoin maxis and then we have another firm called Framework which is like one of the big backers of Ave and Chain Link and Maple, and they are more like EI centric, but like we are the only company that they have ever both invested in, and we try to like bridge between that.
And yeah, Sam was an early investor.
We have some great insurance investors, crypto investors.
Stillmark is a great Bitcoin firm, so we, we really are like bringing together all these expertise.
Will we need more capital? you know, we, we have a pretty amazing business.
Our a Sort of, I don't know, margin profile is very good selling life insurance to people who are in their 30s and 40s who are obsessed with longevity like that, you know, that's a good business to be in, but fundamentally like our ambitions, as I mentioned, they are international, they are global, they go across products.
There's um.
All these things that no one's ever heard of like guaranteed investment contracts, deferred annuities, bank owned life insurance, like company owned life insurance.
So will we raise more capital?
I think the big step between where we are and like the like next big phase transition will probably be getting a credit rating, and that will require more capital.
But yeah, we have, we've been fortunate to both have good success in the company and to be trusted by our investors to like build great products and like.
Currently all set for now.
You mentioned some of the legacy.
I think what's really interesting about your story is that your background not you're at McKenzie, right?
You're, you're from like, yeah, I mean, I like worked at Stripe.
I I went through Y Combinator with the startup, and then I like McKinsey hired me to like build startups for a big company.
I started in Fintech and then so I was like Fintech.
I actually did some government service and then Fintech.
And then McKenzie and then I was like, so you blend these worlds too, I think that yeah yeah that's part of where my mind was going when you were even listing out some of the companies in Bermuda.
Has any of these big insurance companies contacted you guys as like a partner to offer?
Yes, is that, is that something that's currently like in in talks?
Is it a real thing yet or it's kind of a concept?
I'll let you know in a few months, Katie.
I guess let me, let me give you a deeper answer, which is, as you said earlier, is a very institutional year of Bitcoin, right?
And you've got BlackRock, you've got Fidelity, you've got Franklin Templeton saying people should have 1% of their retirement savings in Bitcoin.
So yes, there are lots of people in the world who are saying why not 1% of life insurance?
Why not 1% of deferred annuities?
There is $8 trillion sort of captured inside the balance sheets of long-term insurers, and I for one think it should be more than 1%, and we are the only game in town, so.
And just that, yeah, it makes you think like the build versus buy and fintech and crypto is an interesting there are real structural barriers, regulatory barriers for incumbents to do what we do.
So we're, we're happy to utilize our global monopoly and when it gets people.
More policyholders, the hardest money in the world in their life insurance company.
OK, and you're currently US, Canada, UK.
What, what are the complexities?
I know I used to work at like a broker a job that was socks and it's like a mess to try to go in other markets.
Let me start by saying.
We don't operate in those countries.
We operate in Bermuda.
People from those countries, if they find out about us and they opt to come to our website and they, they, uh.
Decide to buy a life insurance policy on a purely reverse solicitation basis, then we can serve them.
The barrier to serving people in additional countries is not so much regulatory, but it is like the actual infrastructure.
Like we have to be able to do know your customer and any money laundering.
We have to like do source of wealth checks and critically we have to underwrite them.
So we are a life insurance company and you do not want to write life insurance to someone who's about to die.
And I just run a good business, so you need to like, you ask people like, are you healthy? and they of course say yes.
So what you need to do is to be able to check that and that's a bunch of like technical infrastructure connecting the database, national health services, things like that.
So that is the barrier to being in more countries is like actually building out the product to serve those other countries well.
OK, when you're talking, made me think of that movie Along Came Potley with Ben Stiller's character.
He's like a life insurance.
Feldman, and I feel like they need to redo that, but do Bitcoin life insurance.
That would be.
I, I am prepared to be a producer on The Life of Pappy Sue when he is a Bitcoin life insurance, people are moving that way.
Let's let's like zoom out a bit to wrap things up.
Looking ahead, new products, nit at some potential partnership angles.
You mentioned a couple of things in terms of the next.
6 to 12 months.
What are like the key things you have the team focusing on right now that you could share with us?
Look, first and foremost, we consider like meeting every obligation we have to every policyholder, so um there's just like being trustworthy, um doing trustworthy things, so we put that like a high priority on that and that's like.
Fixing bugs and making sure people can apply and extending new countries for people on the waitlist.
So would you consider like the core of just like selling, helping people plan their futures with Whole Life as like our number one priority?
I think the second product we're working on now is um let's call a guaranteed investment contract, which is what you could think of it like a certificate of deposit but in Bitcoin.
So there's just so many people in the world who Um, want to find yield on Bitcoin and uh we didn't talk about it, but like we essentially run a very conservative, very successful uh private credit operation in Bitcoin, so we lend Bitcoin.
To institutional counterparties with a lot of credit protections we have never had a credit loss, and that is something that is attractive potentially to other people, both policyholders who've actually maxed out their policies, but also to a wide range of people, and the sort of international expansion is another big thing.
And the last thing is that Um, you know, right now we talk to every single customer we have, and as I said, it's a very institutional year.
There's a lot of excitement by traditional finance folks and there's the sort of like partnerships with the existing characters that we mentioned, but also.
Just working with agents and you know, private wealth advisers, financial advisers, accountants, tax and state attorneys, so building tooling to enable those sorts of existing trusted advisers to support their customers in A in Bitcoin life insurance isn't that's interesting because you probably have people who are deep into crypto or are knowledgeable going to their financial advisor and like, can I do this?
And the financial advisor's like, let me like.
Yeah, I've been on some calls where like the person wants to do it and they're like roped in.
Bomb their advisor and their advisor's like, you should not do this and they like I'm here and I like still do it.
I think the other big thing that we take seriously is like we're not only are we making promises to our users for Decades, but we're trying to build a company for decades, so you know the next 6 months uh maybe that'll sound boring to people, but like the most important thing for us is like our investors have trusted us a lot.
We have a lot of our own bitcoin.
It's like in the insurance company we, you know, manage all that Bitcoin, our own Bitcoin, our customer's Bitcoin, uh, we take that that trust really seriously.
Um, so sometimes it can feel on the outside that not a lot's happened because like what we did is we like made good credit decisions this month.
We earned more Bitcoin.
We had a great return on equity.
We, you know, set the company up for success by having, you know, really robust.
Governance procedures and none of that stuff, you know, is exciting on TV, but in TechCrunch, yeah, but it's not what you want, Adam, but it's actually the blocking and tackling that makes a life insurance company go.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
Well, Zach, thank you so much for stopping by.
You'll have to, I know we alluded at some maybe fun things to come, so you'll have to come back and see us soon, and we appreciate your time here on Treasury's Unchained.
My pleasure, Katie, and thank you to everyone for tuning in at home, and we'll see you next time.
