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“Sometimes we look at things where we’re like, ‘you know what, we should come out,’ and sometimes we don’t. And last week, we didn’t come out as fast.”
This is what Maximilian Pace, the technical director of BlockTrust IRA, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
BlockTrust IRA, an AI cryptocurrency retirement platform, was one of many cryptocurrency-focused companies to suffer the brutal selloff that gripped the market last week.
Related: 136-Year-Old Investment Firm Predicts Next Bitcoin Crash
Bitcoin (BTC), XRP (XRP), Ethereum (ETH), publicly traded companies with crypto on their balance sheets, no one was spared.
Bitcoin often indicates market sentiment with its movements. Once it falls, it drags others down. Last week, Bitcoin fell below $70,000 threshold up to $62,000. The move marked Bitcoin’s biggest drop since trading at similar levels in October 2024.
At press time, Bitcoin was slowly climbing back up, trading at $70,724.70
Bitcoin’s fall from its October peak has reignited the debate over whether crypto has any place in the American retirement system.
The speed and severity of the crypto selloff caught many companies off guard.
BlockTrust IRA, which has added $70 million in IRA funds over the past 12 months, found itself in the middle of the bloodbath.
Pace said the company relies on a “broad sense of analytics” designed to operate over longer time horizons rather than reacting to short-term market noise. That approach helped the company get through 2025, and Pace said the company “isn’t necessarily affected by volatility.”
For Pace, the key is perspective.
“There are ways to de-risk the investment, either from a time perspective or from a strategic perspective, that make it more attractive or more acceptable for things like 401(k) plans. But like anything, there’s risk.” he said
The core of concern is risk. Crypto is still a young and highly volatile asset class, where the price moves in minutes and hours, sometimes due to speculation. But pension funds are designed for steady, predictable growth.
In August, US President Donald Trump issued a executive order allowing 401(k) and other defined contribution retirement plans to access alternative assets, including digital assets.
Lee Reiners, a professor at the Duke Financial Economics Center and co-host of the “Coffee & Crypto” podcast, said many retirement plans already get indirect exposure to crypto through publicly traded companies such as Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), which are included in the major equity indices.
