The Hold Your Own Keys custody option affords you maximum flexibility when it comes to choosing your preferred wallet and security setup to protect your bitcoins. An added benefit of this option is that you know your deposit addresses so you can view your assets in a block explorer at anytime and show that your qualified (i.e. tax-advantaged) bitcoins have not been used in a prohibited manner.
How does this work?
Clients establish an investment trust for the benefit of their Choice IRA, and then contribute bitcoin (or other digital assets) that they purchase on Choice into that trust, so that these assets are owned by the trust (which is owned by the client's IRA). Clients are responsible for establishing a digital wallet for the exclusive use/benefit of the trust that matches their security and technical preferences. Clients are also responsible for verifying that that their particular setup does not violate any IRS rules which could disqualify their IRA.
Please note that Choice cannot provide tax nor legal advice, nor technical support for establishing wallets and deposit addresses. Clients should consider their technical proficiency before electing Hold Your Own Keys because it does come with more technical risk and annual reporting responsibilities than the standard Cold Storage option.
Fees
Hold Your Own Keys incurs a one-time setup fee of $625 to establish an investment trust inside your IRA with Safeguard Advisors. On a monthly basis afterwards, it costs $13.33 (or $160 per year) to hold the trust inside your IRA. Hardware wallet devices and multi-signature wallet services will incur additional expenses and fees.
Every custody model has the same transaction fees for digital asset purchases and sales:
Trade Size | Fee (per trade) |
Under $50 | $0.99 |
$50 – $99.99 | $1.49 |
$100 – $249,999.99 | 1.49% |
$250,000 – $499,999.99 | 1.25% |
$500,000+ | 1.00% |
Any bitcoin or digital assets that are not moved to a Hold Your Own Keys wallet after purchase will incur the standard 1% annual cold storage custody fee, which is billed monthly as 0.083% of the average market value of the digital assets in your account over the last 30 days.
For a full list of all other service and transaction fees, please reference our Service & Transaction Fee schedule.