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XCryptocurrency IRA Firms Are Springing Up Around Los Angeles

Despite a rattled market and an uncertain regulatory future, cryptocurrencies continue to entrench themselves further in the mainstream. Now, the digital asset class has found relevancy in a new investment market: self-directed individual retirement accounts, or IRAs. And Los Angeles has quickly established itself as an epicenter of the crypto IRA industry.
Self-directed IRAs have long allowed investors to put their money into alternative assets such as gold, silver, platinum and palladium: minerals that are tangible, and stored securely by banks and financial institutions. But cryptocurrencies—which are essentially pieces of data that are authenticated and tracked on digital ledgers known as blockchains—are considerably different. Yet despite their decentralized, inherently riskier nature, that hasn’t stopped investors from pouring their retirement savings into crypto—giving rise to a cadre of new players seeking to manage such funds.
There are a handful of firms in the L.A. area focused on selling self-directed IRAs with a crypto focus, including Sherman Oaks-based Bitcoin IRA; Burbank-based BitIRA; Woodland Hills-based CoinIRA; and Beverly Hills-based Regal Assets, which is largely focused on metal commodities but sets up crypto IRAs for its wealthy client list.
Most notably, Long Beach-based iTrustCapital raised $125 million in Series A funding last month from New York-based Left Lane Capital. The raise gave iTrustCapital an eye-popping $1.3 billion unicorn valuation some four years after its launch, as well as the capital needed to continue its prolific growth.
With more than 150 employees and operations scattered across the South Bay and Irvine, as well as Salt Lake City, iTrustCapital could double in size by the end of 2022, company CEO Todd Southwick told dot.LA. It plans to use the new funding to build out its regulatory and compliance teams, pursue acquisitions and up its marketing budget.
iTrustCapital now holds roughly $2 billion in assets under custody and 27,000 client-funded accounts, with an average size of $55,000 per account. The startup said it has more than doubled its total transaction volume in the last six months alone, to more than $4.5 billion.
iTrustCapital CEO Todd Southwick.
Courtesy of iTrustCapital
Southwick maintains that iTrustCapital is profitable with revenues of less than $50 million in 2021, thanks in part to a pandemic that drove growth in the crypto market. A Series B raise could follow in 2022, though the timing has yet to be decided. “You’re either going to exit via acquisition or go public—I don’t have a preference,” he said.
iTrustCapital’s competitors include Nashville-based Alto Solutions, which is also a self-directed IRA platform and raised $40 million in a Series B round in January. “I think it’s a two-horse race right now [between Alto and iTrustCapital],” Alto founder and CEO Eric Satz said, discounting some of the smaller players active in crypto IRAs.
Like iTrustCapital, Alto also launched in 2018 and plans to use its new funding to grow its operations (Satz said it’s aiming to more than double its 50-person product and engineering team by the end of 2022). The firm currently serves more than 15,000 IRA investors and holds $1 billion of assets under custody.
Bitcoin IRA co-founder and COO Chris Kline.
Sherman Oaks-based Bitcoin IRA, meanwhile, recently expanded its crypto offerings to focus on digital tokens with a market capitalization greater than $200 million—including Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL)—and to provide its clients with more options to hedge against market fluctuations, according to co-founder and COO Chris Kline.
“At the end of the day, the crypto industry is growing up,” Kline told dot.LA. “More and more clients are looking for options.” Bitcoin IRA’s strategy is to embrace “legitimate players” offering digital assets with larger market caps, Kline said, in order to avoid potential pitfalls in the market.
As an example, he pointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s December 2020 complaint against Ripple Labs and two of the crypto firm’s executives. The SEC alleged that Ripple raised more than $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering—the securities being Ripple’s XRP crypto token.
“You don’t want to be putting a coin in [an account] that could basically not be able to be sold at some point,” Kline said. “We’ve dealt with that—with things like what happened at Ripple at the end of 2020, and with the SEC basically making us tell our clients, ‘Hey, this asset may not be liquid again in the future. Beware.’ And a lot of them sold it off, some held it and they’re waiting to see what happens.”
As a result, not everyone is jumping on the crypto IRA bandwagon. Noticeably absent from the market are popular brokerages like Robinhood, E-Trade and TD Ameritrade—though Ameritrade has made overtures indicating that it could dip its toe in the crypto IRA market, according to sources interviewed.
“We are always monitoring and evaluating new products developing in the space, but we don’t have any specific plans to share at this time,” a TD Ameritrade spokesperson told dot.LA.
As more investors gravitate toward cryptocurrencies in search of financial gains, it makes sense that the sector continues to diversify its investment offerings. But for some who are responsible for clients’ savings, the notion of a crypto-focused retirement fund is simply too much risk to bear.
Financial planner Anjali Jariwala, who leads Torrance-based FIT Advisors, told dot.LA that she would be concerned with someone’s decision to use a self-directed IRA to invest in crypto.
“I believe in diversification and prefer IRA-type accounts to be invested in the markets,” she said. “If there is extra money that is in cash or sitting in a brokerage account, that may be used towards more speculative investments like Bitcoin—but I wouldn't try to find a way to invest retirement money.”
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TikTok Content Moderators Allege Emotional Distress
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Content moderators reviewing TikTok videos have experienced psychological distress after exposure to graphic content, Business Insider reported Thursday.
Current and former moderators employed by Telus International, a contractor used by Culver City-based video-sharing app for content moderation, told BI that they were often assigned long, consecutive shifts overseeing graphic content—including beheadings, child sexual abuse and self-harm—and that requests to be reassigned to less demanding roles were often denied.
TikTok’s parent company, Chinese tech firm ByteDance, uses artificial intelligence to filter and separate inappropriate content into various categories, with human moderators assigned to review the content within those categories. As TikTok’s platform has grown—it is currently the most downloaded app in the world—employees said they were pressured to keep pace with the increase in content and were often denied discretionary wellness breaks, according to BI.
Additionally, while ByteDance has an emergency response team tasked with handling videos reported to law enforcement, one employee told BI that neither that team nor TikTok’s wellness team provided support to the moderators who reported such content. A Telus International spokesperson told BI that its own wellness team supported moderators, who have the option to skip difficult content. Telus employees, however, told BI that skipping videos resulted in disciplinary citations.
In a lawsuit filed against ByteDance in December, former content moderator Candie Frazier alleged that her work resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder and symptoms of severe psychological distress. Two other content moderators have since filed a lawsuit with similar claims.
The lawsuits are part of the growing legal pressure facing TikTok. In California, a bill that would allow parents to sue social media companies for addicting their children to apps passed the State Assembly and awaits the State Senate. The company is also facing renewed pressure from federal regulators over data privacy issues.
TikTok has also been scrutinized for its corporate workplace culture—with severalemployees claiming they were pressured to work long hours and accommodate the schedule of ByteDance’s China office.
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Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Relativity Space Surpasses $1 Billion in Contracts, Inks New Deal with Satellite Maker OneWeb
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Rocket maker Relativity Space soared past a milestone today, surpassing $1 billion worth of contracts for launches on its 3D-printed Terran R rocket.
Long Beach-based Relativity agreed to a multi-launch agreement with broadband satellite maker OneWeb on June 30. CEO Tim Ellis posted on Twitter that following the deal, Relativity now had over $1.2 billion in binding launch contracts secured by five different customers — even though the startup still has yet to send a rocket to orbit.
Ellis called the deal a “huge vote of confidence and we can’t wait to deliver.”
Relativity aims to send the OneWeb satellites by 2025. The OneWeb launch could be one of the first commercial launches sent into space by the rocket maker’s reusable Terran R craft.
OneWeb was previously using Russian Soyuz rockets to launch, but sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine forced it to look to other alternatives. Ellis told TechCrunch Relativity was already looking to court OneWeb as a customer before the war, though, noting the deal “has been in the works for quite some time.”
OneWeb wants its broadband service to be operational by 2023, and to do that it has to launch at least 648 satellites into orbit. Relativity has two rockets under construction – Terran 1 and Terran R.
The smaller Terran 1 rocket has already secured a $3 million contract to launch small satellites for the Department of Defense. The Terran 1 will make its first flight in a mission nicknamed “Good Luck, Have Fun” (GLHF) which is expected to take off this summer and won’t carry any payloads. Assuming the GLHF mission is a success, Relativity will then launch the DoD mission.
The Terran R is Relativity’s 95%-reusable rocket and its answer to competitor SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with which OneWeb is also launching payloads.
In an interview with ArsTechnica earlier this year, Ellis said the craft could take off as soon as 2024, though it’s still being built at Relativity’s 1 million-square-foot factory headquarters in Long Beach.
Last June Relativity raised a $650 million Series E funding round led by its backer Fidelity Management & Research. At that time, Ellis told dot.LA the Terran R rocket was still under development and added, “Ever since Relativity's early days in Y Combinator, we've planned to manufacture a large reusable rocket.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Goop’s Noora Raj Brown On Having the Hard Conversations That Make Change
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
On this week’s episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, host Yasmin Nouri talks with the executive vice president of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, Noora Raj Brown.
Brown started working at Goop when the company was still in the early, hectic stages, moving from a weekly newsletter Paltrow would send out to her friends to a multinational publishing and lifestyle brand.
At the time, Goop’s advice, guides and features about beauty style and wellness, were tackling difficult issues like divorce, sexuality and health in very personal terms.
“So much of what we do at Goop is to push conversations into the mainstream and to talk about things that, frankly, people don't always want to talk about,” she said. “And these are hard conversations, right?”
Brown, a daughter of immigrants, grew up in Silicon Valley and always considered herself a creative, even though her parents were hopeful she’d take a more conventional professional route. “It was like, very much medicine and tech, and I wasn't interested in either,” she says. Instead, her interest veered toward fashion.
After earning her degree, she moved to New York City to work at a fashion magazine called Details, where she got to learn quickly about how designers function and how garments are produced and promoted — but the job didn’t come easy.
“A lot of it was really like finding your path, feeling really lost for a long time. And I think I also had this idea that I would come to New York and I would start interviewing and get a job,” says Brown. “And that would sort of be it. And I didn't realize how insanely competitive it was.”
Brown moved on to work in talent PR where she organized photo shoots, coordinated the angles of stories and then at a fashion and style publication called InStyle during a time when it was in the process of being sold to a new owner.
“There was a feeling of like, you couldn't win,” Brown says. “You're operating from a place of fear; you're not able to be your best self, right?, and you're not able to produce your best work.”
In 2016, when Brown made her way to Goop, there was no in-house communications or legal team, no HR, piles of debt and, from Brown, terror. “I sort of felt like, I was the first line of defense for anything negative that happened to the business,” she says.
The experience left her feeling unqualified, but she said Paltrow’s confidence in her made Brown more confident in her own abilities.
“I think we all just need to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt a little bit,” she says.
Brown’s personal journey, in many ways, mirrored Goop’s mission to push unconventional conversations into the mainstream. Brown says Goop has faced some backlash for its stories, but she says she feels strongly that important topics shouldn't be taboo, and adds that it takes honesty and courage to make change.
“If you're really going to, as we say, [...] milk the shit out of life, you need to do that,” she says. “As I said, operating from a place of real pride, but also real bravery is super important.”
Engagement and Production Intern Jojo Macaluso contributed to this post.
Hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast. Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.
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Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.