Scaling Digital Asset Adoption in America
Presented at DC Blockchain Summit 2026 in Washington D.C.
🎙 Featured Panelists: Ben Weiss (Co-founder and CEO, Coinflip) Congressman William Timmons (R-SC) Ali Tager (Vice President of Communications, National Cryptocurrency Association)
Moderated by: Wasim Ahmad: Wasim Ahmad, Vault12
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDigitalChamber/videos
*** Special Offer for Podcast listeners ***
Promo codes for Vault12 Guard
The iOS codes are good for 1 year subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. iOS codes can be redeemed in the Apple App Store.
The Android codes are good for 90 days subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. Android codes are redeemed when selecting and paying for the Inheritance plan in the app.
Instructions for how to redeem here.
Code: CMNYC26
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1451596986&code=CMNYC26
Android: Enter code CMNYC26 when you select the Inheritance plan
Transcript
Wasim Ahmad:
Hello everyone. My name's Wasim Ahmad. I'm co-founder of Vault12. We're the pioneers in crypto inheritance, something that everyone will need once there is a wave of consumer crypto sweeping the country. We are going to whisk through introductions because the Congressman Timmons from South Carolina has a vote. So let me introduce the rest of the panelists. Ben Bois, co-founder and CEO of Coinflip. They have a network of 6,000 crypto ATMs in 10 different countries and Ali Tega from the National Cryptocurrency Association. So the first question, and it would be great to hear from you first, Congressman. We're potentially months away from having a comprehensive digital asset regulatory framework in the US for the first time. And it would be great if you could paint a picture of what does the American consumer's relationship with crypto look like 18 months from once that act passes.
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Sure. First, thank you for having me. Good afternoon. I mean, number one is that we have to pass this. And I think the reason it's being difficult, I thought it would've been done by now, is the degree of disruption. I think a lot of the people that are trying to protect market share, whether it's the big banks, title insurance, you name it, just the people that are ... It's like Kodak before the iPhone. They're looking at everything. They're like, "This is going to be very disruptive." And they're trying to legislatively protect their market share. So it's going to take a little pushing, but President Trump is very committed, very committed. And the industry has done a very good job of creating the incentives to pass clarity and obviously we've already passed Stablecoin. So I mean, it's going to happen. The disruption is going to occur.
The question is how quickly and with whom first. Obviously, I think the big banks are going to deploy their new technologies, whatever they are. I'm excited to see them because instead of having to start from the bottom and grow, they're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create whatever new technologies, whatever new offerings they're going to have. So I think that's going to come out quickly. After that, there's going to be probably a little bit of a lull as everyone becomes more used to these new technologies. And then I think it's going to start pushing out the little guys and it's going to be difficult to adapt. So I mean, I think Kodak is the best example and they're gone for a reason. I don't want a polar word camera. I got a cell phone. So I think that you're going to see a lot of middlemen and different processes that are going to be gone and I think it's going to be a good thing because efficiencies is the future.
Wasim Ahmad:
Go ahead.
Ali Tager :
Yeah. I love the Kodak example. I completely agree. I think the genie's out of the bottle. The technology is already here and mainstream adoption is no longer a question of if but when. And I think it's kind of twofold. From a consumer standpoint, I expect that we're going to see more people sending money abroad or paying their friends back for brunch in crypto. It's just going to give you another option, another choice. We're going to see more people shopping with it at the register in stores and online, powering their businesses and passions and tokenizing real world assets. I think it's going to be really meaningful and impactful ways that people are going to use this technology, but also really boring ways behind the scenes that we're maybe already engaging with these tools and we don't even realize it. But besides the consumer standpoint, I think the other piece that I expect to see, I hope to see, is more of a rise in accurate public discourse around this industry.
I mean, let's be honest, there's not a day that goes by that there's not a hit piece in the New York Times about crypto painting us all as criminals and it's all about illicit finance. But the reality is there are 55 million in counting Americans already using this technology and 76% of them say that the tool's making a really positive impact on their lives. And that's the story that I'm excited to see.
Ben Weiss:
I agree with both of you and I think we need to pass the market structure bill as soon as possible. I'll say once the Genius Bill was passed, and I don't know if it's necessarily related or not, but we saw our Stablecoin purchases go up at the kiosk, not just in the US but in other countries. And I think that's one of the interesting thing with Stablecoins is that it actually in a way dollarizes the world. And even from a business perspective operating in 10 countries, we use stablecoins to move money between our countries, not international wires. And then I also like your point too about there might be crypto and blockchain use behind the scenes that you don't even notice. So for instance, when you swipe a credit card, there's all sorts of things on the backend that happen like interchange fees and the average American when they swipe a credit card has no idea what an interchange fee is.
And I think when you talk about the settlement layer and infrastructure and finance behind the scenes, that could be the case as well, that crypto and blockchain could be used and the average consumer in certain cases might not even know, but their transaction's more efficient and quicker because of it.
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Let me throw one more piece in there. So China, Russia, India to a large extent, control capital flow. You can't take your money out of the countries. And if you think about it, every time I walk through the airport, it's like you have to declare more than $10,000. I just kind of chuckle. It's kind of funny. I mean, digital wallets, non-custodial wallets self-custodial wallets are going to challenge authoritarian governments because they're not going to be able to control their citizens wealth. And I think that that's going to be something that we're going to be dealing with for at least the next few decades.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Congressman, you are one of the few legislators who actually set up a self-custodial wallet and you've said publicly that when you did that, your own bank blocked you from moving funds on and off chain. So if a sitting member of Congress can't get banks to cooperate with crypto, what hope do consumers have?
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Well, I think they appropriately are waiting for market structure to pass. I think that there's, well, previous to this administration, the last administration, there was absolute legal concerns. So I think that once we pass clarity, it'll be easier, but I'm also very concerned. I mean, my mother is the best fraud target in the history of the world and she needs some guardrails and so it needs to be at least some sort of buyer beware situation. And so we got to work all that out, but I'm confident that that'll get sorted out quickly.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Ben, you've noted that in 2025 a crypto company bought a TradFi company and a TradFi company bought a crypto company. You called it lines of blurring. When traditional financial institutions start offering crypto directly, does that threaten the coin flip kiosk ATM model or does it actually expand the market for everyone?
Ben Weiss:
I think it expands the market and anything that increases the use of crypto is just another opportunity for us to capture different markets of those segments or different segments of those markets, whether with their digital products, whether having ATMs in other countries where there's less banking. But I think that's a great point in the sense of like finance is finance. And if you look at the strategies of both, let's say Robinhood, which started in TradFi, very consumer focused, but TradFi and then they went into crypto and then sort of Coinbase, even though they're sort of crypto native first, they've got into sort of the traditional capital stack as well with prediction markets, derivatives. So I think you're seeing whether it's a TradFi company or a crypto company, I think a lot of companies are trying to be sort of the one stop shop for crypto and then stable coins or sorry, the one stop shop for finance in general, which that includes crypto.
And then Visa, they said that every bank needs to have a stablecoin strategy. So stablecoins are also one of the bridges between traditional finance and crypto.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Ali, you mentioned some statistics. 55 million Americans are already using crypto and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the demographics, but also using crypto and trusting crypto are two completely different things. So what does your data tell you about that gap, the trust gap and is regulation alone enough to close it or does the industry need to invest more in something like education?
Ali Tager :
Absolutely. Well, I'll start at the end and say that regulation is a piece of it, but absolutely so is education. So before we talk about crypto holders, let's talk about non-holders. We surveyed non-holders. We asked them, "Why aren't you using crypto? What's stopping you? " We heard a little bit about regulation. We heard a little bit about, "I think I've missed the boat." Definitely a little bit of, "I don't trust it. I don't get who's backing it. I don't know who controls it, " which again, I think validates the need for education because it is decentralized and we all know how blockchain works, at least everyone in this room. But by and large, the number one barrier to entry is the knowledge gap. They do not get it. They don't know what crypto is, how to set up a digital wallet, how to buy, sell, trade, hold.
And so we've actually just launched a bunch of hands-on learning resources on our website to teach people the basics without the hype or without the jargon, really simple, accessible, snackable explainers and a risk-free simulator so you can actually practice it. So for all the crypto skeptics in your lives, send them to our site. But for crypto holders, it's not the bros that we've all been told it is. A third of crypto holders are women, more are over 55 than under 25, more work in construction than in finance and they span races, regions, religions, and political party lines. It's actually pretty evenly split. And so I think that when it comes to crypto holders, we found that they trust the technology on average equal to or greater than their trust in traditional banking institutions. And when it comes to crypto holders of color, that doubles. They trust crypto more than twice as much as they trust traditional banking.
So it really does level the playing field.That's
Wasim Ahmad:
Really fascinating. Where can people get access to these statistics?
Ali Tager :
I swear I didn't even pay him to ask me that. NCA.org on our website. We've got lots of great research reports as well as stories from real people all across the country who are, like I said earlier, using this technology in really powerful ways, like gaining financial sovereignty and freedom from an abusive relationship to really maybe boring ways like tracking livestock on the blockchain so you can find out how big your cows are going to be.
Wasim Ahmad:
Great. Okay. Congressman, another question about banks. So once the market structure bill passes and assets have a clear path to register either as commodities or securities, I'm hoping we'll have an announcement on that this afternoon. What's your expectation about how quickly traditional banks are going to actually move to offer crypto products? Is it months or years or what do you
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Think? I think it'll be very quick for the big banks. I think that they have been anticipating this for a long time and they've invested enormous amounts of money and they're keeping their cards close because they want to wow everybody with whatever new toys they have. Now I think once you get smaller, it's just hard for them to compete. They can't invest the resources necessary to even understand why this is important. I talk to a lot of smaller banks and credit unions and I ask them, "Is this top of mind for them?" And they do not say yes. And I'm just like, "You need to go read the Kodak case study." It's as simple as that. So I think that it's going to take time for it to be truly disruptive because I think that in rural banks and in smaller credit unions and whatnot, their customers are probably going to be a little slower to adopt, but it's going to be a generational thing eventually because the cost savings, the efficiencies, it's going to change the world.
And so they're not going to be able to avoid the hit for long, but I promise you the big banks are going to adapt and they're going to compete and I think everybody's going to be better off because of it.
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, I want them to do that very, very quickly, but I'm a little skeptical because I've been asking a lot of, every time I live in New York, so I bump into bankers all the time and I'm not hearing that the banks have had huge hiring sprees of getting people from the crypto industry to come in. We already talked about education for consumers, but who is going to educate the people that are on the other end of the phone line or the chat prompt? So I'm a little more skeptical, but yes, there is definite sort of green shoots in that area. I think recently Wells Fargo made some announcements. JP Morgan, even though all the banks are creating a ruckus right now with the Clarity Act, there is movement for sure, but I just wonder if they have recruited early enough and in the biggest possible way.
I don't know if you have a view on that, Ben.
Ben Weiss:
I agree with you on this type of bank. We see a lot of community banks, someone who went through the whole debanking and operation choke point, thankfully the US has community banks. Some countries just have four banks and we've seen them sort of be more scared or just not even thinking of crypto. I think sometimes with the bigger banks you hear blockchain, not Bitcoin and there's still a skepticism, but I think again, it's sort of a case by case basis and the great CEOs and the great companies are always looking, how do we in a way cannibalize our existing product because the future moves on. Like Kodak, if they were going to succeed, would have had to cannibalize their polarized cameras. So I think the smartest banks sort of see where this is going, not that they don't care about traditional deposits and mortgages and all that, but they're trying to at least incorporate the technology and spend money on R&D.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Ben, your company has a network of more than 6,000 ATMs, crypto ATMs in 10 different countries. So the idea of going to an ATM putting in a card or a fingerprint or something and then withdrawing some type of currency, is that taking kind of consumers in the direction of crypto transactions to buy pizza or buy coffee, or is that taking them down the path of this is a great store of value? Can you talk a little bit about that concept?
Ben Weiss:
It depends. I would say in the US primarily a store of value like Bitcoin is the hardest, most inflation proof asset there is. But for instance, we operate in South Africa and the brand depreciates a lot and we see a bunch of people buying stablecoins and using that as a store of value. Sort of maybe they have extra savings that they keep in Bitcoin, but sort of their checking account in a way is in stablecoins. And even in terms of like one of the things that I think gets crypto more adoption is just easier to use, easier interface. Like for instance, in South Africa, we have the ATMs and the malls and like in the US you call customer support. In South Africa, we actually not only have a phone line, but we have someone standing in a coin flip t-shirt in front of the ATM to teach people how to use it.
And obviously we can do that in countries like South Africa because of the cost structure, but I think it's both, it can be a store of value, but I think in countries with destabilized currencies where there's not a lot of payment mechanisms, they might not trust the banks, you see it as a day-to-day exchange of value.
Wasim Ahmad:
Okay. Congressman, before you step off the panel to go vote, can you tell us what you think one thing policy, product, cultural shift that would do more to scale adoption than anything else that we've kind of talked about today?
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
I mean, I think education's everything and people don't understand the different use cases and how the efficiencies will be created. It's hard to even fully grasp some of the changes that are going to occur. I mean, my family has a privately held company and we spend tens of millions of dollars on corporate compliance and on maintaining stock records and all of that. I mean, that's going to be on the blockchain in five, 10, 15 years and just all of the different businesses that are going to be gone because technology can automate it and do it way better, way faster. So I just think education's going to be everything. And I think once we pass market structure, once all of the investment that has been sitting on the sidelines is unleashed, I think you're going to see education and people understanding all the different use cases and how it's going to change their lives.
I mean, I think it's fantastic and I hope that we can get this right and get it done quickly because I mean, this should have been done months ago and again, the reason this is not done yet is because the people that are anticipating market disruption are trying to legislatively control market share and that's bad. And so we've got to make sure that we push past that and we get the legislative framework right and off to the races.
Wasim Ahmad:
Thank you very much, Congressman. Okay. We're going to carry on. We have a little more time to discuss some things. So Ali, obviously we're at this pivotal moment for regulatory clarity, but I want to sort of delve into this idea that as far as the average American consumer is concerned, we've had this narrative coming from the media, from politicians, not all politicians, but some politicians, that crypto is for billionaires, that crypto is for scams and terrorists, whole narrative about, "Oh, it's volatile, you can't trust it. " So how are we going to convince the average crypto consumer that it's safe and accessible?
Ali Tager :
Yeah, absolutely. I think for starters, the NCA is a nonprofit that's here to help everyday people understand what crypto is and how to use it safely and responsibly. So I like to think our role is less about convincing and more about educating, but we're doing that by busting the myths and misconceptions and hype and jargon with data and facts and stats and real stories of real people. So much of the narrative around crypto, as we all know, is about the hype, the possibility, the potential, the future. We're talking about the present. We're talking about real people in your neighborhoods, lots of people in this room, I'm sure, our friends, our families who are using this as a way to have more accessibility, have twenty four seven access, have more ownership and control over their assets. But at the same time, we can't pretend that scams and volatility aren't a problem.
However, they are a problem in every corner of the internet and every industry. And so I think that how we can show up and help people is by teaching them how to spot scams with warning signs of fraud, what to do if and when you think you or your loved one might be dealing with a scammer or a fraudster. Because again, what we're seeing with crypto is the same as what we see with traditional banking. It's the same as we see even on online dating, cat phishing, impersonation scams, especially with the rise of AI. But what we're seeing right now with crypto is the same journey that we've seen play out time and time again with any new tool or technology and innovation AI, cell phones, right? Going back to even electricity and cars and railroads, when something comes along that's going to break barriers and disrupt traditional systems, some people are incentivized to want to stop that.
And so there's a lot of fear mongering that's happening and what we're really trying to do is show that this is a tool that's helping normal people like us in a lot of normal ways. I think to pile on to what you were saying earlier, investing, of course, the long-term store of value is a huge use case for digital assets, but I've been really surprised by some of the data that we've seen, including reports we just did with PayPal around the holidays where about a fifth of US shoppers were gifting crypto. About a quarter said they would prefer crypto over a gift card in their Christmas stocking or wherever you get your gifts. And so I think people are starting to see this as a way to spend and to donate to nonprofits like Movember and also too, like we talked about beyond crypto blockchain.
You can tokenize pretty much anything these days and use it for reducing fraud and making sure that you have trackable, traceable, immutable ledgers. And I think that's really where I see the possibility and the potential of the technology.
Wasim Ahmad:
So we have really kind of focused on the sunshine above the cloud side of the moment that we're in. And Ben, I wonder if you could comment on ... Your company's been around for 10 years, so you've seen your fair share of go slow market momentum and then lack of market momentum.What happens in November if the sides change and there's no Clarity Act enacted?
Ben Weiss:
Well, I'm hoping, I think someone said it on the last panel that we've gotten sort of crossed the Rubricon or move the Overton window where the Operation Choke Point or the law fare against crypto would hopefully not come back. But I think dealing with a patchwork of state laws, dealing with sort of that regulatory uncertainty does slow down the market and wouldn't be good. That being said, there are a lot of Democrats I think who are, they got a lot of votes on the Genius Bill. So hopefully even in the next ... We want to get this passed now, but even in the next Congress, hopefully there's sort of enough momentum to get something done. And you were talking about PayPal. I was watching a clip on X at like two in the morning where Peter Thiel was like, because they had a huge fraud issue when they first started and I was watching the clip and he's like, "We have to get the network large enough before the politics catches up to it.
" So I think we have to get the, and hopefully we're there, but we have to get crypto in enough people's hands. We have to get enough consumers, politicians, regulators educated on it and just realizing it's a neutral to beneficial technology just because bad people misuse it just like in normal finance doesn't discredit the technology.
Ali Tager :
Yeah. To build on that, some of the conversation we were having backstage was about people just outright dismissing crypto of, "It's not for me. " And again, where does that come from? The conversation I like to have with the skeptics that I meet in the wild is, "Oh, I don't get it. I don't know what's in it. I don't know who's backing it and it's not for me. " And I'm like, "Okay, can I be nosy for a second? Do you have a 401k?" And of course the answer is always yes. And then my follow-up question is, what's in it? Nobody ever knows and we trust it because we grew up with it and it's a familiar tool. And so I think that with businesses like PayPal getting on board with traditional banks and other institutions getting on board, it will start to feel familiar and normal and just inherently safer.
But at the same time, it's our responsibility at the NCA to help people understand how to navigate this safely and responsibly. And it's
Ben Weiss:
About meeting the customer where they're at. I think that's the key to adoption. Some people are not going to buy crypto unless it's through an ETF or their 401k. Some people are going to keep it on a treasure or a paper wallet. Some people might buy it at ATM. Some people are going to buy it at PayPal or Robinhood. So I think it's about meeting the customer where they are and then all those other sort of ancillary financial services like inheritance. It's amazing to have $10 million of crypto on a treasure. It's not so amazing if you're sick and you have kids and you haven't thought about like the estate planning or how to transfer to them. So I think whether it's donations, tax and estate, all those sort of things you see in traditional finance, we have to bring those over to crypto as well.
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, thank you for ending on that. I appreciate it. Go talk to a lawyer. That's all we have time for. Thank you so much.
DC Blockchain Summit
From Google's War on Crypto to the Clarity Act: The Future of Inheritance in Web3
For episode 733 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Wasim Ahmad, CEO of Vault12. Vault12 is a non-custodial crypto security and digital inheritance platform. It enables cryptocurrency owners to protect and back up their wallet seed phrases, private keys, and digital assets (like NFTs) by distributing encrypted data shards across a decentralized network of trusted friends, family, and devices. #blockhashpodcast #vault12 #podcast. Brandon Zemp is the host and owner of the BlockHash Podcast. He's a Forbes Author, Amazon Bestseller, Investor, Entrepreneur and Blockchain educator.
⏳ Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(3:11) Who is Wasim Ahmad?
(4:31) What is Vault12?
(6:05) Use-cases around crypto inheritance
(7:58) Next step for funds security in crypto
(10:40) Existing partnerships (12:32) Sumsub
(13:16) Public Investing (14:01) Thoughts on the Clarity Act
(19:25) Vault12 at Bitcoin2026
(22:03) Vault12 roadmap
🎙 Vault12 Links: 🔗 Website: https://vault12.com/ 🔗 X: https://x.com/vault12 🔗 LinkedIn: 
/ vault12 📢
Disclaimer: None of our content constitutes, nor is intended to act as financial advice. It’s important to always do your own research and due diligence before making any investment decision. Digital Assets and Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and carry a considerable amount of risk. 📣 This episode is brought to you by Public Investing Paid ad. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. This information is for educational purposes only and is not tax or investment advice. Consult your tax advisor for individual considerations. Crypto IRAs are self-directed individual retirement accounts offered and custodied by Alto Trust Co, a New Mexico trust company. Information about retirement accounts on Public is for educational purposes only and is not tax or investment advice. Visit the IRS website at https://www.irs.gov/ for more information on the limitations and tax benefits of IRAs. Crypto is highly speculative and involves significant risk, including loss of principal. Cryptocurrencies are not protected by FDIC or SIPC. See our Crypto Risk Disclosures at https://public.com/custodian-account-... for additional information. See terms of Match Program. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.
Transcript
Brandon Zemp:
Appreciate you taking the time today. How's it going? How's Bitcoin 2026 been treating you?
Wasim Ahmad:
Great, great. A lot of energy. A lot of good speakers yesterday.
Brandon Zemp:
Any in particular that you saw that were fun?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, I mean Paul Atkins, that was pretty good. I think Kash Patel, I was expecting an announcement of some kind, something material, but they didn't release Roman Storm. They didn't release the Samourai Wallet guy. I don't know what else he was saying.
Brandon Zemp:
Was it mostly just regulatory talk a little bit and the landscape?
Wasim Ahmad:
I think it was about the future of the market, which is going to shift from what it is today with the original... the OGs from Bitcoin to all of the stuff that's happened with institutional investment strategy, all of those kinds of things. And now we're on the cusp of taking the very first step into a world where there's going to be a hundred million more retail crypto investors. And the only cryptocurrency that they know about is Bitcoin because there's a thousand others that they're not going to have been exposed to. Bitcoin is the brand of cryptocurrency and that's the one that they're going to jump on. We need that Clarity Act signed. We're in the business of crypto inheritance. We're the pioneers.
Brandon Zemp:
You're Vault12?
Wasim Ahmad:
Vault12. We started the company 10 years ago. My CEO was part of the blockchain team at Andreessen Horowitz, helped Coinbase get their funding and realized that if this exchange was successful, many, many people would buy cryptocurrency. Actually, Bitcoin was the only thing available at the time. And they would have to deal with all of the security backup issues and, what happens to your Bitcoin if you pass away or you're incapacitated or you're in jail? There needs to be all of those things that happened. We launched our app in 2019 right before the pandemic and then had to find a serious but a nice way to talk about how important it is to make sure you have backup, successful backups, successful plan for how your Bitcoin is going to get passed down.
Brandon Zemp:
So is that what Vault12 is all about? It's like a succession plan?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah, we are an app that gives you a digital vault. You put your information in there. Your information could be a video describing what the seed phrases are, or it could be the seed phrases or the private key. Anything in any digital form, that information is then encrypted, split into pieces and distributed to what we call Guardians. Guardians could be three of your friends, three of your family members, three of your professional contacts. And then you also, not only do you get to choose how many pieces, you get to say, "Well, when I need access to it, how many need to give me the okays?"
Brandon Zemp:
So it's multifactor?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So there's multiple parties that are involved. It's not multi-sig and it's not MPC. It's using Shamir's secret sharing, but we have smoothed it out and everything gets calculated and handled just through the app and you're not having to literally move a shard from one place to another.
Brandon Zemp:
Gotcha.
Wasim Ahmad:
So it's designed in a way that the people that are guarding your vaults are regular ordinary people, maybe not super, super technical.
Brandon Zemp:
That's interesting.
Wasim Ahmad:
And then one of them is going to be your beneficiary. And so when the time comes, they can ask for access to the vault.
Brandon Zemp:
Yeah. It's been a problem in this space for a long time and something that I think a lot of people have been concerned about. Even myself, what if something happens to me? My crypto is just oof in the ether. There's no succession behind that or guarantor. So this actually makes a lot of sense. Have you seen a lot of use cases with maybe parents or grandparents maybe wanting to take... My grandma owns Bitcoin. My parents own a little bit of crypto as well. I imagine this is something that they would be very interested in maybe even for like a trust or maybe even a business, I could see some applications. Have you seen any in particular that are used [inaudible 00:04:18]
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, the obvious one is obviously parents of Bitcoiners who also bought Bitcoin. So that's one. But I think the more interesting one is actually regular crypto investors because unfortunately many of them have passed away and there's some famous examples like Matthew Mellon, who is the heir to the Mellon Bank fortune and he had $2 million worth of cryptocurrency and very securely stashed away in multiple places, very good security, so good that it wasn't documented anywhere, obviously, and no one in his family knew how to access any of it. And it's all just locked, it's just out there somewhere. They didn't get any of it.
And then the third use case is something that it's a little more emotional and it's about the fact that some of us are at a point in our lives where our parents are declining and so we are helping them both with making sure their finances are in order, their wills are in order, maybe there's some health things that we're sorting out for them. And while we're doing that, it dawns on you, "Well, I better make sure that my staff is sorted too." And so because that's happening in their lives, they then deal with their own ahead of maybe when they normally would've talked about it. And that is actually one of the biggest use cases.
Brandon Zemp:
Yeah. I could see this being a next big step for security in this space too and being able to provide an alternative method in case something does happen. If I go into a coma tomorrow and I need my brother or my mom to be able to access funds to pay for my medical bills or something God forbid happens, it's good for us to have options like that and to have some kind of backend where that can occur in certain situations.
Wasim Ahmad:
But the trouble is there's a lot of bad options. So a lot of people will say, "Well, I gave a list of my wallets to my lawyer." "But did you write it down or did you put it on a US... How did you give it to your law firm?" And the security of that information is also important because anyone can rifle through a paper file and then drain your wallets. I mean, it's not going to be the lawyer, but it could be someone else. A lot of vendors out there in the wallet space will have solutions for backing things up. I mean, for the last... Over a decade, nine out of 10 wallets said, "Write it down," which is a ridiculous thing. All the people that wrote it down and then had their homes burned down in LA, they didn't recover their crypto wallets.
Brandon Zemp:
Or they write the wrong word. I've done that.
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So a lot of wallets will say, "We'll back it up to the cloud." And that's a very convenient way to do it. I think in this day and age, I think we're all very comfortable with cloud security, but what we're not in control of is the relationship between that vendor and that cloud provider. And we all saw what happened with Gemini where they had a yield bearing account and they did that through two counterparties, Genesis... They had an issue with FTX and suddenly all our assets are frozen for 18 months with no hope of seeing them.
Luckily the Winklevosses fought and got all of that money back 100%, but it could happen to some other smaller vendor and you have no recourse. So putting stuff in the cloud is not a good option. And then a lot of people, well, in the past at Bitcoin conferences, they would have that ledger device around their neck and I mean, you can lose those. I'm not sure what your nephew's going to do with your ledger wallet if that's the only thing that's left.
So there's a lot of bad options or subpar options where you have to think through what are you going to do? And I think that having a good backup is the way to do it and then having a path forward for who gets access to that when something happens.
Brandon Zemp:
I agree. I imagine great partnerships for you probably are with existing wallets that are out there too because they have that exact kind of target market and client base that would cater for you guys very well. Have you worked on any partnerships with some software wallets?
Wasim Ahmad:
So we support any wallet that exports information that allows you to access the wallet. We support that, any blockchain. But the reality is the wallets are doing whatever wallets do, which is basically getting you to put information into the wallet and then getting you to buy cryptocurrency from the wallet. That is their business. They're not interested in some side thing, even though crypto inheritance is a dollar a day kind of revenue stream for them. So we think that the market for this particular service is once the Clarity Act passes and there's a hundred million new retail crypto investors, which will morph the number of cryptocurrency investors that exist today.
In the next few years, that is who is going to drive the market. The only thing they know about is Bitcoin right now and these are people who 17 years ago didn't know what any of this was, didn't buy anything, didn't buy anything five years ago, didn't buy anything 10 years ago and now they're going to buy it because they can buy it from Chase even though it's Coinbase behind the scenes that's probably providing the infrastructure or they're going to buy it from Citibank. They're all going to buy it from a wallet, some random wallet. They're actually going to buy it from the brands that they know and trust. And so that's where our efforts to set is partnering with TradFi institutions. Yeah. I think that's the bigger market.
Brandon Zemp:
What are your thoughts on the Clarity Act then in terms of maybe how that's going to change things when it eventually gets passed? I mean, I think the consensus is that it will draw a lot more of retail into the market that it hasn't already participated in crypto and a lot of it through these institutions and have been on the sideline waiting for a final degree of clarity to start pushing products up and ways for them to access this market. When you look at the Clarity Act, what are some initial thoughts that you have about maybe how that's going to impact maybe the market and the way retail gets involved going further, then how does that impact you guys with Vault12?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So we've been very, very involved in the last six years with the SEC directly and with all of the different bills that have made their way, didn't quite make it. Last year we wrote to the Crypto Task Force, laid out how Vault12 has a token that's used in the system to reward guardians and laid all of that out to say whatever regulations or guidelines you're thinking about, it needs to factor in these kinds of scenarios. Today, the only thing that people think about when they think of crypto apps is exchanges and wallets, we're neither. So we're something else and there's going to be a lot of other apps that are not exchanges or wallets that people need. And so that's what the Clarity Act is ushering in, that kind of innovation.
And I think what is really going to happen is we as part of the crypto industry, like all of the vendors that are here, we need clarity to continue with the vision that we laid out when we published our white papers 10 years ago. We need that clarity to finish delivering on all of that. But there are a whole bunch of unintended things that are happening. So not only is the government unclear about what you can and can't do for the agencies, there's all these other people that are part of the world we live in, like Google and Apple that control things like ad networks and app stores where someone might deliver an app for the cryptocurrency industry and they have their own rules. They've made up rules to say, "You can do this, but you can't do this."
Google won't let a crypto app advertise unless you're an exchange and have a money transmitter license, which makes sense or your hardware wallet. If you're neither of those, you cannot advertise and there's no rhyme nor reason as to why, other than caution and risk, but it's unintended things like that that are going to need to change. They have basically waged a war on crypto up till now and that's going to come to an end. So it's a different point of view, I know, but that combined with this influx of retail crypto investors and the pull in from the TradFi institutions. And I think there's still going to be plenty of room for brand new financial institutions, Robinhood is an example. Obviously Coinbase is going to have one of every type of financial product for retail. All of that is going to carry on going and then the TradFi is going to be catching up from behind.
Brandon Zemp:
Do you think given the fact that we're in a bear market right now after the, I guess cycle that we've had over the last year or two coming up, that this, if Clarity gets passed this year, and it probably will get passed, that that could be a nice resurgence for the market to I think get optimism going again and flowing and maybe turn things around? So I could see that as a real turning point to pull us out of this bear market cycle that we're in right now. Do you see it as also that opportunity for the market?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, I think from a day-to-day perspective, yes, it'll be a moment of triumph. But I think in general when we talk about the market 10Xing, that will come as this material new delivery of new ways for people to tap into the Bitcoin economy, to the crypto economy and that will come as more participants enter the market. So I think that needs 12 months, maybe probably more like 24 months.
Brandon Zemp:
Or the more extended timeline, yeah.
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, the banks probably have to hire crypto experts and I don't think they're hiring right now. I'm not sure if they think they're going to do it with AI, but-
Brandon Zemp:
We know they're experimenting. I guess the biggest question is-
Wasim Ahmad:
They've been experimenting for a long time.
Brandon Zemp:
Yeah.
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah.
Brandon Zemp:
I guess this question is like, are they on the sidelines waiting for Clarity to get passed so that they can be first movers?
Wasim Ahmad:
There's a whole bunch of things that they literally cannot do. I cannot talk to a bank right now, just in the corridors where there's no cameras, but I can't have a conversation with them about anything in the future and I think we need that to happen with Clarity and then all of the rules and... the rules that the agencies will then roll out, that needs to be rolled out.
Brandon Zemp:
I agree. So what brings you the Bitcoin 2026? What are you guys looking to do while you're here?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, I was hoping that this would be the place where they announced the Clarity Act is going to the president's table so that isn't going to happen, but not because there's anything bad going on but just scheduling-wise. So that was the main reason and I think I just wanted to tap in. There was so much energy and vibrancy last year, I thought, "Well, yeah, let's go check it out."
Brandon Zemp:
You're just feeling out the culture and seeing what's on the horizon, listening to the speakers. Are you also looking for potential partners, other companies to work with?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, I've been really looking at who is here now that's different to years in the past. And I've been working with a film director on a movie called The Bitcoin Executor. They've been showing the trailer in between speakers on the main stage and this is a great movie. It's not out yet, but you can check out the trailer.
Brandon Zemp:
Fictional movie or a documentary?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yes, it's a fictional movie. It's made by the people that made The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, which was made 11 years ago and has... all the people that are doing the keynotes are in that documentary. This is a fictional movie, but Bitcoiners will love it because it shows different aspects of Bitcoin culture and there's just in the way that they shot it, they have beautiful Easter eggs, if you call it, just hidden away in the backdrops of the movie and all of the characters people will recognize, "Yeah, I know a guy just like that. I know someone who that's what they do." And so it's just like a fun project. It's about... the underlying story is based around inheritance, but it's a story about a person who doesn't really believe in Bitcoin and then goes on this journey because his friend disappears to go and find the beneficiaries of his wallet and discovers a new way of thinking about life through Bitcoin.
Brandon Zemp:
That's exciting. We don't get a lot of media that's solely about Bitcoin or crypto. We get little tidbits here and there in existing TV shows or a movie, but like-
Wasim Ahmad:
And they're generally negative, right?
Brandon Zemp:
Sometimes, yeah.
Wasim Ahmad:
They're criminals or someone's being kidnapped or there's money laundering-
Wasim Ahmad:
But this is something different. This is very positive, very contemplative. So check it out.
Brandon Zemp:
And then what's on the horizon for you guys here in 2026 with Vault12? Anything exciting coming up? Any announcements? What should we keep an out for?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, probably the biggest thing that we're going to do this year is with the regulations that were announced in March in DC, which was, "This is what tokens are. These are the different types of tokens. This is how a token goes from one scenario to another scenario," that is all regulation. So that means that we can now finally list our token, which is needed to reward guardians. So we built everything so there was a reward mechanism in the system and we have had the token, but the previous SEC was like, "No, we think everything's a security. You can't be sending that around to people you don't know. That's not allowed." So we had to pull that functionality out, which is really not that great and now we're putting it back in and we are pursuing token listing. And I think hand in hand with the Clarity Act, it's really the new time to roll this out exactly as we laid out in our white paper in 2018.
Brandon Zemp:
Exciting. Well, yeah, timing I think is right. It's a good place to start having those conversations in a good period of time, I think this year. So I wish you guys the best of luck and continue to let me know when you guys have new updates. We'd love to do a part two and maybe have an extended conversation. And it's always difficult at these events. There's so much going on and so many adjacent interviews and flashing lights and whatnot.
Wasim Ahmad:
This was a unique interview.
Brandon Zemp:
Yes. Yes.
Wasim Ahmad:
We covered a lot of things.
Brandon Zemp:
We did. I appreciate the time. It's been great. Keep in touch. We'll do it again soon.
Wasim Ahmad:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
*** Special Offer for Podcast listeners Promo codes for Vault12 Guard
The iOS codes are good for 1 year subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. iOS codes can be redeemed in the Apple App Store.
The Android codes are good for 90 days subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. Android codes are redeemed when selecting and paying for the Inheritance plan in the app.
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Vault12 is NOT a financial institution, cryptocurrency exchange, or custodian. We do NOT hold, transfer, manage, or have access to any user funds, tokens, cryptocurrencies, or digital assets. Vault12 is exclusively a non-custodial information security and backup tool that helps users securely store their own wallet seed phrases and private keys for the purpose of inheritance. We provide no legal or financial services, asset management, transaction capabilities, or investment advice. Users maintain complete control of their assets at all times.
Scaling Digital Asset Adoption in America
Presented at DC Blockchain Summit 2026 in Washington D.C.
🎙 Featured Panelists: Ben Weiss (Co-founder and CEO, Coinflip) Congressman William Timmons (R-SC) Ali Tager (Vice President of Communications, National Cryptocurrency Association)
Moderated by: Wasim Ahmad: Wasim Ahmad, Vault12
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDigitalChamber/videos
*** Special Offer for Podcast listeners ***
Promo codes for Vault12 Guard
The iOS codes are good for 1 year subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. iOS codes can be redeemed in the Apple App Store.
The Android codes are good for 90 days subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. Android codes are redeemed when selecting and paying for the Inheritance plan in the app.
Instructions for how to redeem here.
Code: CMNYC26
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1451596986&code=CMNYC26
Android: Enter code CMNYC26 when you select the Inheritance plan
Transcript
Wasim Ahmad:
Hello everyone. My name's Wasim Ahmad. I'm co-founder of Vault12. We're the pioneers in crypto inheritance, something that everyone will need once there is a wave of consumer crypto sweeping the country. We are going to whisk through introductions because the Congressman Timmons from South Carolina has a vote. So let me introduce the rest of the panelists. Ben Bois, co-founder and CEO of Coinflip. They have a network of 6,000 crypto ATMs in 10 different countries and Ali Tega from the National Cryptocurrency Association. So the first question, and it would be great to hear from you first, Congressman. We're potentially months away from having a comprehensive digital asset regulatory framework in the US for the first time. And it would be great if you could paint a picture of what does the American consumer's relationship with crypto look like 18 months from once that act passes.
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Sure. First, thank you for having me. Good afternoon. I mean, number one is that we have to pass this. And I think the reason it's being difficult, I thought it would've been done by now, is the degree of disruption. I think a lot of the people that are trying to protect market share, whether it's the big banks, title insurance, you name it, just the people that are ... It's like Kodak before the iPhone. They're looking at everything. They're like, "This is going to be very disruptive." And they're trying to legislatively protect their market share. So it's going to take a little pushing, but President Trump is very committed, very committed. And the industry has done a very good job of creating the incentives to pass clarity and obviously we've already passed Stablecoin. So I mean, it's going to happen. The disruption is going to occur.
The question is how quickly and with whom first. Obviously, I think the big banks are going to deploy their new technologies, whatever they are. I'm excited to see them because instead of having to start from the bottom and grow, they're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create whatever new technologies, whatever new offerings they're going to have. So I think that's going to come out quickly. After that, there's going to be probably a little bit of a lull as everyone becomes more used to these new technologies. And then I think it's going to start pushing out the little guys and it's going to be difficult to adapt. So I mean, I think Kodak is the best example and they're gone for a reason. I don't want a polar word camera. I got a cell phone. So I think that you're going to see a lot of middlemen and different processes that are going to be gone and I think it's going to be a good thing because efficiencies is the future.
Wasim Ahmad:
Go ahead.
Ali Tager :
Yeah. I love the Kodak example. I completely agree. I think the genie's out of the bottle. The technology is already here and mainstream adoption is no longer a question of if but when. And I think it's kind of twofold. From a consumer standpoint, I expect that we're going to see more people sending money abroad or paying their friends back for brunch in crypto. It's just going to give you another option, another choice. We're going to see more people shopping with it at the register in stores and online, powering their businesses and passions and tokenizing real world assets. I think it's going to be really meaningful and impactful ways that people are going to use this technology, but also really boring ways behind the scenes that we're maybe already engaging with these tools and we don't even realize it. But besides the consumer standpoint, I think the other piece that I expect to see, I hope to see, is more of a rise in accurate public discourse around this industry.
I mean, let's be honest, there's not a day that goes by that there's not a hit piece in the New York Times about crypto painting us all as criminals and it's all about illicit finance. But the reality is there are 55 million in counting Americans already using this technology and 76% of them say that the tool's making a really positive impact on their lives. And that's the story that I'm excited to see.
Ben Weiss:
I agree with both of you and I think we need to pass the market structure bill as soon as possible. I'll say once the Genius Bill was passed, and I don't know if it's necessarily related or not, but we saw our Stablecoin purchases go up at the kiosk, not just in the US but in other countries. And I think that's one of the interesting thing with Stablecoins is that it actually in a way dollarizes the world. And even from a business perspective operating in 10 countries, we use stablecoins to move money between our countries, not international wires. And then I also like your point too about there might be crypto and blockchain use behind the scenes that you don't even notice. So for instance, when you swipe a credit card, there's all sorts of things on the backend that happen like interchange fees and the average American when they swipe a credit card has no idea what an interchange fee is.
And I think when you talk about the settlement layer and infrastructure and finance behind the scenes, that could be the case as well, that crypto and blockchain could be used and the average consumer in certain cases might not even know, but their transaction's more efficient and quicker because of it.
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Let me throw one more piece in there. So China, Russia, India to a large extent, control capital flow. You can't take your money out of the countries. And if you think about it, every time I walk through the airport, it's like you have to declare more than $10,000. I just kind of chuckle. It's kind of funny. I mean, digital wallets, non-custodial wallets self-custodial wallets are going to challenge authoritarian governments because they're not going to be able to control their citizens wealth. And I think that that's going to be something that we're going to be dealing with for at least the next few decades.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Congressman, you are one of the few legislators who actually set up a self-custodial wallet and you've said publicly that when you did that, your own bank blocked you from moving funds on and off chain. So if a sitting member of Congress can't get banks to cooperate with crypto, what hope do consumers have?
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Well, I think they appropriately are waiting for market structure to pass. I think that there's, well, previous to this administration, the last administration, there was absolute legal concerns. So I think that once we pass clarity, it'll be easier, but I'm also very concerned. I mean, my mother is the best fraud target in the history of the world and she needs some guardrails and so it needs to be at least some sort of buyer beware situation. And so we got to work all that out, but I'm confident that that'll get sorted out quickly.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Ben, you've noted that in 2025 a crypto company bought a TradFi company and a TradFi company bought a crypto company. You called it lines of blurring. When traditional financial institutions start offering crypto directly, does that threaten the coin flip kiosk ATM model or does it actually expand the market for everyone?
Ben Weiss:
I think it expands the market and anything that increases the use of crypto is just another opportunity for us to capture different markets of those segments or different segments of those markets, whether with their digital products, whether having ATMs in other countries where there's less banking. But I think that's a great point in the sense of like finance is finance. And if you look at the strategies of both, let's say Robinhood, which started in TradFi, very consumer focused, but TradFi and then they went into crypto and then sort of Coinbase, even though they're sort of crypto native first, they've got into sort of the traditional capital stack as well with prediction markets, derivatives. So I think you're seeing whether it's a TradFi company or a crypto company, I think a lot of companies are trying to be sort of the one stop shop for crypto and then stable coins or sorry, the one stop shop for finance in general, which that includes crypto.
And then Visa, they said that every bank needs to have a stablecoin strategy. So stablecoins are also one of the bridges between traditional finance and crypto.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Ali, you mentioned some statistics. 55 million Americans are already using crypto and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the demographics, but also using crypto and trusting crypto are two completely different things. So what does your data tell you about that gap, the trust gap and is regulation alone enough to close it or does the industry need to invest more in something like education?
Ali Tager :
Absolutely. Well, I'll start at the end and say that regulation is a piece of it, but absolutely so is education. So before we talk about crypto holders, let's talk about non-holders. We surveyed non-holders. We asked them, "Why aren't you using crypto? What's stopping you? " We heard a little bit about regulation. We heard a little bit about, "I think I've missed the boat." Definitely a little bit of, "I don't trust it. I don't get who's backing it. I don't know who controls it, " which again, I think validates the need for education because it is decentralized and we all know how blockchain works, at least everyone in this room. But by and large, the number one barrier to entry is the knowledge gap. They do not get it. They don't know what crypto is, how to set up a digital wallet, how to buy, sell, trade, hold.
And so we've actually just launched a bunch of hands-on learning resources on our website to teach people the basics without the hype or without the jargon, really simple, accessible, snackable explainers and a risk-free simulator so you can actually practice it. So for all the crypto skeptics in your lives, send them to our site. But for crypto holders, it's not the bros that we've all been told it is. A third of crypto holders are women, more are over 55 than under 25, more work in construction than in finance and they span races, regions, religions, and political party lines. It's actually pretty evenly split. And so I think that when it comes to crypto holders, we found that they trust the technology on average equal to or greater than their trust in traditional banking institutions. And when it comes to crypto holders of color, that doubles. They trust crypto more than twice as much as they trust traditional banking.
So it really does level the playing field.That's
Wasim Ahmad:
Really fascinating. Where can people get access to these statistics?
Ali Tager :
I swear I didn't even pay him to ask me that. NCA.org on our website. We've got lots of great research reports as well as stories from real people all across the country who are, like I said earlier, using this technology in really powerful ways, like gaining financial sovereignty and freedom from an abusive relationship to really maybe boring ways like tracking livestock on the blockchain so you can find out how big your cows are going to be.
Wasim Ahmad:
Great. Okay. Congressman, another question about banks. So once the market structure bill passes and assets have a clear path to register either as commodities or securities, I'm hoping we'll have an announcement on that this afternoon. What's your expectation about how quickly traditional banks are going to actually move to offer crypto products? Is it months or years or what do you
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
Think? I think it'll be very quick for the big banks. I think that they have been anticipating this for a long time and they've invested enormous amounts of money and they're keeping their cards close because they want to wow everybody with whatever new toys they have. Now I think once you get smaller, it's just hard for them to compete. They can't invest the resources necessary to even understand why this is important. I talk to a lot of smaller banks and credit unions and I ask them, "Is this top of mind for them?" And they do not say yes. And I'm just like, "You need to go read the Kodak case study." It's as simple as that. So I think that it's going to take time for it to be truly disruptive because I think that in rural banks and in smaller credit unions and whatnot, their customers are probably going to be a little slower to adopt, but it's going to be a generational thing eventually because the cost savings, the efficiencies, it's going to change the world.
And so they're not going to be able to avoid the hit for long, but I promise you the big banks are going to adapt and they're going to compete and I think everybody's going to be better off because of it.
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, I want them to do that very, very quickly, but I'm a little skeptical because I've been asking a lot of, every time I live in New York, so I bump into bankers all the time and I'm not hearing that the banks have had huge hiring sprees of getting people from the crypto industry to come in. We already talked about education for consumers, but who is going to educate the people that are on the other end of the phone line or the chat prompt? So I'm a little more skeptical, but yes, there is definite sort of green shoots in that area. I think recently Wells Fargo made some announcements. JP Morgan, even though all the banks are creating a ruckus right now with the Clarity Act, there is movement for sure, but I just wonder if they have recruited early enough and in the biggest possible way.
I don't know if you have a view on that, Ben.
Ben Weiss:
I agree with you on this type of bank. We see a lot of community banks, someone who went through the whole debanking and operation choke point, thankfully the US has community banks. Some countries just have four banks and we've seen them sort of be more scared or just not even thinking of crypto. I think sometimes with the bigger banks you hear blockchain, not Bitcoin and there's still a skepticism, but I think again, it's sort of a case by case basis and the great CEOs and the great companies are always looking, how do we in a way cannibalize our existing product because the future moves on. Like Kodak, if they were going to succeed, would have had to cannibalize their polarized cameras. So I think the smartest banks sort of see where this is going, not that they don't care about traditional deposits and mortgages and all that, but they're trying to at least incorporate the technology and spend money on R&D.
Wasim Ahmad:
So Ben, your company has a network of more than 6,000 ATMs, crypto ATMs in 10 different countries. So the idea of going to an ATM putting in a card or a fingerprint or something and then withdrawing some type of currency, is that taking kind of consumers in the direction of crypto transactions to buy pizza or buy coffee, or is that taking them down the path of this is a great store of value? Can you talk a little bit about that concept?
Ben Weiss:
It depends. I would say in the US primarily a store of value like Bitcoin is the hardest, most inflation proof asset there is. But for instance, we operate in South Africa and the brand depreciates a lot and we see a bunch of people buying stablecoins and using that as a store of value. Sort of maybe they have extra savings that they keep in Bitcoin, but sort of their checking account in a way is in stablecoins. And even in terms of like one of the things that I think gets crypto more adoption is just easier to use, easier interface. Like for instance, in South Africa, we have the ATMs and the malls and like in the US you call customer support. In South Africa, we actually not only have a phone line, but we have someone standing in a coin flip t-shirt in front of the ATM to teach people how to use it.
And obviously we can do that in countries like South Africa because of the cost structure, but I think it's both, it can be a store of value, but I think in countries with destabilized currencies where there's not a lot of payment mechanisms, they might not trust the banks, you see it as a day-to-day exchange of value.
Wasim Ahmad:
Okay. Congressman, before you step off the panel to go vote, can you tell us what you think one thing policy, product, cultural shift that would do more to scale adoption than anything else that we've kind of talked about today?
Congressman William Timmons (R-SC):
I mean, I think education's everything and people don't understand the different use cases and how the efficiencies will be created. It's hard to even fully grasp some of the changes that are going to occur. I mean, my family has a privately held company and we spend tens of millions of dollars on corporate compliance and on maintaining stock records and all of that. I mean, that's going to be on the blockchain in five, 10, 15 years and just all of the different businesses that are going to be gone because technology can automate it and do it way better, way faster. So I just think education's going to be everything. And I think once we pass market structure, once all of the investment that has been sitting on the sidelines is unleashed, I think you're going to see education and people understanding all the different use cases and how it's going to change their lives.
I mean, I think it's fantastic and I hope that we can get this right and get it done quickly because I mean, this should have been done months ago and again, the reason this is not done yet is because the people that are anticipating market disruption are trying to legislatively control market share and that's bad. And so we've got to make sure that we push past that and we get the legislative framework right and off to the races.
Wasim Ahmad:
Thank you very much, Congressman. Okay. We're going to carry on. We have a little more time to discuss some things. So Ali, obviously we're at this pivotal moment for regulatory clarity, but I want to sort of delve into this idea that as far as the average American consumer is concerned, we've had this narrative coming from the media, from politicians, not all politicians, but some politicians, that crypto is for billionaires, that crypto is for scams and terrorists, whole narrative about, "Oh, it's volatile, you can't trust it. " So how are we going to convince the average crypto consumer that it's safe and accessible?
Ali Tager :
Yeah, absolutely. I think for starters, the NCA is a nonprofit that's here to help everyday people understand what crypto is and how to use it safely and responsibly. So I like to think our role is less about convincing and more about educating, but we're doing that by busting the myths and misconceptions and hype and jargon with data and facts and stats and real stories of real people. So much of the narrative around crypto, as we all know, is about the hype, the possibility, the potential, the future. We're talking about the present. We're talking about real people in your neighborhoods, lots of people in this room, I'm sure, our friends, our families who are using this as a way to have more accessibility, have twenty four seven access, have more ownership and control over their assets. But at the same time, we can't pretend that scams and volatility aren't a problem.
However, they are a problem in every corner of the internet and every industry. And so I think that how we can show up and help people is by teaching them how to spot scams with warning signs of fraud, what to do if and when you think you or your loved one might be dealing with a scammer or a fraudster. Because again, what we're seeing with crypto is the same as what we see with traditional banking. It's the same as we see even on online dating, cat phishing, impersonation scams, especially with the rise of AI. But what we're seeing right now with crypto is the same journey that we've seen play out time and time again with any new tool or technology and innovation AI, cell phones, right? Going back to even electricity and cars and railroads, when something comes along that's going to break barriers and disrupt traditional systems, some people are incentivized to want to stop that.
And so there's a lot of fear mongering that's happening and what we're really trying to do is show that this is a tool that's helping normal people like us in a lot of normal ways. I think to pile on to what you were saying earlier, investing, of course, the long-term store of value is a huge use case for digital assets, but I've been really surprised by some of the data that we've seen, including reports we just did with PayPal around the holidays where about a fifth of US shoppers were gifting crypto. About a quarter said they would prefer crypto over a gift card in their Christmas stocking or wherever you get your gifts. And so I think people are starting to see this as a way to spend and to donate to nonprofits like Movember and also too, like we talked about beyond crypto blockchain.
You can tokenize pretty much anything these days and use it for reducing fraud and making sure that you have trackable, traceable, immutable ledgers. And I think that's really where I see the possibility and the potential of the technology.
Wasim Ahmad:
So we have really kind of focused on the sunshine above the cloud side of the moment that we're in. And Ben, I wonder if you could comment on ... Your company's been around for 10 years, so you've seen your fair share of go slow market momentum and then lack of market momentum.What happens in November if the sides change and there's no Clarity Act enacted?
Ben Weiss:
Well, I'm hoping, I think someone said it on the last panel that we've gotten sort of crossed the Rubricon or move the Overton window where the Operation Choke Point or the law fare against crypto would hopefully not come back. But I think dealing with a patchwork of state laws, dealing with sort of that regulatory uncertainty does slow down the market and wouldn't be good. That being said, there are a lot of Democrats I think who are, they got a lot of votes on the Genius Bill. So hopefully even in the next ... We want to get this passed now, but even in the next Congress, hopefully there's sort of enough momentum to get something done. And you were talking about PayPal. I was watching a clip on X at like two in the morning where Peter Thiel was like, because they had a huge fraud issue when they first started and I was watching the clip and he's like, "We have to get the network large enough before the politics catches up to it.
" So I think we have to get the, and hopefully we're there, but we have to get crypto in enough people's hands. We have to get enough consumers, politicians, regulators educated on it and just realizing it's a neutral to beneficial technology just because bad people misuse it just like in normal finance doesn't discredit the technology.
Ali Tager :
Yeah. To build on that, some of the conversation we were having backstage was about people just outright dismissing crypto of, "It's not for me. " And again, where does that come from? The conversation I like to have with the skeptics that I meet in the wild is, "Oh, I don't get it. I don't know what's in it. I don't know who's backing it and it's not for me. " And I'm like, "Okay, can I be nosy for a second? Do you have a 401k?" And of course the answer is always yes. And then my follow-up question is, what's in it? Nobody ever knows and we trust it because we grew up with it and it's a familiar tool. And so I think that with businesses like PayPal getting on board with traditional banks and other institutions getting on board, it will start to feel familiar and normal and just inherently safer.
But at the same time, it's our responsibility at the NCA to help people understand how to navigate this safely and responsibly. And it's
Ben Weiss:
About meeting the customer where they're at. I think that's the key to adoption. Some people are not going to buy crypto unless it's through an ETF or their 401k. Some people are going to keep it on a treasure or a paper wallet. Some people might buy it at ATM. Some people are going to buy it at PayPal or Robinhood. So I think it's about meeting the customer where they are and then all those other sort of ancillary financial services like inheritance. It's amazing to have $10 million of crypto on a treasure. It's not so amazing if you're sick and you have kids and you haven't thought about like the estate planning or how to transfer to them. So I think whether it's donations, tax and estate, all those sort of things you see in traditional finance, we have to bring those over to crypto as well.
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, thank you for ending on that. I appreciate it. Go talk to a lawyer. That's all we have time for. Thank you so much.
DC Blockchain Summit
From Google's War on Crypto to the Clarity Act: The Future of Inheritance in Web3
For episode 733 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Wasim Ahmad, CEO of Vault12. Vault12 is a non-custodial crypto security and digital inheritance platform. It enables cryptocurrency owners to protect and back up their wallet seed phrases, private keys, and digital assets (like NFTs) by distributing encrypted data shards across a decentralized network of trusted friends, family, and devices. #blockhashpodcast #vault12 #podcast. Brandon Zemp is the host and owner of the BlockHash Podcast. He's a Forbes Author, Amazon Bestseller, Investor, Entrepreneur and Blockchain educator.
⏳ Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(3:11) Who is Wasim Ahmad?
(4:31) What is Vault12?
(6:05) Use-cases around crypto inheritance
(7:58) Next step for funds security in crypto
(10:40) Existing partnerships (12:32) Sumsub
(13:16) Public Investing (14:01) Thoughts on the Clarity Act
(19:25) Vault12 at Bitcoin2026
(22:03) Vault12 roadmap
🎙 Vault12 Links: 🔗 Website: https://vault12.com/ 🔗 X: https://x.com/vault12 🔗 LinkedIn: / vault12 📢
Disclaimer: None of our content constitutes, nor is intended to act as financial advice. It’s important to always do your own research and due diligence before making any investment decision. Digital Assets and Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and carry a considerable amount of risk. 📣 This episode is brought to you by Public Investing Paid ad. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. This information is for educational purposes only and is not tax or investment advice. Consult your tax advisor for individual considerations. Crypto IRAs are self-directed individual retirement accounts offered and custodied by Alto Trust Co, a New Mexico trust company. Information about retirement accounts on Public is for educational purposes only and is not tax or investment advice. Visit the IRS website at https://www.irs.gov/ for more information on the limitations and tax benefits of IRAs. Crypto is highly speculative and involves significant risk, including loss of principal. Cryptocurrencies are not protected by FDIC or SIPC. See our Crypto Risk Disclosures at https://public.com/custodian-account-... for additional information. See terms of Match Program. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.
Transcript
Brandon Zemp:
Appreciate you taking the time today. How's it going? How's Bitcoin 2026 been treating you?
Wasim Ahmad:
Great, great. A lot of energy. A lot of good speakers yesterday.
Brandon Zemp:
Any in particular that you saw that were fun?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, I mean Paul Atkins, that was pretty good. I think Kash Patel, I was expecting an announcement of some kind, something material, but they didn't release Roman Storm. They didn't release the Samourai Wallet guy. I don't know what else he was saying.
Brandon Zemp:
Was it mostly just regulatory talk a little bit and the landscape?
Wasim Ahmad:
I think it was about the future of the market, which is going to shift from what it is today with the original... the OGs from Bitcoin to all of the stuff that's happened with institutional investment strategy, all of those kinds of things. And now we're on the cusp of taking the very first step into a world where there's going to be a hundred million more retail crypto investors. And the only cryptocurrency that they know about is Bitcoin because there's a thousand others that they're not going to have been exposed to. Bitcoin is the brand of cryptocurrency and that's the one that they're going to jump on. We need that Clarity Act signed. We're in the business of crypto inheritance. We're the pioneers.
Brandon Zemp:
You're Vault12?
Wasim Ahmad:
Vault12. We started the company 10 years ago. My CEO was part of the blockchain team at Andreessen Horowitz, helped Coinbase get their funding and realized that if this exchange was successful, many, many people would buy cryptocurrency. Actually, Bitcoin was the only thing available at the time. And they would have to deal with all of the security backup issues and, what happens to your Bitcoin if you pass away or you're incapacitated or you're in jail? There needs to be all of those things that happened. We launched our app in 2019 right before the pandemic and then had to find a serious but a nice way to talk about how important it is to make sure you have backup, successful backups, successful plan for how your Bitcoin is going to get passed down.
Brandon Zemp:
So is that what Vault12 is all about? It's like a succession plan?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah, we are an app that gives you a digital vault. You put your information in there. Your information could be a video describing what the seed phrases are, or it could be the seed phrases or the private key. Anything in any digital form, that information is then encrypted, split into pieces and distributed to what we call Guardians. Guardians could be three of your friends, three of your family members, three of your professional contacts. And then you also, not only do you get to choose how many pieces, you get to say, "Well, when I need access to it, how many need to give me the okays?"
Brandon Zemp:
So it's multifactor?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So there's multiple parties that are involved. It's not multi-sig and it's not MPC. It's using Shamir's secret sharing, but we have smoothed it out and everything gets calculated and handled just through the app and you're not having to literally move a shard from one place to another.
Brandon Zemp:
Gotcha.
Wasim Ahmad:
So it's designed in a way that the people that are guarding your vaults are regular ordinary people, maybe not super, super technical.
Brandon Zemp:
That's interesting.
Wasim Ahmad:
And then one of them is going to be your beneficiary. And so when the time comes, they can ask for access to the vault.
Brandon Zemp:
Yeah. It's been a problem in this space for a long time and something that I think a lot of people have been concerned about. Even myself, what if something happens to me? My crypto is just oof in the ether. There's no succession behind that or guarantor. So this actually makes a lot of sense. Have you seen a lot of use cases with maybe parents or grandparents maybe wanting to take... My grandma owns Bitcoin. My parents own a little bit of crypto as well. I imagine this is something that they would be very interested in maybe even for like a trust or maybe even a business, I could see some applications. Have you seen any in particular that are used [inaudible 00:04:18]
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, the obvious one is obviously parents of Bitcoiners who also bought Bitcoin. So that's one. But I think the more interesting one is actually regular crypto investors because unfortunately many of them have passed away and there's some famous examples like Matthew Mellon, who is the heir to the Mellon Bank fortune and he had $2 million worth of cryptocurrency and very securely stashed away in multiple places, very good security, so good that it wasn't documented anywhere, obviously, and no one in his family knew how to access any of it. And it's all just locked, it's just out there somewhere. They didn't get any of it.
And then the third use case is something that it's a little more emotional and it's about the fact that some of us are at a point in our lives where our parents are declining and so we are helping them both with making sure their finances are in order, their wills are in order, maybe there's some health things that we're sorting out for them. And while we're doing that, it dawns on you, "Well, I better make sure that my staff is sorted too." And so because that's happening in their lives, they then deal with their own ahead of maybe when they normally would've talked about it. And that is actually one of the biggest use cases.
Brandon Zemp:
Yeah. I could see this being a next big step for security in this space too and being able to provide an alternative method in case something does happen. If I go into a coma tomorrow and I need my brother or my mom to be able to access funds to pay for my medical bills or something God forbid happens, it's good for us to have options like that and to have some kind of backend where that can occur in certain situations.
Wasim Ahmad:
But the trouble is there's a lot of bad options. So a lot of people will say, "Well, I gave a list of my wallets to my lawyer." "But did you write it down or did you put it on a US... How did you give it to your law firm?" And the security of that information is also important because anyone can rifle through a paper file and then drain your wallets. I mean, it's not going to be the lawyer, but it could be someone else. A lot of vendors out there in the wallet space will have solutions for backing things up. I mean, for the last... Over a decade, nine out of 10 wallets said, "Write it down," which is a ridiculous thing. All the people that wrote it down and then had their homes burned down in LA, they didn't recover their crypto wallets.
Brandon Zemp:
Or they write the wrong word. I've done that.
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So a lot of wallets will say, "We'll back it up to the cloud." And that's a very convenient way to do it. I think in this day and age, I think we're all very comfortable with cloud security, but what we're not in control of is the relationship between that vendor and that cloud provider. And we all saw what happened with Gemini where they had a yield bearing account and they did that through two counterparties, Genesis... They had an issue with FTX and suddenly all our assets are frozen for 18 months with no hope of seeing them.
Luckily the Winklevosses fought and got all of that money back 100%, but it could happen to some other smaller vendor and you have no recourse. So putting stuff in the cloud is not a good option. And then a lot of people, well, in the past at Bitcoin conferences, they would have that ledger device around their neck and I mean, you can lose those. I'm not sure what your nephew's going to do with your ledger wallet if that's the only thing that's left.
So there's a lot of bad options or subpar options where you have to think through what are you going to do? And I think that having a good backup is the way to do it and then having a path forward for who gets access to that when something happens.
Brandon Zemp:
I agree. I imagine great partnerships for you probably are with existing wallets that are out there too because they have that exact kind of target market and client base that would cater for you guys very well. Have you worked on any partnerships with some software wallets?
Wasim Ahmad:
So we support any wallet that exports information that allows you to access the wallet. We support that, any blockchain. But the reality is the wallets are doing whatever wallets do, which is basically getting you to put information into the wallet and then getting you to buy cryptocurrency from the wallet. That is their business. They're not interested in some side thing, even though crypto inheritance is a dollar a day kind of revenue stream for them. So we think that the market for this particular service is once the Clarity Act passes and there's a hundred million new retail crypto investors, which will morph the number of cryptocurrency investors that exist today.
In the next few years, that is who is going to drive the market. The only thing they know about is Bitcoin right now and these are people who 17 years ago didn't know what any of this was, didn't buy anything, didn't buy anything five years ago, didn't buy anything 10 years ago and now they're going to buy it because they can buy it from Chase even though it's Coinbase behind the scenes that's probably providing the infrastructure or they're going to buy it from Citibank. They're all going to buy it from a wallet, some random wallet. They're actually going to buy it from the brands that they know and trust. And so that's where our efforts to set is partnering with TradFi institutions. Yeah. I think that's the bigger market.
Brandon Zemp:
What are your thoughts on the Clarity Act then in terms of maybe how that's going to change things when it eventually gets passed? I mean, I think the consensus is that it will draw a lot more of retail into the market that it hasn't already participated in crypto and a lot of it through these institutions and have been on the sideline waiting for a final degree of clarity to start pushing products up and ways for them to access this market. When you look at the Clarity Act, what are some initial thoughts that you have about maybe how that's going to impact maybe the market and the way retail gets involved going further, then how does that impact you guys with Vault12?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So we've been very, very involved in the last six years with the SEC directly and with all of the different bills that have made their way, didn't quite make it. Last year we wrote to the Crypto Task Force, laid out how Vault12 has a token that's used in the system to reward guardians and laid all of that out to say whatever regulations or guidelines you're thinking about, it needs to factor in these kinds of scenarios. Today, the only thing that people think about when they think of crypto apps is exchanges and wallets, we're neither. So we're something else and there's going to be a lot of other apps that are not exchanges or wallets that people need. And so that's what the Clarity Act is ushering in, that kind of innovation.
And I think what is really going to happen is we as part of the crypto industry, like all of the vendors that are here, we need clarity to continue with the vision that we laid out when we published our white papers 10 years ago. We need that clarity to finish delivering on all of that. But there are a whole bunch of unintended things that are happening. So not only is the government unclear about what you can and can't do for the agencies, there's all these other people that are part of the world we live in, like Google and Apple that control things like ad networks and app stores where someone might deliver an app for the cryptocurrency industry and they have their own rules. They've made up rules to say, "You can do this, but you can't do this."
Google won't let a crypto app advertise unless you're an exchange and have a money transmitter license, which makes sense or your hardware wallet. If you're neither of those, you cannot advertise and there's no rhyme nor reason as to why, other than caution and risk, but it's unintended things like that that are going to need to change. They have basically waged a war on crypto up till now and that's going to come to an end. So it's a different point of view, I know, but that combined with this influx of retail crypto investors and the pull in from the TradFi institutions. And I think there's still going to be plenty of room for brand new financial institutions, Robinhood is an example. Obviously Coinbase is going to have one of every type of financial product for retail. All of that is going to carry on going and then the TradFi is going to be catching up from behind.
Brandon Zemp:
Do you think given the fact that we're in a bear market right now after the, I guess cycle that we've had over the last year or two coming up, that this, if Clarity gets passed this year, and it probably will get passed, that that could be a nice resurgence for the market to I think get optimism going again and flowing and maybe turn things around? So I could see that as a real turning point to pull us out of this bear market cycle that we're in right now. Do you see it as also that opportunity for the market?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, I think from a day-to-day perspective, yes, it'll be a moment of triumph. But I think in general when we talk about the market 10Xing, that will come as this material new delivery of new ways for people to tap into the Bitcoin economy, to the crypto economy and that will come as more participants enter the market. So I think that needs 12 months, maybe probably more like 24 months.
Brandon Zemp:
Or the more extended timeline, yeah.
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, the banks probably have to hire crypto experts and I don't think they're hiring right now. I'm not sure if they think they're going to do it with AI, but-
Brandon Zemp:
We know they're experimenting. I guess the biggest question is-
Wasim Ahmad:
They've been experimenting for a long time.
Brandon Zemp:
Yeah.
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah.
Brandon Zemp:
I guess this question is like, are they on the sidelines waiting for Clarity to get passed so that they can be first movers?
Wasim Ahmad:
There's a whole bunch of things that they literally cannot do. I cannot talk to a bank right now, just in the corridors where there's no cameras, but I can't have a conversation with them about anything in the future and I think we need that to happen with Clarity and then all of the rules and... the rules that the agencies will then roll out, that needs to be rolled out.
Brandon Zemp:
I agree. So what brings you the Bitcoin 2026? What are you guys looking to do while you're here?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, I was hoping that this would be the place where they announced the Clarity Act is going to the president's table so that isn't going to happen, but not because there's anything bad going on but just scheduling-wise. So that was the main reason and I think I just wanted to tap in. There was so much energy and vibrancy last year, I thought, "Well, yeah, let's go check it out."
Brandon Zemp:
You're just feeling out the culture and seeing what's on the horizon, listening to the speakers. Are you also looking for potential partners, other companies to work with?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean, I've been really looking at who is here now that's different to years in the past. And I've been working with a film director on a movie called The Bitcoin Executor. They've been showing the trailer in between speakers on the main stage and this is a great movie. It's not out yet, but you can check out the trailer.
Brandon Zemp:
Fictional movie or a documentary?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yes, it's a fictional movie. It's made by the people that made The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, which was made 11 years ago and has... all the people that are doing the keynotes are in that documentary. This is a fictional movie, but Bitcoiners will love it because it shows different aspects of Bitcoin culture and there's just in the way that they shot it, they have beautiful Easter eggs, if you call it, just hidden away in the backdrops of the movie and all of the characters people will recognize, "Yeah, I know a guy just like that. I know someone who that's what they do." And so it's just like a fun project. It's about... the underlying story is based around inheritance, but it's a story about a person who doesn't really believe in Bitcoin and then goes on this journey because his friend disappears to go and find the beneficiaries of his wallet and discovers a new way of thinking about life through Bitcoin.
Brandon Zemp:
That's exciting. We don't get a lot of media that's solely about Bitcoin or crypto. We get little tidbits here and there in existing TV shows or a movie, but like-
Wasim Ahmad:
And they're generally negative, right?
Brandon Zemp:
Sometimes, yeah.
Wasim Ahmad:
They're criminals or someone's being kidnapped or there's money laundering-
Wasim Ahmad:
But this is something different. This is very positive, very contemplative. So check it out.
Brandon Zemp:
And then what's on the horizon for you guys here in 2026 with Vault12? Anything exciting coming up? Any announcements? What should we keep an out for?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, probably the biggest thing that we're going to do this year is with the regulations that were announced in March in DC, which was, "This is what tokens are. These are the different types of tokens. This is how a token goes from one scenario to another scenario," that is all regulation. So that means that we can now finally list our token, which is needed to reward guardians. So we built everything so there was a reward mechanism in the system and we have had the token, but the previous SEC was like, "No, we think everything's a security. You can't be sending that around to people you don't know. That's not allowed." So we had to pull that functionality out, which is really not that great and now we're putting it back in and we are pursuing token listing. And I think hand in hand with the Clarity Act, it's really the new time to roll this out exactly as we laid out in our white paper in 2018.
Brandon Zemp:
Exciting. Well, yeah, timing I think is right. It's a good place to start having those conversations in a good period of time, I think this year. So I wish you guys the best of luck and continue to let me know when you guys have new updates. We'd love to do a part two and maybe have an extended conversation. And it's always difficult at these events. There's so much going on and so many adjacent interviews and flashing lights and whatnot.
Wasim Ahmad:
This was a unique interview.
Brandon Zemp:
Yes. Yes.
Wasim Ahmad:
We covered a lot of things.
Brandon Zemp:
We did. I appreciate the time. It's been great. Keep in touch. We'll do it again soon.
Wasim Ahmad:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
*** Special Offer for Podcast listeners Promo codes for Vault12 Guard
The iOS codes are good for 1 year subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. iOS codes can be redeemed in the Apple App Store.
The Android codes are good for 90 days subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. Android codes are redeemed when selecting and paying for the Inheritance plan in the app.
Instructions for how to redeem here.
Code: CMNYC26
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1451596986&code=CMNYC26
Android: Enter code CMNYC26 when you select the Inheritance plan
Ghouls can be guardians too
Two Vault 12s this season. Only One Safeguards Your Digital Life.
Vault 12 is a trending topic just not for the reason you might expect.
As fans plunge into Fallout’s latest season, the sound of “Vault 12” is now a one-two punch to the face.
At Vault12, we’re taking the moment to smile — and to highlight something important:
* Crypto Inheritance
* Encrypted crypto & seed phrases
* Future-protect your legacy with quantum-safe security
No post-apocalyptic training required.
And remember when adding Guardins to your inheritance Vault, Ghouls can be Guardian's too!
With Vault12 Guard, you can secure your digital valuables with your choice of trusted Guardians. After you have created your Vault, you are ready to assign Guardians, who will be able to help you recover your Vault in case of accidents like phone loss.
This guide will take you through the steps to help you assign your Guardians simply and efficiently.
How to start adding your Vault12 Guardians?
Now that you have set up your Vault12 Guard Digital Vault, begin by navigating from the Vault's home screen by pressing the "Add Guardians" button. From the "My Guardians" screen, you can easily manage your existing Guardians, or add more Guardians to your account.
What to consider when adding Guardians to your Digital Vault?
Now you are ready to assign Guardians, who can help you recover your Vault in case of accidents such as phone loss. Your circle of Guardians usually consists of:
- trusted people from your network of family or friends, like your spouse/partner, a close friend, or parent; and/or
- additional devices with Vault12 Guard installed and that are under your full control, such as:
- a tablet with iOS or Android,
- an additional or backup smartphone,
- your Macbook with M-series processors,
- even an older iPod touch could become a tool useful for backup.
Think about who your Guardians should be, keeping in mind that for maximum resilience, your Guardians and the devices that they use should appear online regularly, for automatic backup safety checks. Unlike an offline backup like a paper copy that you can't easily check, Vault12 Guard automatically and routinely checks the availability of your configured backup devices, and signals if it recommends re-verification of any Guardians' devices that were out of duty (offline) for an extended time.
Eventually, you need at least 3 Guardians to complete the recommended setup scheme. However, don't hesitate to start adding Guardian candidates right away. You can always add more Guardians later, or change individual Guardians that you designated earlier, if you later realize that they are not the best fit, or if you decide to change/upgrade one of your additional guarding devices (like an iPad).
Why is 2-of-3 Guardians the default setup?
There is an "Advanced" button on the Guardians setup screen where you can change your required number of Guardians, but it is highly recommended to stick with the default settings for your first Vault creation:
- 3 total Guardians are recommended, with confirmations from 2 out of those 3 Guardians to recover your Vault. This gives you resilience in case one of your Guardians fails to respond.
The simplest Guardian configuration to begin using is 1 trusted Person (e.g., your spouse) and 2 spare devices under your control (e.g., iPad and Macbook). In this case, you are still in control of recovery if the trusted person fails to respond, because your 2 spare devices that are configured as Guardians can be used to satisfy the 2-of-3 confirmations to restore your Vault. Further, based on this 2-of-3 confirmation setup, none of your individual Guardians or devices exposes you to risk if one of them is compromised or fails. This type of setup offers a careful balance of control, convenience, safety, and fault tolerance.
How to subscribe to or try out Vault12 Guard?
Now that your Vault is configured with basic information and a full set of Guardians, it requires a Vault12 Guard app subscription, and you will be asked to choose a trial plan.
Trials are free for the first 30 days with no payment method commitment, so feel free to enroll in a trial without concerns.
If you choose to keep using the Vault12 Guard platform to protect your assets after the Trial period, you will need to activate one of the subscription plans that includes a Vault. You can review what is included in each plan on the Vault12 download page.
Can my Vault Guardians be people or devices?
As mentioned above, there are two ways to add new Guardians:
- Invite trusted people from your inner circle, or
- Enroll trusted devices.
In Vault12 Guard, the steps to enroll either a trusted person or a trusted device are equivalent - you identify the Guardian Name, choose a type, and then "pair" the Vault12 Guard apps on your Vault owner’s device and on the Guardian's device. The difference is only in how you choose to do it: either locally with your own spare device in your hands, or together with a live Guardian (either locally or remotely).
It is recommended to get familiar with the process of setting up a Guardian device first by enrolling your own spare device as a Guardian. It will be much more fun to enroll one of your family or friends as a Guardian after you are familiar with the process, and can confidently walk them through the steps.
High-level view of how to add a Vault12 Guardian
In a nutshell, to add a Guardian, the Vault owner sends the Guardian an invitation link to join their Vault, and then the Guardian confirms acceptance of the invitation by opening that link in Vault12 Guard.
In this example:
- Enter the Guardian Name, e.g., “Jason Sands” if it is a person, or “Dana’s iPad” in case of your spare device. Later, when you are using your Vault, you will distinguish between your Guardians using the name that you enter here.
- After entering the Guardian's name, choose one of the “Person” or "Spare device" options, and then press "Continue." This choice doesn’t affect how the Guardian device works, it only helps you to keep in mind which Guardians are devices that are controlled by you directly, and which of your Guardians are other people.
How to invite a Guardian with an invitation link?
The next screen offers a choice of how to invite your Guardian to join your Vault: either “Send a message” or “Scan a code.”
“Send a message” allows you to share an invitation link from an installed app on your phone to an app on the Guardian’s device. The sharing process is standard, and the options that you see will depend on what is installed on your phone.
Just hit “Share Message” or Copy/Paste the invite link to the messenger or communication method of your choice, and send it to the new Guardian or to your spare device.
How to accept an invitation to Guard a Vault?
The Guardian should open the invitation link on her/his device. If they have already installed Vault12 Guard, then when they click on the invitation link, the Vault12 Guard app will open and will present a screen asking the Guardian to confirm that they intend to guard the Vault.
If Vault12 Guard is not already installed, then the first time the user clicks on the invitation link, they will be encouraged to install the app. Later, after successfully installing the app, they should click on the invite link again so that the Guard app opens and presents the Guardian with the confirmation screen described.
The app will also ask for permission to "Allow Notifications," which will support timely interactions between the Guardian and Vault12 Guard in the future.
How to add a Guardian by scanning a QR code?
The "Scan a code" alternative is useful for even faster adding of Guardians. It can be used when Vault12 Guard is already installed on both devices.
In this case, the Guardian device's Vault12 Guard displays a QR code, and the Vault owner can scan it with their main device's Vault12 Guard.
This QR-code-scanning process can be performed on “air-gapped” devices without being connected to a network, which is a slightly more secure channel of communication. However, this setup type requires slightly more effort, so is not recommended for first-time onboarding.
How to verify your Guardians' status?
If your Guardian accepted their invitation and joined the Vault, their status will be reflected in the Guardians screen of your Vault owner's Vault12 Guard. After you have successfully enrolled your first Guardian, you are good to go to add other friends, family, or spare devices as Guardians to reach the recommended count of 3 Guardians total, as shown in the screenshot.
What if a Vault Guardian's status is still pending?
If something did not go smoothly with adding a Guardian the first time, and the Guardian's status remains as "Pending," you can tap inside the details of that specific Guardian to easily re-invite or replace them.
After adding Guardians to your Vault: Next steps?
Vault12 Guard makes it easy to set up and use a Digital Vault. With Vault12, you can secure your digital assets with trusted Guardians, making it easier to recover your vault in case of device accidents. Start protecting your digital valuables today with Vault12 Guard.
Now that you have a Vault, you can do the following:
- Add assets including cryptocurrency seed phrases and other types of digital assets.
- Generate a cryptocurrency seed phrase.
- Assign a beneficiary Guardian to inherit your digital assets.
Quantum-safe Data Storage for App Developers with Open-Source Shamir Secret Sharing for Capacitor
How to build quantum-resistant apps with the Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor?
The future of computing is knocking at our door. Quantum computers promise to revolutionize industries, solve impossible problems, and, unfortunately, break most of the encryption that protects our digital lives today.
This is where the Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor plugin becomes your secret weapon for building truly resilient and secure apps.
What is Capacitor by Ionic?
Capacitor is an open-source, cross-platform native runtime that lets developers build iOS, Android, and web apps from a single modern JavaScript/TypeScript codebase. Created by the team behind Ionic, it provides a consistent API layer that bridges web technologies (like React, Vue, Angular, or vanilla JS) with native device capabilities such as secure storage, biometrics, filesystems, and more. Through its plugin system, Capacitor allows both first-party and community plugins—like Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor—to expose powerful native functionality in a way that feels natural to web developers, enabling high-performance, production-grade apps without sacrificing the speed and flexibility of a web-based stack.
What are the challenges of Self-Custody?
We're witnessing a fundamental shift in how people think about their digital assets and personal data. From crypto wallets to personal health records, users increasingly want control over their own information. They don't want to trust centralized services with their most sensitive data.
But self-custody creates a terrifying problem: what happens when someone loses their phone, forgets their password, or worse—their device gets stolen? Traditional backup solutions force users to trust third parties or create single points of failure.
The Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor plugin solves this elegantly by eliminating the need for any single point of trust or failure.
What is the mathematics behind Shamir's Secret Sharing?
Shamir's Secret Sharing reads like something from a cryptography fairy tale. Invented by Adi Shamir (the "S" in RSA encryption), this algorithm takes any secret and mathematically divides it into pieces called shards.
Here's where it gets beautiful: you can lose some shards and still recover your secret perfectly. Need 3 shards to reconstruct your data? Generate 5 shards and distribute them to trusted friends or devices. Even if 2 shards disappear forever, you can still recover everything.
But the real magic happens in what cryptographers call "information-theoretic security." Each individual share reveals absolutely nothing about your secret. Not a single bit of information leaks, no matter how powerful the computer trying to crack it.
This isn't just computationally difficult to break—its mathematically impossible. Even with unlimited processing power, an attacker with insufficient shards learns nothing. The mathematics guarantee this, not the limitations of current technology.
How do you Future-proof against quantum threats?
Most encryption today relies on mathematical problems that are hard for classical computers to solve. Factoring large prime numbers takes classical computers thousands of years. Quantum computers could solve these same problems in hours.
Shamir's Secret Sharing takes a completely different approach. Its security doesn't depend on computational difficulty—it depends on mathematical impossibility. Think of it like trying to solve an equation with fewer values than unknowns. There are infinite equally valid solutions, making it impossible to determine which one is correct.
This information-theoretic approach means quantum computers offer no advantage to attackers. The underlying mathematics remain just as secure whether facing classical computers, quantum computers, or hypothetical super-quantum computers that might emerge decades from now.
Your applications built with the Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor today will remain secure through whatever computing revolution comes next.
How can you Fault-proof your apps through distribution
Traditional security models create single points of failure. Lose your password manager database? Everything's gone. Company servers get compromised? Your data's exposed. Phone gets stolen? Access to your accounts vanishes.
Shamir's Secret Sharing flips this model entirely. Instead of protecting one critical thing perfectly, you distribute security across multiple independent channels. Each share can live in a different place:
- One share encrypted by your phone's secure enclave
- Another with a trusted friend or family member
- A third is stored in a safety deposit box
- Additional shards distributed to other devices or locations
The threshold system means you're protected against multiple simultaneous failures. Device breaks? Friend moves abroad? Safety deposit box becomes inaccessible? Your system keeps working because no single failure can compromise your security.
This distributed approach creates applications that become more resilient as they scale, not more vulnerable.
What are Common Use Cases for the Shamir's Secret Sharing Capacitor Plug-in?
The Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor plugin provides the foundation, but imagination determines the possibilities. Consider these emerging use cases:
Family digital inheritance becomes possible when crypto seeds or important documents are shared across trusted family members. Parents can ensure their digital assets transfer smoothly without exposing sensitive information during their lifetime. That's what the Vault12 Guard app does by using Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor.
Collaborative authentication allows teams to protect shared resources without any single administrator having complete control. Critical business systems require multiple people to authorize changes, preventing both external attacks and insider threats.
Progressive disclosure enables applications that reveal information only when specific conditions are met. Legal documents that unlock automatically when multiple parties agree, or time-locked messages that require distributed consent to access early.
Redundant backup systems can store encrypted application state across multiple cloud providers, user devices, and physical locations. Users never lose access to their data, but no single provider ever has complete information.
The plugin's cross-platform nature—supporting iOS, Android, and web—means these experiences work seamlessly across all user devices and contexts.
How has the Shamir's Secret Sharing Capacitor Plug-in been tried and tested in commercial apps?
The convergence of quantum computing, increased privacy awareness, and demand for user-controlled applications creates unprecedented opportunities for developers who think ahead.
Applications built with traditional security models will face obsolescence as quantum computers emerge. Centralized platforms will struggle as users demand true ownership of their data. Single points of failure will become unacceptable as digital stakes continue rising.
But developers using Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor can build applications that thrive in this new landscape. Your users get genuine self-custody without sacrificing usability. Your architecture becomes more resilient as it scales. Your security improves as computing power increases rather than becoming more vulnerable.
The plugin abstracts away the complex mathematics and cross-platform implementation details. You get enterprise-grade Shamir's Secret Sharing through simple TypeScript interfaces, letting you focus on creating innovative user experiences rather than cryptographic implementation.
How can you start using the Shamir's Secret Sharing Capacitor Plug-in?
Quantum computers won't wait for our applications to catch up. User expectations for data ownership and privacy continue accelerating. The developers who start building quantum-resistant, fault-proof applications today will define the next generation of digital experiences.
The Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor plugin gives you the tools. The mathematical foundations are unshakeable. The production validation is complete. The cross-platform compatibility ensures a broad reach.
What remains is the most exciting part: imagining and building the resilient, user-empowering applications that will define computing's next chapter. The future belongs to developers who understand that true security comes not from building higher walls, but from removing single points of failure entirely.
Your users are ready for applications they can truly trust. The technology is ready to support your vision. The question is: what will you build?
Using the Shamir Secret Sharing plugin for Capacitor - Github: https://github.com/vault12/capacitor-shamir
What is Shamir's Secret Sharing?
Shamir's Secret Sharing is a cryptographic algorithm that divides a secret into multiple parts (shards), where a minimum threshold of shards is required to reconstruct the original secret. This ensures that:
- No single shard reveals any information about the secret
- Any threshold number of shards can reconstruct the secret
- Security through distribution - store shards separately for maximum security
What are the Security Concepts behind Shamir's Secret Sharing?
Shamir's Secret Sharing provides information-theoretic security, which means the algorithm is mathematically proven to be unbreakable regardless of computational power. Key security advantages:
- Quantum Resistance: Security relies on mathematical impossibility rather than computational complexity, remaining secure against quantum computers
- No Key Management: There is no single master key to rotate or protect; instead, security hinges on distributing and safeguarding the individual shards
- Mathematical Foundation: Based on polynomial interpolation over finite fields, where reconstructing the secret without sufficient shards is mathematically impossible, not just computationally difficult
What are the features of Shamir's Secret Sharing Capacitor Plug-in?
- Secure Secret Splitting: Split sensitive data into encrypted shards using Shamir's Secret Sharing
- Cross-Platform: Native support for iOS, Android, and Web
- Flexible Storage: Memory-based and filesystem-based operations
- Progress Tracking: Real-time progress callbacks for all operations
- Performance Optimized: Efficient handling of large files and data
- Recovery Options: Restore complete secrets or individual shards
What are examples of Real-World Usage?
This plugin has already been battle-tested in production for a decade on almost a million iOS and Android devices, as a core component of Vault12 Guard, a mobile app that provides decentralized backup, and inheritance for crypto wallets and other sensitive data.
More information is at Github: https://github.com/vault12/capacitor-shamir
What Happens to Your Bitcoin When You Die? The Great Crypto Inheritance Crisis With Vault12
$6 trillion in crypto. Almost none of it has an inheritance plan. I chat with Wasim Ahmad, Co-Founder of Vault12, live at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas to talk about the crisis nobody in crypto is talking about: What actually happens to your digital assets when you're gone. Your will doesn't unlock your wallet. Your family can't call Bitcoin. And writing down your seed phrase anywhere creates a security risk that could drain everything overnight. Vault12 was built to solve exactly this. Using quantum-safe cryptography, it protects your crypto legacy without storing anything in the cloud, on a device, or on paper, so your family is protected and your assets stay secure until they're actually needed.
This is the conversation every crypto holder needs to have. And it starts here.
TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Introduction
0:33 - The $6 Trillion Crypto Inheritance Crisis Nobody Is Talking About
1:00 - What Actually Happens to Crypto When You Die
1:36 - How Vault12 Is Pioneering the Future of Crypto Inheritance
3:20 - 3 Dangerous Mistakes Crypto Holders Make With Their Digital Assets
4:30 - The Clarity Act Explained: What It Means for Every Crypto Holder
6:26 - How Crypto Regulation Opens the Door for Innovation and Growth 6:50 - How to Protect Your Crypto Legacy With Vault12 🔒
JOIN VAULT12 → https://vault12.com/
🐦 Follow Vault12 → https://x.com/Vault12
🐦 Follow Wasim → https://x.com/wasima
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL: Twitter ▶ / https://x.com/girlintheverse
Instagram ▶ / 
/ girlintheverse T
HIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. I am not a financial advisor. Everything I say as entertainment only. There are a lot of risks and it is important to know what they are. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. Know what you're getting into!
*** Special Offer for Podcast listeners Promo codes for Vault12 Guard
The iOS codes are good for 1 year subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. iOS codes can be redeemed in the Apple App Store.
The Android codes are good for 90 days subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. Android codes are redeemed when selecting and paying for the Inheritance plan in the app.
Instructions for how to redeem here.
Code: CMNYC26
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1451596986&code=CMNYC26
Android: Enter code CMNYC26 when you select the Inheritance plan
Girlintheverse:
Hey, it's Girl in the Verse. I'm here at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas and today I'm joined by Wasim Ahmad from Vol 12. We're going to be chatting about this great inheritance that we're talking about.
Wasim Ahmad:
It's amazing. $64 trillion worth of assets in total are going to be transferred to a new generation of asset owners, investors, and six to seven trillion dollars of that is going to be crypto assets.
Girlintheverse:
That's huge. That's not a small number. $7T crypto. And we're talking about younger generations. So what does this mean for our crypto, especially young people, we never think about the future somehow. I don't know why. We never think about what happens with all this crypto that I will inherit. What do I do with it?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, you can do whatever you want with it, but hopefully you'll keep it for a long, long time, but you have to make sure that you're protecting it, that it's safe, that it's private, that it's secure. And that should something happen to you, you pass away, you have an accident, you're incapacitated in some way, that your family can access those assets in the future, that there's a path for them to receive those assets.
Girlintheverse:
And you're building that. Vault12 is building this?
Wasim Ahmad:
Well, we're the pioneers of crypto inheritance. We started 10 years ago. In fact, my CEO, Max, was part of Andreessen Horowitz and helped Coinbase get its funding from A16Z. And so at that time he realized that if Coinbase was super, super successful, there'd be all these consumers that had cryptocurrency. At the time it was Bitcoin. And the security model for cryptocurrencies is that you have to secure them. No one's going to secure it for you. And then obviously later on we saw many, many other cryptocurrencies come in. And so he actually started Vault 12 at that time and in 2019 we had our app and we put it on the Google and the Apple app stores. And since then we have something like 400,000 people that have downloaded it. It enables people to create a digital vault, put in all of the information necessary to access those assets.
So the wallet seed phrase or the private key, or you can record a video with a riddle of like what the 12 seed phrase words are. It can be any digital information. And then when the time comes, you can specify who should receive that information. The information in the digital vault is encrypted. It's split into pieces and they're sent out to friends, family, professionals that you work with who will guard a sliver of your assets. They're not going to know what it is. It's not like multi-sig and it's very, very flexible. You can have like nine people, three family members, three friends, three professionals. And you can say as long as three of them say, okay, you can access, you can get access to the seed phrase, you can do all of those kinds of things.
Girlintheverse:
This reminds me of the memes of people digging up their hardware wallets in a park and thinking, "I'll let my family figure this out later, but this is a way better option."
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. I mean for a number of reasons. So burying your seed phrase is not a good idea because you may not be able to find it again. Putting it in the cloud, not a good idea, not because clouds are necessarily unsafe, but because clouds are seldom run by the company that you purchased the access from. And so if they fall out or they have businesses change, you may not be able to access those assets. And then some people I know, especially true of the Bitcoin conference, have their ledger devices around their neck. Again, something that is a local device can be lost, can be stolen. So again, not a good idea. So you want something, you want a way to store that information in a way that it stays private so that no one can rifle through it. No point in giving it to your lawyers in some office somewhere, but that's also not on the cloud.
It's not subject to accidental loss or erasure or any of those kinds of things. And so that's what Vault 12 is. It's an app that creates a digital vault and if you lose your phone, you can just recreate the vault on another phone and that's the beauty of it.
Girlintheverse:
I love it. It's very simple. I love it. Let's talk about this Clarity Act. We're in the US, everyone's waiting on this Clarity Act. Everyone's hoping that one zip passes, things will change for a lot of people. What is that going to do for Vault 12?
Wasim Ahmad:
So I think the most important thing surrounding the Clarity Act for Vault 12 customers is that once it passes, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, it's going to usher in an era of the crypto consumer. Up till now at conferences like this, we love to talk about institutions and institutional investing, but we are on the cusp. We are at the start of a journey for the crypto consumer and I expect that there's going to be a hundred million new crypto consumers that will come into this space and they'll come in not because some crypto exchange managed to grow their customer base, but because banks, retail banks will be able to offer crypto mortgages and crypto accounts, just like they offer stock trading on their platforms. Maybe it'll be Coinbase that's providing that behind the scenes, but it'll have a bank's logo on it. And because of that, because consumers by and large trust their banks, they will start to accumulate crypto.
And when they start to accumulate crypto, they'll need to think about, well, what happens if I pass away and like, how do I make sure that this goes to my kids? And for that, Vault 12 is perfect, but the market will grow and it'll be a 10 year journey of growing, but we haven't seen that yet. So this is a new era and I'm so excited to see that.
Girlintheverse:
I'm really excited too because we've been, like you said, we've been begging for regulation. We're tired of feeling like what are we going to do with our crypto and are we allowed to even use it and pay stuff with it or are people going to accept it? And now there may be this possibility where it's going to be easy peasy.
Wasim Ahmad:
It's just normal. They're not even going to call it crypto.
Girlintheverse:
Well, thank you so much, Wasim. Where can people learn more about Vault 12 and where can they join and participate?
Wasim Ahmad:
Yeah. So obviously we're on X, so you can find us at @Vault12 and then our website, vault12.com and you can download the app from there and it's in the app stores, so you can download it from the app stores as well.
Girlintheverse:
Thank you so much.
Wasim Ahmad:
Thank you.
How Coinbase led to the creation of Vault12 Crypto Inheritance
Recorded at DC Blockchain Summit 2026, Washington D.C.
🎙 Featured Panelists:
- Wasim Ahmad, Founding CMO & Business Development, Vault12
Youtube:
Rollup: We're hoping that we don't die anytime soon, but kind of tell us the impetus for this and really why it matters today, even for us young people.
Wasim Ahmad: Well, I think especially for all, because all of the stories around people dying and then their assets not being available to their families, are unfortunately young people. So everyone from the [inaudible 00:00:23] who did all kinds of stuff to make sure his crypto was secure, it was so secure that none of the family can get into the $200 million worth of crypto that he left. And he died very young. So yeah, I mean the impetus comes from when crypto was first taking off with Bitcoin.
My CEO was Andreessen Horowitz. He was part of the blockchain team and helped do the deal with Coinbase to get them funded. And he realized at the time that if Coinbase was successful, there'd be all these consumers that would have to deal with security of their assets during their lifetime, but also what happens to their Bitcoin when they die. And so he founded Vault 12 10 years ago, and it took us a little bit of coding work. And we launched in 2019 in the app store. So we're in the iOS app store and the Google Play Store.
*** Special Offer for Podcast listeners ***
Promo codes for Vault12 Guard
The iOS codes are good for 1 year subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. iOS codes can be redeemed in the Apple App Store.
The Android codes are good for 90 days subscription at no cost, then will revert to standard price for Inheritance plan. Android codes are redeemed when selecting and paying for the Inheritance plan in the app.
Instructions for how to redeem here.
Code: CMNYC25
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1451596986&code=CMNYC26
Android: Enter code CMNYC26 when you select the Inheritance plan
Wasim Ahmad, Founding CMO & Business Development, Vault12
Joe Ciccolo, Founder & President, BitAML
Josh Deems, Head of Americas, Figment
Kris Klaich, Senior Director of Operations & Policy, The Digital Chamber
Markus Veith, National Industry Leader Digital Assets, Blockchain & web3, Grant Thornton (moderator)
Boston Blockchain Week
Transcript
Markus Veith:
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We are going to talk about regulatory and legislative developments in a crypto space. And we're just going to do a quick round of introductions. As Ian already said, I'm Markus Veith. I'm a Partner. I'm the National Leader for Crypto Blockchain for the accounting firm Grant Thornton, and a pleasure to be here. I'll be your moderator.
Joe Ciccolo:
Hi, everybody. Joe Ciccolo, founder and President of BitAML. We provide regulatory compliance consulting services to the crypto space. I'm also the Executive Director of the California Blockchain Advocacy Coalition 501(c)(6) Trade Association, representing the interests of the crypto and broader Web3 community before the California legislature, California Governor's Office, and various state regulatory agencies.
Josh Deems:
Great, nice to meet everyone. My name is Josh Deems. I am Head of Americas for Figment. Figment is a staking services company headquartered in Canada, but we do a lot of work here in the US. I'm based in Boston, so it's nice to have an event like this in our backyard, which is fantastic. I've spent a lot of time working in the space, both in the Boston area with Fidelity and State Street prior and kind of full circle now bringing staking services to larger institutions, having the regulatory clarity that they've got over the last year. I'm really excited to talk to you all more about that today.
Wasim Ahmad:
Hi, everyone. My name is Wasim Ahmad. I am Co-Founder of a company called Vault12, and we handle crypto inheritance. A few years ago we issued tokens, and since then we've been encumbered by the lack of regulations here in the US and the lack of regulations in the UK and the ridiculous regulations that now exist in Europe. And so, I spent a lot of time commenting on bills, briefing politicians, briefing staffers, working with the Digital Chamber, working with other lobby groups, so lots to say on this subject.
Kristopher Klaich:
Hello, everybody, my name is Kristopher Klaich. I am a Senior Director of Operations and Policy at the Digital Chamber. We are the largest and first trade association for the industry. We represent around 160 companies to advocate and educate on their behalf largely to the federal government, but increasingly at the state level and internationally. And I lead our National Security Policy.
Markus Veith:
All right. So without further ado, let's get started. We have prepared a couple of questions and we have about 30 minutes. We don't have room for Q&A, so if you have any questions, please approach us after the sessions. We'll all be hanging around.
So let's get started. So we recently have seen the first piece of crypto legislation signed into law, the GENIUS Act. As stablecoins continue to grow and gain prominence and more adoption, I just wanted to start with that topic. So Josh, I'd like to start with you. Can you talk about some of the details with the GENIUS Act and what it means for the industry?
Josh Deems:
Yeah. So even just to zoom out one step further and talk about how the GENIUS Act fits within the overall framework that this current administration is pushing, at least from an agenda and policy perspective on crypto assets, there was kind of three main things or four main things that they're trying to accomplish. The first is come up with a regulatory framework for stablecoins. This exists in some way, shape, or form in Europe, exists in some way, shape, or form in Hong Kong. And this is really, shaping this was something that was critical to the second term of this Trump presidency. So that is kind of goal number one, is come up with a national framework for being able to issue and list a stablecoin. The second was really allow stablecoins to be issued by private entities and keep them out of this sort of surveillance style of what we call central bank digital currency. So those were kind of like the two stablecoin-related goals of this current congress and the current executive branch.
And then, on top of that is come up with a market structure bill, which is really at the heart of it determining what the SEC has the oversight over versus what the CFTC does, what constitutes a security versus a commodity, and all the downstream implications from there. And I guess the last is really just coming up with a way for the US to hold a strategic crypto reserve.
GENIUS Act is the first law that we have in the United States around cryptocurrencies, period. And it allows non-bank issuers as well as bank issuers to issue their own form of money, to issue a dollarized version on a blockchain. And it sort of prescribes how they want to see this done. There are reserve requirements, so how much can be held in short-term Treasuries, how much can be held in cash behind the actual issuance of the token. But really, this opens the door for companies like Circle to be able to list USDC and other firms to be able to interact with USDC as a payment mechanism under the law of the United States. So that's a major step forward in terms of a policy achievement under this administration.
For us at Figment, we're a producer of blocks, we're helping generate rewards for keeping the blockchain running. And so, the reason we like to see GENIUS, the reason stablecoins matter is people are using blockchains more. There's more demand for blockspace, meaning there are fees that are being paid to the chains in order to send stablecoin transactions. So ultimately, this benefits the overall crypto economic system, but in a way that is being done not through regulatory arbitrage, but also through having sound policy. So we were really excited to see the GENIUS Act get signed into law this July.
Markus Veith:
If I can just add one more thing on the requirements. As the accountant on the panel, the GENIUS Act also comes with reporting requirements, right? So as many of you know, most the stablecoin issuers outside of New York state, DFS has come up with a set of rules and requirements for stablecoin attestation. There's now a monthly stablecoin attestation requirement as well as the annual audit requirement that also comes with the Act.
Next up, just to stay with the stablecoins, I keep reading more and more about that banks and particularly regional banks are feeling the heat from stablecoin issuers, and they're feeling unfairly treated about some of the requirements they're subjected to versus non-bank regulated or non-state bank regulated stablecoin issuers. Josh, can you just also elaborate on that a little bit?
Josh Deems:
Yeah, so I think some of the state banks are under pressure or they're feeling competitive pressure because a company like Circle can condition with stablecoin not have the same reserve requirements as a regular bank and they're basically be able to bifurcate or sort of sort of bypass this dual banking system, this state-by-state banking framework that we've set up if you create a bank at a state level. So there'll probably be some changes to GENIUS. I think there's healthy debate and I think there's also bipartisan support to kind of work on some carve-outs that still also protect the state-level banks, but this was something that they'll fix over time, but not something that people have any real major opposition to.
Wasim Ahmad, Founding CMO & Business Development, Vault12
Josh Deems, Head of Americas, Figment
Kris Klaich, Senior Director of Operations & Policy, The Digital Chamber
Boston Blockchain Week
Markus Veith:
Great, thank you. So Josh already mentioned a little bit about the market structure bill, so just want to talk a little bit about the market structure bill, which is the next landmark legislation. Can you talk a little bit about the upcoming regulation, what you see in your space?
Wasim Ahmad:
Sure. So the market structure bill is the over-encompassing bill that will govern how the market works, who's going to regulate it, and how the market participants will interact with all of the rules that the regulators come up with. And so, there's a couple of pieces to this.
Firstly, what is the role of the SEC versus the CFTC? So that is being redefined and both of these regulators are getting focused on very, very specific areas.
So an example of that, the prior administration's SEC was very focused on enforcement with lawsuits and those kinds of things. Now they're very, very focused on not only innovation, I think all these bills support innovation, but they're focused on fraud. So they have a very specific mandate to root out and find fraud, which is great.
The CFTC is going to have jurisdiction over another range of commodities and will have to work hand in hand with the SEC. So there's sort of stipulations around how the SEC communicates with the CFTC to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Other parts of the market structure bill involve how companies who issue tokens, which may in the past have been considered securities, how they can transition to a different model where the token is being used inside the network, so in a very decentralized way. So these are some of the kinds of things that are coming along.
The status of it is that the House has passed a version of the CLARITY Act, and then there's a version from the Senate. But there's quite a lot of work that needs to happen over the next couple of months, and so it's heading to get signed by the end of the year. So that's kind of the timeline of the market structure bill, the actual law getting signed.
But if I may, there are some other layers that certainly this administration has been, from a strategic perspective, putting into all of the legislation. So there's overarching bills. A lot of what's in the GENIUS Act is referred to in the market structure bill. There's also guidelines like Safe Harbor that are being pursued, which is something that's coming from the SEC. So the idea is that all of these bills, all of these laws and then the rules underneath, are layered so that if one of them is rescinded by a future administration, there's still protection for the overall market. And I think this is a very good thing. It means that things will take a little longer to get done. Originally, CLARITY Act was supposed to be signed by August 1st and then it was September 30th, but I think third time lucky, I think we're on track for post-Thanksgiving.
The other thing to note just in this area of regulations, the laws are the laws, but the rules are what the regulators will give to the market, and the rules also have to be formulated. And obviously, everyone is beavering away. The SEC is super busy doing that right now. I know because I've been talking to them.
Some of those rules may have some kind of 90-day consultation period, some of them which are a lower level, maybe it's better to call it guidance, can just be issued, communicated to the market and they go into effect straight away. So after the law is signed, there's going to be a period of time before all of the rules are in place and we actually have a way to participate in the market and be very, very clear about how things work. So we're not done December 30th, but it's coming. And it hasn't been coming for many years and now there's tremendous momentum here. And the best thing about the market structure bill is it's going to usher in an era of consumer crypto, which is the biggest I think, opportunity especially here in Massachusetts with all the financial services companies here.
Kristopher Klaich:
I can add a little bit of color because we're in the weeds on these issues, helping to develop the policy and the laws. We're working directly with Congress and the senators and their staff and the congressmen and their staff to help flesh out the details of what will go into these bills based on our members' interests and input. And then, as you mentioned, after a bill is passed, we are working with the regulators to help flesh out what those rules are, responding to the request for comment from Treasury, from FinCEN, from SEC and CFDC, for example, to help define how those laws are actually implemented in practice. And so, that's a long, much more convoluted process than the average crypto or blockchain adherent would maybe realize, but it's a long ugly process sometimes and that's what we do to help advocate on behalf of our members to make sure that the industry can thrive in the US.
Markus Veith:
Thank you.
Wasim Ahmad, Founding CMO & Business Development, Vault12
Joe Ciccolo, Founder & President, BitAML
Josh Deems, Head of Americas, Figment
Kris Klaich, Senior Director of Operations & Policy, The Digital Chamber
Markus Veith, National Industry Leader Digital Assets, Blockchain & web3, Grant Thornton (moderator)
Boston Blockchain Week
Joe Ciccolo:
Yes. I just wanted to add, similarly, in California we're going through, I mentioned rulemaking working with our regulators. So in California we passed DFAL, Digital Financial Assets Law. It's comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto, including oversight of stablecoin issuers. And that was signed back in 2023 pre-GENIUS, so we're grappling with what that might look like. There's language already in GENIUS that would put in preemption for state level. And so, there's a feeling in California that we worked so hard to build this infrastructure and staffing, and now we're sort of going, "Are we going to oversee? What's that going to look like? Is there going to be licensing? Maybe, but maybe some of the aspects of the rulemaking won't go through." So right now, going through the rulemaking process for DFAL, which goes live July 1st of next year. So that's regulating crypto exchanges, trading platforms, but also the stablecoin issuers. That Chapter 6 of Assembly Bill 39, which would oversee stablecoin issuers, is kind of in flux at the moment. And so, through the rulemaking process, there's been several notice of public engagement and not one has dealt with stablecoin topics.
So we're sort of deer in the headlights in California, and I think that brings up a broader issue of what that might look like at the state levels when we have preemption. And as I understand it, in CLARITY or at least one of the more recent versions I saw, there was preemption in that as well. So what does that mean for all the state regulators that are counting on their ability to continue to oversee various aspects of the crypto marketplace?
Markus Veith:
Yeah. It's interesting, right? I've been involved with crypto for 10 years now, 10, 11 years. And at the beginning it was like the Wild West, right? Most of the entrepreneurs consider themselves and may still consider themselves to be running a technology firm. My background is banking and banking risk, credit risk management, but I always said, "Look, this looks to me like a broker dealer like a bank." And I was always expecting 10 years down the road, crypto companies will have some kind of a banking or broker dealer license.
And then, 2022 happened, came around and everybody was crying foul and looking for being rescued, being bailed out and, "Where's the federal regulator?" Right? You can't have it both ways. I'm a proponent of regulation, but it needs to be sensible. It needs to protect the users, specifically individuals, consumers, but it also needs to give the flexibility for companies to grow and explore and expand. So it's glad to see after 10 years of back and forth, maybe, maybe not that we finally see some traction.
And I think we're going to talk a little bit more, it has to be bipartisan. Right? It cannot be a partisan issue. Crypto is not a national, it's not a political thing. It's international. It's a technology that we all want to benefit and harvest and see the best use of it.
So next up, I want to talk a little bit about the SEC's recent take on staking. So the SEC has declared certain staking services as not a security offering. And Josh, I know Figment is dealing with it on the forefront. Can you tell the audience a little bit more what is staking and how does it impact the thought process at SEC? How does it impact the industry?
Josh Deems:
Yeah. So basically, staking is a consensus mechanism that non-Bitcoin effectively protocols operate on top of which requires participants to lock their tokens without transferring the custody of them into a validator. That validator then is responsible for securing the blockchain for basically voting and attesting to transactions happening on the blockchain. And in return for providing that service for locking up your tokens, you earn a reward. And that reward is usually in two components. One is new inflation, so the new issuance of tokens on the blockchain, and the second is in the form of transaction fees, so fees that users are paying to each other to transact on chain.
We did not have clarity in the United States on whether or not staking, using or holding Ethereum or Solana or any of these tokens that have staking embedded within their operating, within their consensus mechanism, whether or not that constituted the creation of a security, right? You're earning rewards by validating a blockchain network. Us and our competitors and pretty much everybody had gotten legal opinion that stated staking does not, it's a technology service, but there was nothing really at the highest level of government.
And so, on May 29th, we actually received notice from the SEC, or not notice, but we received non-binding guidance that basically stated staking does not constitute the offering of a security when it's offered in the way that we do and most of our competitors offer it, which was huge news for us. It just gave us a sigh of relief, because it gave legitimacy to what we were doing and the rules looked exactly as we had thought that they would be designed. Again, it's non-binding guidance so if there were to be a new SEC that were to come in under a new administration, that could potentially go away. But that was a really good step in the right direction.
The second thing is about a month and a half later, the SEC followed up with guidance around liquid staking token. So we talked about what staking is, a liquid staking token is a representation of a stake position, but it's liquid, it's tokenized. So my stake Ethereum can become tokenized. I can deposit my Ethereum in a protocol called Lido and receive ST ETH or staked ETH back. But I can trade that, I can transact that, which I can't do when my Ethereum is locked. The SEC came out and said, "LST, those liquid staked tokens, also don't constitute the creation of a security in July guidance.
So I think, very similar to you, Wasim, I've been in lockstep with a crypto task force over the last couple of months. I think again, it's just a signal. If anything it's symbolic, that this SEC is willing to engage, willing to have the conversation, willing to be educated. We've done teach-ins. They've said, "Hey, just come in and tell us how these things work." We'll bring people from our engineering team or our compliance team or whoever to come in and just engage. And I think that sort of engagement is leading to good decisions, even though it's not law, at least rules that operators like us can abide by, so yeah.
We think the next thing that will happen from here on out is the whole reason we want the SEC to kind of be in favor of staking as a technology service, not constitute the offering of a security, is so that the ETFs, the impending Solano ETFs and the existing Ethereum ETFs in the United States, which have almost $20 billion of assets in them, can stake those assets; because today they can't because there wasn't this type of clarity around whether or not the act of staking created a security or not.
Markus Veith:
Thank you. Just one more point, you mentioned you got a legal letter, right? I think before the shift in the stance by the SEC, I think law firms were less and less willing to issue a legal letter, right? Because as an accountant, I deal with it. I would be the one that says, "Hey, do you have a legal letter, a legal opinion that says it's not a securities offering?" And law firms, like accounting firms, have been holding back saying, "Look, this is becoming too risky. It's becoming too hot a topic." So it's good to see that we're finally making progress here.
So next up, we already talked a little bit about the state level, so I'd like to hear a little bit more how the federal initiatives impact the state level. And if you can also talk a little bit what we mentioned about the bipartisan and blue versus red states a little bit, if you can.
Joe Ciccolo:
Yeah, and I think I talked about preemption before, and I think that's a concern for the states having their sort of orbit of regulatory oversight and what does that look like in response. And I think that there's a lot of wait and see on that.
As far as bipartisanship, I've met with some of the other chapters or other groups at different states, both red and blue and I guess purple, we can throw that in the mix. And we agree, we want to make this bipartisan or nonpartisan at all. And so, I've met with some of the other blue state leadership and how can we elevate the voices of folks that are out there that have been enthusiastic about crypto and it just so happens they're Democrats. How do we make sure that we don't lose them in the process? And at the same time as an extension of that, how do we bring on board more Democrats and more folks on the liberal side of the aisle that do support crypto, and what does that look like so it doesn't become about one particular elected official or one particular political party.
And different ways of achieving that, right? In California, we talk about the balance between protecting consumers and being pro-innovation. Right? We have Silicon Valley and we sort of fancy ourselves being ahead of the curve on protecting consumers; both noble pursuits that I don't think are mutually exclusive, so using that. And then, maybe if we talk to some folks from Texas, we might get a different opinion about the swashbuckling entrepreneur and how can we mine more crypto and things like that. So it's about appealing to the constituency and finding what resonates in terms of messaging.
Real quick, since it was mentioned before, we were talking about staking; so following that, a lot of the states rescinded their cease and desist against staking rewards. California was not one of those states. There's still an active cease and desist that targeted Coinbase, although it's widely viewed as a blanket across the board. So Commissioner Mohseni said he'll reconsider that in a recent conversation with me, so hopefully he'll follow up and take a look at that. But it just sort of shows that it's not sort of one-to-one, right? The federal government does something and the states go, "Oh, that sounds good to me." There's still going to be a back and forth and a little bit of a tug of war going on.
Markus Veith:
Great, thank you. So kind of like to round it up, I want to get back to the federal level. Chris, can you talk a little bit more or take a look at the crystal ball and see what you think we'll see in the near future as other federal regulation or initiatives that will give us regulatory clarity?
Kristopher Klaich:
Sure. Yeah. So right now the administration's three main priorities are developing the rules and regulations that will flow out of the GENIUS Act that was passed at the end of July; developing the market structure legislation that we've talked about, that has to go through a process which I can break down a little bit more; and then, also the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act. Those are the three main priorities that the administration has and is leaning in to hard.
The process for having the market structure bill passed, as I mentioned before, it's much more complex than just throwing some words on a paper and having a vote in sometime over the next few months. Right now we have new language that has come out of the Senate Banking Committee that we and others have helped to shape by providing input into what we think ought to be in the bill. That will be marked up, which is really sort of a public opportunity where the Senate Banking Committee comes together to edit and debate the bill inside the committee.
The Senate Agriculture Committee is doing the same thing. They're probably a month or so behind, give or take. So we are waiting for language, draft language to come from the Senate Agriculture Committee for their portions of the bill. The industry will comment on it, provide some feedback, and there will be a markup on that bill in the Senate Agriculture Committee sometime probably in end of October, potentially November, ideally with a vote before Congress goes out of session for the end of the year.
That's probably the best case scenario. And like I said, the administration is leaning very hard on Congress to get something done, but you just never know. I say this in a loving way. I cut my teeth in D.C. working in the Senate, but Congress is sort of like a cat with a laser pointer. And again, I don't mean that to demean them, but they end up being focused on whatever is in the front page of the news. So if there is an attack, there's a war, something like that, attention can shift very quickly and momentum can stall very quickly. And so, the time to act is to push now and to try to get something completed as soon as possible.
Wasim Ahmad, Founding CMO & Business Development, Vault12
Joe Ciccolo, Founder & President, BitAML
Josh Deems, Head of Americas, Figment
Kris Klaich, Senior Director of Operations & Policy, The Digital Chamber
Markus Veith, National Industry Leader Digital Assets, Blockchain & web3, Grant Thornton (moderator)
Boston Blockchain Week
Markus Veith:
Great, thank you. And just I guess the last question real quick, just a sentence or two, I just want to ask the panelists what they think we will see in the next five years near-term, mid-term from a regulatory development. Chris, do you want to start?
Kristopher Klaich:
I think if we do have the market structure bill passed over the next several months, real world assets and asset tokenization has, many companies are already jumping in even without full clarity because they see the writing on the wall and the opportunity is just massive, massive from a financial perspective and efficiencies perspective. So I think that focus will shift there. And the focus is never far from the national security issues as well. That is an underlying and continual concern that won't go away regardless of what is passed and when it's passed.
Markus Veith:
Wasim.
Wasim Ahmad:
Sure. I think market structure bill getting signed means a huge wave of momentum for consumer crypto financial services. Every bank will offer exposure to crypto, and then exposure to other services like insurance, inheritance, et cetera. And hopefully we'll see the end of our reliance on software wallets and not ridiculous hardware wallets and we'll just deal with all of that on devices like this, which is strong enough to hold my passport so it should be strong enough to hold my crypto.
Josh Deems:
Yeah, I'm with you, Wasim. I really believe in this idea of a super app where you can have access to your banking, your crypto, your commodities, your stocks. You can pay anybody anywhere at any time without any sort of intervention or anyone in between. I think that's like if we land a market structure bill and we do it right, I think we'll have this sort of concept in the US. The last thing I'll say is I want to own Bitcoin and I want to own Solana and Ethereum and be able to stake those two in my retirement account. That's a lofty goal.
Joe Ciccolo:
Fantastic. What do I see in crystal ball? I think the turf war is going to ramp up the states and the federal government, not just with GENIUS, but presuming that CLARITY moves forward in some form or fashion I think the issue of preemption is going to remain. And I think you're going to see the states sort of push back, a lot of that obviously driven by politics, and so we will see that how that shakes out. The state regulators aren't going away. There's not going to be a spirit of Halloween banner across the state regulatory agency offices. It's just going to be a matter of who's going to oversee what and how they complement or don't complement each other.
Markus Veith:
All right. Thank you very much.
Media
Vault12 Guard provides inheritance, and secure decentralized backup of seed phrases and/or private keys, giving Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH).
View all articlesHow to subscribe to Vault12 Guard with $ETH and $VGT (and get a 50% Discount)
Updated: Apple now allows external crypto payments
Overview
It's easy to set up a subscription plan for Vault12 Guard, whether you use the Apple iOS App Store or Google Play Store, or you want to use cryptocurrency like Ethereum (ETH) or the Vault Guardian Token (VGT) to pay for a subscription plan.
This article takes you through the step by step process to subscribe using VGT or ETH on the same device as your digital Vault. You can see an overview of the steps in the this video:
Step 1. Go to pay.vault12.com on your mobile device
To start the subscription or plan upgrade, visit pay.vault12.com. The following flow shows you how to complete your plan subscription on the same device as your Vault12 Guard app.
Further down in this article, you can see the flow if you are using two different devices, e.g., a mobile with the Guard app and a laptop to browse the payment website.
View Details
From the pay.vault12.com page, click on the link "Have the Guard app on this device?"
Now, press the "Connect to Vault" button to choose the Vault you will be creating a subscription for.
Step 2. Connect to Vault12 Guard app
When prompted, Open the Guard app.
Press OK to confirm a successful connection.
Step 3. Choose Plan
Now on your browser, choose a plan.
For full Inheritance and Backup capabilities, choose the "Inheritance" plan.
Step 4. Plan Payment
Now you will see the plan details, including length of subscription and the renewal date.
To make the payment, open your digital wallet that holds your VGT or ETH funds, and scan the QR code. This will automatically fill in the details of the amount, and the destination address for the payment.
Automatic Discount for $VGT
If your wallet does not use QR codes, then you will need to type in the details of the destination address, and the payment amount.
Note: The payment amount must be entered exactly as shown on the screen - please double check the amount carefully to prevent typos. (Using the QR code, you never have to enter this information.)
If you have selected VGT as the payment type, then you will automatically receive a 50% discount, and the amount shown will be the discounted price.
Step 5. Payment Complete
Once the funds have been transferred, you will see a confirmation in your browser.
When you open the Vault12 Guard app, you will see a message confirming the subscription.
Subscription Status
At any time you can review "Settings" / "Plans & Payment" in the Guard app to see the status of your subscription. In this example, you can see that a whole year of the new subscription remains.
Alternate approach using your mobile and a second device
Go to pay.vault12.com using a laptop or second device that is separate from your device with the Vault12 Guard app installed.
You will be brought to a webpage with a Vault12 code to scan. Leave this page open, because you will be scanning the code using your Guard mobile app.
Scan the code using Vault12 Guard
Once you have opened the Vault12 Guard app on your mobile phone, click on the QR code Scan icon in the top right hand corner and scan the QR code from the browser.
Scan the code on the webpage by positioning the mobile camera so the code is in clear view. Your app will automatically perform the scan.
Select a Plan
After scanning the code, your browser will refresh to the Vault12 web dashboard. Choose a plan by tapping the "Upgrade" button on the bottom of the card that reflects your preferred plan.
Upgrade your plan and get VGT Discount
At the top of the Plan Upgrade screen, you'll see a toggle "Pay with" offering a choice of paying with VGT or ETH. You can get the discount by choosing the "VGT" toggle option to view the amount of your plan payable in VGT.
To make the payment, open your digital wallet with your VGT or ETH funds (Metamask or your choice of wallets), and scan the QR code. This will automatically fill in the details of the amount, and the destination address for the payment.
If your wallet does not use QR codes, then you will need to type in the details of the destination address, and the payment amount.
Note: The payment amount must be entered exactly as shown on the screen - please double check the amount carefully to prevent typos. (Using the QR code, you never have to enter this information.)
50% Discount with VGT
If you paid for your plan with VGT, then your 50% discount was automatically applied. Congratulations!
If you chose the ETH option, then the subscription cost is the normal plan cost.
Plan upgraded
After you pay the correct unique amount with your wallet and the transaction has finalized in the network (~ 1 minute), you will see a "Payment received" confirmation, and your subscription will be activated.
Congratulations - Your subscription Upgrade is complete
At any time you can check your plan status in your Vault12 Guard app.
