“Sometimes we look at things that we say, ‘you know what, we should get out,’ and sometimes we don’t. And last week, we did not get out as quickly.”
This is what Maximilian Pace, the chief technical officer of BlockTrust IRA, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
BlockTrust IRA, an AI cryptocurrency retirement platform, was among the many crypto-focused companies that suffered from the brutal sell-off that gripped the market last week.
Related: 136-year-old investment firm predicts next Bitcoin crash
Bitcoin (BTC), XRP (XRP), Ethereum (ETH), publicly listed companies with crypto in their balance sheet, no one was spared.
Bitcoin often signals market sentiment with its movements. Once it falls, it drags others along. Last week, Bitcoin fell below the threshold of $70,000 to as low as $62,000. The move marked Bitcoin’s biggest plunge since it traded at similar levels in October 2024.
At press time, Bitcoin was slowly climbing back, trading at $70,724.70
Bitcoin’s plunge from its October peak has reignited the debate over whether crypto has any space in the American retirement system.
The speed and severity of the crypto sell-off caught many firms off guard.
BlockTrust IRA, which has added $70 million in IRA funds over the past 12 months, found itself in the middle of the bloodbath.
Pace said the firm relies on a “broad sense of analytics” designed to perform over longer time horizons rather than react to short-term market noise. That approach helped the company outperform in 2025, and Pace said the firm is “not necessarily wavered by volatility.”
For Pace, the key is perspective.
“There are ways of de-risking the investment, either from a time perspective or from a strategy perspective, that make it more attractive or more acceptable for things like 401(k) programs. But like anything, there’s risk,” he said.
At the core of the concern is risk. Crypto is still a young and highly volatile asset class, where price moves in minutes and hours, at times due to speculation. But pension funds are designed for steady, predictable growth.
In August, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order allowing 401(k) and other defined-contribution retirement plans to access alternative assets, including digital assets.
Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at the Duke Financial Economics Center and co-host of the “Coffee & Crypto” podcast, said that many retirement plans already gain indirect exposure to crypto through publicly traded companies like Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), which are included in major equity indices.
