Approved IAR CE Courses

Clients with bitcoin may seek to fund a trust, retain a concentrated position, provide for beneficiaries, or prepare for incapacity and death. Investment advisers need to identify how ownership, decision authority, custody and administration fit together, and where legal, tax or fiduciary expertise is required. This workshop examines direct trust ownership, trust-owned LLC structures, directed and discretionary roles, and the main categories of custody arrangement. Participants consider concentration, liquidity, conflicts of interest, recordkeeping and succession through a hypothetical client case. The focus is the adviser's role in evaluating the situation, documenting unresolved issues and coordinating the appropriate professionals.

Instructor conflict disclosure and mitigation: The instructors are affiliated with Unchained, a sponsor of the event. Christina McDonagh is Chief Investment Officer of Gannett Trust Company, an independent subsidiary of Unchained, and Stephen Pollock is a Growth Director at Unchained. Unchained contributed subject matter input to the course. To mitigate this conflict, the course materials were reviewed by an independent content reviewer with no commercial interest in the subject matter; custody and trust approaches are compared generically across the categories available in the market; no company, product, platform, logo or URL appears in the instructional materials; the affiliation is disclosed on the opening slide and orally; and no sales solicitation, contact collection or follow-up offer is permitted. BFFS staff attend the full session.

This course gives investment adviser representatives a structured framework for evaluating investment products that offer Bitcoin exposure or Bitcoin-linked income. Participants distinguish Bitcoin-denominated from dollar-denominated returns, separate returns produced by market mechanics from returns produced by an operating business, identify structural features such as wrapping, rehypothecation, and synthetic exposure, and assess whether a product's return thesis depends on a temporary market condition. The course compares two established Bitcoin-linked structures in generic terms (leveraged corporate-treasury common equity and perpetual preferred stock), sets out design criteria that apply to any Bitcoin-linked product, and applies a three-component evaluation framework in a case study. No issuer, product, or service is named or recommended. Instructor disclosure: Wyatt O'Rourke owns Basilic Financial LLC, a registered investment adviser that evaluates Bitcoin investment products for clients, and is a co-founder and 50% owner of BFFS Media LLC, the provider. Wyatt is also a co-founder of Pax Partners, which offers a Bitcoin-linked investment product whose design includes the components evaluated in this course. Mitigation: all content was reviewed by an independent reviewer with no commercial interest in the subject matter; the course uses anonymized, hypothetical products only; and the framework is taught as one evaluation lens applied to all product categories.

This course examines how an investment adviser representative's fiduciary duties of care and loyalty apply when clients ask about, hold, or allocate to Bitcoin. Participants work through applied scenarios: a near-retirement client's large allocation request; the choice among custody models (qualified custodian, multi-key arrangements, client self-custody) and how each affects adviser custody obligations under federal and state rules; an adviser's obligations after a third-party security incident affecting assets the adviser does not manage; and conflicts from personal digital asset trading and firm affiliations. Code of Ethics controls and Form ADV disclosure are covered as tools for managing those conflicts. No product, platform, or service provider is featured or endorsed. Instructor disclosure: the instructor is founder and CEO of a regulatory compliance consulting firm whose clients include registered investment advisers that advise on digital assets; an investment adviser owned by a co-owner of the course provider is a client of that firm. The instructor has no ownership in the course provider, and his firm is not an event sponsor.