Iconiq For Crypto
A trusted organization that serves as a referral-driven advisory firm for crypto founders, protocol execs, early employees, and HNW crypto holders; pseudo-family office for advisory, data, access, security, planning, tax/legal coordination to manage & maximize long-term wealth.
The reason ICONIQ mattered in its earliest years was because it was a firm built around its clients’ lives, legacies and community; it was effectively a family-office-style advisor for elite tech founders that oftentimes allocated to outside managers rather than forcing everything it did into one captive product set.
Crypto-native wealth management is largely lacking with limited options and underdeveloped sophistication. Some of this can be attributed to the nascency of the asset class but many of those newly minted high-net-worth individuals don’t have a proper avenue for efficiently managing existing wealth and leveraging their capital for new wealth creation. What it needs is a combination of efficiently managed tax advisory, trusted wealth management, access, an early-curated client set and a network that compounds on itself. It is especially true that this network may not be exclusively cryptonative/crypto-only as many of those who have built their wealth in crypto do not have much (if any) touch-points to other emerging areas of interest (despite their best efforts to brute force this in some cases).
This company should have a few layers:
Zero hidden balance sheet risk (i.e. there is no rehypothecating, no opaque yield, no “trust us” lending book/services).
Reference-based growth (<10 initial clients)
Overly transparent operational seriousness. This means registration where necessary, an emphasis on almost overcommunicating all of the security measures, insurances where meaningful, documented controls, sanctions/AML discipline, 24/7 availability/services, visibility into additional services available. Part of this should also likely include education for the whole family system (i.e. spouse, heirs, trustees, estate attorneys, etc).
The ideal founding team here likely has experience inside the crypto founder/protocol/fund universe and/or high-level experience as an operator in private wealth, treasury or structured advisory. Ideally they have in mind a handful of initial first clients they’d target and have visibility into warm intros.
The early mistake here would be chasing scale too quickly and underappreciating how important the closed, intimate and high-touch / referral-based model is. Trust and legitimacy should be held precious. This trust layer also means not steering clients into products/positions/affiliates that would in any way compromise the relationship and the core underlying promise.
