Company: STAA
Filing Date: 2025-10-09
Form Type: DFAN14A
Source: 0001213900-25-097833
Chunk: 12

Company: STAAR SURGICAL CO
Filing Date: 2025-10-09
Form: DFAN14A
Chunk 12
---
 it to make often quite long-term loans.
The loans went bad, the depositors asked for their crypto back, and various crypto platforms — Celsius, Voyager, Genesis, FTX —
blew up. This is a well-understood problem, but people conveniently forgot it during the boom, and crypto had no mechanisms — no
lender of last resort, no deposit insurance, no particular discipline about capital or liquidity — to mitigate it.

The obvious solution is that crypto life insurers
should make the crypto loans? Bloomberg’s Muyao Shen reports:

Apollo, Northwestern Mutual, Pantera
Capital and Stillmark are joining Bain Capital and crypto investor Haun Ventures to back the Bitcoin life insurance firm Meanwhile in
a $82 million funding round.

The Bermuda-regulated insurer, which
claims to be the first life insurer to offer products entirely denominated in crypto, began to provide policies in 2023. The firm invests
policyholders’ premiums by lending Bitcoin to large, regulated financial institutions. Zac Townsend, a co-founder and chief executive
officer of Meanwhile, said the firm is now “one of the largest lenders of Bitcoin in the world at duration,” or over longer
periods of time.

“We are not running a hedge fund
or trading desk or worried about the price of Bitcoin day-to day or week-to-week or month-to-month,” Townsend said in an interview.
“We engage on this side of the business in institutional B2B, private credit.”

I mean. Yes. Also there’s a tax trade:

Meanwhile’s life insurance products
also provide tax advantages for Bitcoin holders. After two years, policyholders can borrow up to 90% of their policy’s Bitcoin value
in a tax-free manner, according to the firm’s website. The borrowed Bitcoin will adopt a new cost basis, allowing the policyholders
to sell the Bitcoin without triggering capital gains taxes.

Tai Lopez

We talked last month about allegations
that Retail Ecommerce Ventures, which bought RadioShack and other brands out of bankruptcy and pivoted them to online commerce, was a
Ponzi scheme. We had actually talked about REV before, because in 2021 Tai Lopez, an REV co-founder who was charged last month, said
he was “taking RadioShack on the blockchain, it’ll be the first huge mainstream brand that flipped completely into a crypto.”
What I did not know was that Lopez is a famous peddler of YouTube self-help programs who is best known for, like, keeping his Lamborghini