How zerohash won Morgan Stanley's crypto business

0:00Hi, this is Lex, and welcome to the Fintech Blueprint. It's your podcast about Fintech, decentralized finance, digital banking, investing, robot advice, artificial intelligence, and all the other frontier technology that is transforming financial services. To get more content, like an illustrated transcript of this conversation in your inbox, subscribe at FintechBlueprint.com. So without further delay, let's jump into today's episode. Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's conversation. I'm so pleased to have with us again Edward Woodford, who is the founder and CEO of ZeroHash. ZeroHash is one of the original companies focused on embedded crypto and digital asset infrastructure and has been a fantastic success. So I'm really excited to learn more about how the last few years have gone and generally

1:03catch up with Edward. Four years ago, Edward was on the show with a very clear number. ZeroHash was processing 5% of all Ethereum transactions. This time, he's on the show with quite a few other numbers. We're a $65 billion settled, 7 million end customers, and Morgan Stanley building its E-Trade crypto offering on ZeroHash Rails. That is a lot of growth, and I'm really excited for this conversation. We recorded the podcast earlier in the year, and everything that Edward teased in his conversation has come to market. The E-Trade integration is live, the staking infrastructure has launched, the Treasury published the first proposed rules under the Genius Act. So you can see how those predictions came to market. Also, Stripe and Visa answered his M&A predictions with something even bigger, a 140 company

2:03stablecoin consortium. So all of this convergence is happening in new ways. There are three things I would tell you to pay attention to in the conversation. First, the product that large financial companies are buying isn't just technology or licensing, but actually trust risk transfer and doing that at large scale. Second, that on-chain money or crypto has turned into legally distinct categories. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized money market funds, and each one has its own rulebook. And finally, the absolutely incredible journey of sticking with a company for a long time and seeing it go from idea to product market fit to becoming a really important part of the industry structure. So with that, welcome to the conversation. Thank you. Yeah, four years by the calendar by crypto, you stablecoin years, like dog years. So maybe like speaking for 21 years ago, it's been 200 years.

3:05Yeah, it's exactly. Some fun facts about last time we talked, the key number you had come in with was that zero hash was processing 5% of all Ethereum transactions. That was an amazing number. And I think now zero hash has had over 65 billion in volume settled and over 7 million customers over these four years. So you've been pretty busy. Tell us what you've been up to, like what's happened? So a lot has obviously shifted, I think, from both macro perspective and just a general perspective. I mean, look, the business has got bigger, which is a good thing. We've always tried to not make a trade off between scaling and trust. And so what we've really seen is some of the largest fis come to zero hash and build and zero hash, right? Groups like Morgan Stanley and others. And we've become a more global business since we last chatted. So we are now licensed in Europe under both a meeker and EMI licensing framework.

4:09And so if there's been all of that natural evolution, I also like to talk about the macro opportunity, right? So obviously there's been a lot of regulatory clarity that's been provided and a lot of opportunity that has enabled groups to enter the space for the first time. But then also just the kind of the distribution of the technology is also scaled. We kind of use this analogy of all this metric of how many stablecoin enabled accounts are there globally. And so that we're basically adding up how many people have a revolutionary account that has a stablecoin wallet naturally enabled G cash, Robin Hood, the new bank. And obviously that evolution has scaled tremendously, which for us, for a business like us, which is a transactional business, having all of those endpoints that have now been naturally created, naturally creates a driving a driving force in terms of being able to drive more, more use cases and applications. And so we now power things like account funding and stablecoins instant funding, payouts globally. So there's been a lot of evolution across the landscape. And there's definitely been a rising tide.

5:11And I think we've risen fast enough tide. That's always our goal. Yeah, I mean, look, it's a great place to be. Let's revisit the foundations. I think if we kind of rewind back maybe five years or even longer now, there was this idea of embedding finance in lots of different applications and lots of different websites. And there were different kinds of finance that you could embed. You could embed a bank account. You could embed a traditional brokerage or custodian account. And I remember kind of some of the early positioning for ZeroHash was, you know, how do you embed crypto trading into an application? And I think at the time also there was a lot of growth in things like on and off ramps and MoonPay had a big round. So sort of a bit muddy in the market overall, but because people didn't really know what it is that they wanted to embed. And there's been this huge evolution in both the blockchain side and embedded finance. So can you talk a little bit about what the core of the business was at its founding and

6:16then what has that evolved to over time? Yeah, no, it's certainly interesting. I mean, we definitely come to some degree full circle with this concept of the everything application that we now see. And so whether that be to be able to do payments within the same application through stable coins or whether that be embedding crypto as part of an investment or rewards product, we certainly seen that drive. And I think that's certainly been helpful for us because we provide that gateway for traditional fIs to offer crypto and stable coin infrastructure. If we take a step back to when we founded the business in 2017, we started the business to be primarily a B2B business and all B2C business, but really the consumer was an institution. We very quickly realized that if our thesis was that this was a technology that was going to be everywhere, there was certainly going to be some new entrance to the space with creative destruction leading to new companies. And we've certainly seen that with groups like Coinbase. But were we best positioned to be that kind of new entrance or were we best positioned

7:20to bridge the opportunity for traditional enterprise and fIs into the space? And so we very quickly realized that we wanted to move into a pure play infrastructure business. And so we switched gears, I mean, within 12 months of launching the business. And obviously we've gone through a number of different cycles and we've been able to grow in scale. There's been lots of, I would say, shiny things in the space and they continue to be shiny things. And I think I always say to our team, let's not be a magpie. And what I mean by that is let's just go to the shiny thing and try and pick those things up, whether it be, for example, NFTs or, for example, the stable coin sound, which was invoked for a long time. And I think these things go through trends. And I think ultimately you've got to say, like does this have long time stay in power? Is this fundamentally 10x better than what we have today? And is there a huge opportunity? And so that's kind of how we built the business and you've seen some of these ups and downs over the last four years since we last chatted in that way.

8:22So when you think about the core pillars, not the shiny bits, but the main core pillars, what are they and how are they structured? Yeah, so look fundamentally we're a technology business that believes that blockchain will help rewire the way that value moves globally. And we really productize that into kind of three core product verticals that crisscross many customer segments and increasingly our customers are using one or more of these products. So the first product that we offer is what we call our trade product, which is effectively an invest in product with crypto at its core. So this is where we've seen, for example, Morgan Stanley, interactive brokers, public.com, one pay, which is a warm up spin out, all offer crypto trading as part of a native application and experience through zero hash. The second is what we call our transact business, which is actually our largest business, you know, accounts for close to 7% of our revenue.

9:22And this is effectively leveraging stablecoins in crypto as a payment method. And here we power groups like gusto in terms of two sided marketplaces offering payouts globally. We can talk more about how we think they were intersect with agents, but effectively in terms of payroll today, payroll to humans, that is a huge and growing part of our business. And then as well, what we call account funding, enabling people to leverage stablecoins to fund an account, whether that be a gaming account or whether that be a brokerage account or whether that be an FX account through through our infrastructure. And then finally is tokenization where we offer infrastructure to allow groups to tokenize things on the blockchain. Now the commonality of all of those things is this is technology and this is moving value. And at its core, it's the same infrastructure enabling, you know, a piece of a theorem to move on chain is fundamentally the same as moving a piece of USDC on a theorem, as well as moving a piece of tokenized stock on the Ethereum blockchain.

10:24It's fundamentally the same, but what we've been really good at and has continued to do over the last four years is effectively productize on the edge to make it really simple. But at its core, it's the same fundamental engine across all three of those product stocks. And like I mentioned, our payments businesses are largest by some significant size, but we're seeing huge growth in our tokenization business as more and more companies look to come on chain and to leverage blockchain as a mechanism of value transfer. So I want to go into some of the client names you mentioned, but before that, I want to double click on the infrastructure you're talking about, you know, a lot of that is tech, but a lot of that is also a regulatory footprint, you know, an attempt to navigate very different requirements and lots of different places under very different political regimes. But a high level, how much of the product is the regulatory chassis versus tech?

11:25And then kind of the follow up to that is how has it changed over time? Yeah, great question. If you look at maybe the two legs of the stall or different, I'm not not enough of a car guy to use an analogy of the chassis, but you know, the different parts of a chassis. The fundamental building blocks that we offer is effectively trust and technology. And within trust, part of that is our regulatory license and stack, which is certainly a part of the puzzle. It is incredibly complex. It adapts. It evolves. And to do it at scale is complex. But I think we talk less about the pure play regulatory infrastructure because long term regulation one in the US, for example, certain barrier there has decreased. I would say I think that's a fair statement to make. The licensing construct, which I think most people get wrong, is licensing is a bar. It's not the goal. And so getting licensed actually opens you up to a lot of other risks in terms of actually being able to manage and monitor this in at scale.

12:29The core product that we sell is trust and within that you can have within that part of that is the licensing. But a lot of that also is our trust from a cybersecurity perspective, the impact track record that we've maintained for eight years, the fact that we build on everything that we do is FIPS compliant, which is effectively governmental grade because the threat actors at this point have also become more sophisticated as we last spoke. And we're talking about state actors as the biggest threat actor to this space. There's been a lot of global movement in terms of regulatory agencies now implementing blacklist in our specific addresses on chain. The travel rule has now become implemented since we last spoke. There's a lot of complexity beyond just the licensing construct. It's a holistic view of trust and ensuring that ultimately FIPS and enterprises are looking to say, look, we need to experiment. We need to drive this forward. But even in the best case scenario, when we're talking to a group like Morgan Stanley, which generates tens of billions of dollars of profit, a quarter, you're talking to them

13:33about a quantum with crypto that is obviously a lot less, at least initially. And so the biggest risk factor for these FIs is it's not really the revenue opportunity. It's the risk factor of entering the space and doing it right. And that's really what we offer on the trust layer. And then obviously technology is a huge part of what we offer. I would say actually the bulk of what we offer. And I say this a lot. Look, blockchains are like Tamago cheese. They live, they breathe, and they change. And that's a little flippant. But what I mean by that is that you fundamentally, some Tamago cheese live and some Tamago cheese die. I mean, look at the number of blockchains that have been created and now have material side, you can look at Salana versus four years ago, base versus four years ago. And so what you're charging towards continuously is evolving and it's continuously changing. And actually not only the number of change, the number of assets that is continuing to evolve and change. And if you look at, for example, USDC, four years ago, USDC I think was on two blockchains. It's now on 30 plus blockchains natively.

14:36If the loan, the concept of wrapped or, for example, bridged USDC that now exists. And so the complex defector from a technology perspective has massively increased and it is moving at an incredible pace. And so our offering on the technology side is one, it's, we allow you to effectively innovate without having to deal with this continuously evolving technology. But two, the technology question has become incredibly more complex. And so the importance of what we offer around, for example, the interoperability of stable coins has become very, very, very meaningful. I have been able to bridge between USDC, ETH to USDC, for example, Polygon or USDC Canton. And so I'd say the technology value proposition that we offer has actually increased meaningfully because this space has become, the technical evolution has gone parabolic. And then just the fragmentation from a technology perspective has increased.

15:36And so our value prop there has increased as well. Let's then double click on a Morgan Stanley or any of the other companies that you mentioned. What is it that they're getting and why are they partnering with you? Certainly if you've got a couple of billion in profit, you know, you can try and build a bunch of stuff yourself. Like what's the build versus buy versus kind of rent decision in those firms and how were you able to persuade them? Ultimately, I think there's two core factors. One is, like I mentioned, trust. Trust is a huge part of this. Large financial institutions and enterprises make decisions based on risk. And so being able to show that you are a very de-risk solution that can allow them to scale and innovate without trading off in effectively a zero-sum construct risk is incredibly important. That's the first piece. The second piece is we give a lot of surface area to partners to be able to innovate across

16:40the holistic part of all of their businesses. And what I mean by that is we allow, for example, Morgan Stanley's wealth clients to now buy a cell crypto to move crypto into those accounts and to use that crypto effectively as collateral as well over time. And so that is a really important part of the Morgan Stanley wealth business. You better look at other parts of their business, their payments business, all their institutional business. And you know, they've been public that they are looking at, for example, tokenization. We provide tokenization infrastructure. They're looking at how on-chain money changes their business, whether that be stable coins or tokenized deposits that is also a really important piece. So we give them an ability to cover a lot of surface area very, very quickly and to innovate. And that's really, really important for these financial institutions that want one provider to give them a lot of leverage very, very quickly. And so those are kind of the two key areas. And what we do is complex and what we do is complex at scale.

17:41And also we've learned a lot of lessons over the last eight years. And so that's what groups are buying. They're buying that knowledge. They're buying that ability to move quickly without trading off risk. And that's what we offer as a business. That's cool. Great. So you mentioned that kind of the largest part of the business is now payments and stable coins. And one of the kind of strange things, at least from my vantage point, is like the emergence of stable coins as these special categories of tokens. And that's been now enshrined in policy. And people are talking about them as if they're very different from all the other tokenization that you've mentioned before. Can you talk about the evolution of that use case? And also what's changed in the counter parties? How is gusto now thinking about payments and distributions that they weren't before? Why are they thinking about crypto dollars? Some things there that's different in the water.

18:42And I'm curious if you saw develop through kind of the customer conversations. It's interesting to look back. I mean, four years ago, I don't think we were describing ourselves as a crypto and stable coin business. In some ways, we were slow to start describing ourselves in that way because we just viewed it as, hey, these are cryptographic assets. And we viewed this very much pure play technology play, right? A piece of Ethereum is no difference to like a meme coin built on the Ethereum blockchain as a dollar on the blockchain. We were probably a little slow to draw this distinction. And it's interesting because during the more challenging period under the SEC, where obviously crypto was under attack, I think what drove that distinction was in part, businesses that purely played in the stable coin space, saying, well, look, stable coins are good. Crypto is bad. And fundamentally, I don't think you can draw that distinction. And ultimately, they rely on each other, right? If a blockchain is, if stable coin has been moved on the Ethereum blockchain, fundamentally,

19:45you are buying a piece of Ethereum over time. You move that asset or do anything on that blockchain. But it was this distinction that was created, I think, in the market in part to draw the distinction between the mess that we saw with FTX, the mess that we saw with the SEC, and businesses saying, well, we're going to carve a path and just be very, very narrow. Now, I think for a long time, actually, that was seen as a weakness and a dig against zero hash. People said, well, you know, they do a lot of crypto. Actually what we're seeing is that it's a huge advantage because the same, every business that uses us for crypto is using us for stable coins at this point. So maybe even taking a step back. So a lot of four years ago, we wouldn't draw that distinction between stables and crypto. And as a pure play technologist, we kind of viewed them as the same, but they are definitely different in terms of how the market perceived them. And now, actually, they're distinct from a regulatory perspective. And so stable coins now under genius are defined assets with seven percent of those assets must be held in short-term government debt. So one of the things that we are drawing a distinction between is actually pure play,

20:48say, crypto assets and what we're calling on-chain money. Because I think if we touch base in four years time, there's actually going to be all of these subcategories within on-chain money. And on-chain money, just to simplify, let's just say it's on-chain dollars. So now you live in a world where we have stable coins which are legally distinct, legally defined under genius, which are distinct from, for example, on-chain tokenized deposits, such as what JP Morgan has done. And then again, you can distinguish that to, for example, CBDCs, which obviously won't exist in the US, at least under this administration. And then you can also just distinguish it again to, for example, tokenized money market funds, which are effectively another form of dollar. So we talk about complexity. On-chain money now has these legal distinctions that have been created within the last 12 months because of the laws that have been created in Europe under Mika and because of the Genius Act here in the US. And so that distinction certainly now exists. So maybe go into your second part of your question.

21:50How do companies like Gusto, how do two-sided marketplaces think about stable coins globally and what's changed? Well, one is they look at the law and they look at what's been created and the comfort around it that certainly changed the conversation. I would say the biggest piece that shifted is again, going back to this metric of stable coin enabled accounts, and we released a 2026 momentum report that I think is actually one of the best pieces that's been created in terms of the metrics that really matter. And so what's happened is we now have two billion nodes globally that can receive stable coins, whether the customer knows it or not. And so we've moved from this being a niche money movement. I need to create a cryptographic wallet. It feels a little complex. It feels a little different. To now, hey, I can move stable coins, a freelancer in the Philippine that wants to be paid via Gusto can effectively do an account to account transfer. They can say, I want to move my dollars from Gusto to my G cash account.

22:51Again, the experiences have abstracted away from the chain. It's abstracted away in terms of the asset. It's just an account to account movement because the ability to receive those stable coins has massively increased. And so that Filipino freelancer can now receive that stable coin or in theory over time, other forms of on-chain money. And that can either be kept as a store value. You can then issue cards against it where you're obviously in a huge dynamic evolve. Or for example, it could be automatically converted into local currency and spent in that form. That's what's changed. As in the last four years, you've seen a massive evolution. I think the technology question and the technology evolution is actually massively misunderstood and actually massively underappreciated in the space, as well as obviously the regulatory shifts that we've seen. But at its core, just philosophically, why is Gusto interested in this? It's really what does on-chain money solve for their customers, both the SMDs that they

23:52power, as well as the freelancers and contractors globally. Ultimately, we're talking about the loss of money and the loss of money matter in. And also the loss of money, both speed 24, 7, 365 and global. And that's why these groups are doing this. So, you know, playing this out, if you're a freelancer in the Philippines, you can receive your funds instantly. Whereas if you'll move in, for example, that across Swift, it could take three, four, five days in the fees are significantly larger. Equally, if you're an SMB and you need to fund your payroll, for SMBs, the largest cost factor is payroll. It's 62-70% on average of your total costs. And if you need to fund six, seven days in advance because of banking holidays or because of other frictions that exist in the banking system, especially internationally, for example, I'm a Brazilian company, paying a contract in the Philippines, I may need to pre-fund that balance seven to ten days in advance. And with stable coins, you can effectively do just in time funding in order to meet

24:56the payroll requirement. And that has a massive impact for SMBs, right? You're not having to take debt, you're not having to take other forms of financing. You're working capital is much more efficient, which in small businesses is incredibly important. So that's fundamentally what shifted is an appreciation of it, a safety and soundness over these assets. But I think most importantly, just a technical distribution factor. Those three pieces combined has an unlocked use case such as the gusto use case that we power to exist. Do you think the end consumer, like the end user, even knows what's going on? Like do they care? I think in a lot of cases, you mentioned the stable coin sandwich where it's on RAM, move around, and then off RAM. But there's plenty of apps now where the end user ends up holding on-chain dollar and sort of the UI just abstracts it away. Like are we in a place where people across the world, especially in the global south, they

26:01know it's an on-chain dollar and they've been dealing with Bitcoin and XRP and all this other stuff. So they're like, oh, what it's great to have a dollar version of this. Or is it just a number on a screen? And it doesn't really matter as long as you can spend it. I think it's increasingly the latter. And then maybe I'll share with you a little bit more in terms of how we're thinking about that. So, yes, certainly once the tokenized dollar, tokenized on-chain dollar, it effectively has abstracted away. The usability, we've seen a huge amount of innovation in terms of abstraction around seed phrases, recovery, social logins. So I think at rest, a lot of these complexities around chains and assets have been abstracted away. And again, that's a very real factor. If you tell a user, hey, this is USDC on X, Y, Z chain and then there's another asset on USDC on another chain, that is complex to the user. That is abstracted away, I think, increasingly in terms of the interfaces that are being created

27:03and just the innovation around holding the stable coins at rest. Well, we're spending a huge amount of time and a product that we recently released, which is what we call ORTH, which is effectively the open banking of stable coins, is the ability to abstract away those complexities of on-chain money movement tied to money in motion. And what I mean by that is, hey, Lex, I want to sponsor your podcast. Right now, the complexity of using stable coins to do that would be quite high. In the sense of the user friction, in the sense of, I wouldn't say, well, Lex, what chain do you want it on and what is your alpha numerical dress? Those two big questions are a massive falloff in terms of usability. Now what's really important to remember is that we've seen a massive increase in stable coin on chain money movement, despite this friction existing, which to me shows that there's a huge value proposition. And so when the usability challenge is solved, you can expect a massive, massive increase

28:08in terms of on-chain money movement. But let me maybe talk more about what this ORTH part does. What it does is effectively allows me as a user to not have to think about the chain that I'm sending on and the asset that I'm sending. And so you're abstract in this completely away. So it's more of an account to account movement. And so from, again, the gusto use case, it is effectively I'm funding from my gusto account. I log into my, say, my Robinhood account. And effectively what we're doing on the back end is we're pulling, okay, what chains does Robinhood accept? What is the alpha numerical dress? We automatically pull that in from behind the scenes and a very plaid-like experience. And the money moves. And so from a customer experience perspective, it's seamless. It's an account to account movement. And so we're scaling that product. We recently launched that. We're embedding that across all of our use cases. And to me, that is one of the biggest unlocks over the next 12 months is solving this usability

29:09challenge that will drive more and more on-chain money movement. So I think to answer your question explicitly, we're pretty close at rest. I think in motion, we have the solution. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned like it's hard to put down a string of characters for your address. I would put forward that it's a lot easier to give you an address than it is to fill out my swift information, an iBend number, an account number, and routing number, and the address of my bank by a lot. So I think that user experience is actually a lot less friction than the last time you used a Fyseur of interface or a world pay interface and had to move money. I don't disagree. I think sorry to interrupt. I don't disagree on that point, but I think that there's certainly, I would say there's a trust factor, right? Because obviously moving money on-chain is irreversible. So there's a concern around copying alpha and numerical addresses. Also there's just a learning experience, right?

30:11There's just a friction in terms of wow, this looks very, very scary. This looks very in and butter comes very crypto. And I think that's what you're overcoming. Whether or not it is more simple or not, you're overcoming other challenges. It's a trust factor again. It's an education curve again. That's part of what you're solving for as well. Yeah, absolutely. We should replace wallet addresses with a series of emojis and smiley faces. And I think that'll solve it. My address will be catcat unicorn robot. That'll be fine. The other kind of thing that stuck out of what you said is, you compare yourself to plaid, which is really interesting. And data aggregation is sort of some of the first. I mean, not the first, but like second generation embedded finance stuff. And the limitation of those companies still to this day with our existing banking system is that they're read only. You can, whether it's through screen scraping or APIs, the only thing you can do is look.

31:14You can look, but you can't touch. You can't tell, at least yet, you know, move through a third party connection, move this money from Bank of America to fidelity. But with blockchain-based systems, you definitely can. And we're like in this transition period where the on-chain financial system is still much smaller than the traditional one. But it is just so much more performant because you can read, write, and own to steal a phrase. I wonder if at some point will plaid be acquiring you? Will you be acquiring plaid? Like because end of the day, we're trying to solve the same thing for a customer, which is the customer controls their assets. You know, how do you see sort of Web2 Fintech and Web3 Fintech that's going after similar use cases like partnering, converging, or working together? I mean, we're seeing this convergence already, right? If you look at the payment, traditional payment pond, is that we, that we serve today?

32:14We serve as groups like Stripe and a Shift 4 and Nuve and groups like that and many, many more. And so, you know, groups like Wall Pay. So, and that's across a whole set of use case and applications. I think in terms of the platonology, I was using the platonology primarily around the authentication product that we've built. But you're absolutely right in terms of the ability to move assets in a way that is again abstracted. I think ultimately when you look at any payment business, whether it be building for today or building for tomorrow, I think you're trying to solve three key problems. One is identity. The other is money movement. And the final one is authentication. And obviously, the plat started, you know, coming at this from the authentication piece and then they've tried to bolt on identity and then they've tried to bolt on money movement. But ultimately, those were all payment businesses trying to solve for, especially when you think about the agentic while that we're moving into increasingly. Those three problems actually become increasingly important. All those three opportunities become, you know, much bigger opportunities. Zerahashi really came at this from a money movement question and we saw the identity

33:19chat called question as well. And then also the authentication question is an add on piece that we've built as well. I do ultimately think that the money is to be made in a transactional business in terms of the money movement. We can effectively give our authentication layer an identity layer effectively away in terms of driving network effects. Look, the reality is that we've seen massive convergence, particularly in the trading space. So you look at, for example, cracking buying very traditional players, coinbase again, buying very traditional players. I think we're going to enter over the next 24 months, massive consolidation and movements from both sides. So what I mean by that is it would not surprise me if circle were to make a big play for a traditional money mover, whether that be a group like a D low core others. That is a very clear opportunity that can exist. Equally, it doesn't, it will not surprise me. And I think also if you could have played the same thing to Tether, right, you saw the

34:20rumors that should Tether by PayPal. I mean, just the fact that we're asking that question implies that we're not too far away from something like that happening. So I do anticipate a more stable coin native business like a Tether, like a circle acquiring increasingly more traditional assets in the space. Equally, you're going to see companies like Zerohash buy more traditional assets in the payment space. Because again, these two things are not, they're not going to coexist. They're going to converge. We're already seeing that stable coins are just a very, very powerful alternative payment method that saw a lot of applications in use cases. And so naturally, these things should not sit side by side. But they are going to converge. And so 100% you are going to see a convergence. And I think it's going to be even bigger than what we've seen on the trading side where you've seen very large acquisitions, billion dollar plus. You've already started to see that with Stripe, right? Stripe, or bridge, must cut, or be the end K.

35:20I think now you're actually going to see a lot more groups like us be very aggressive, moving in and acquiring assets in the traditional space to provide a more holistic solution to our customers. So when I think about that, I also think about the adoption curve. And it usually follows like an S-curve shape where in the beginning nobody believes you and then things start to accelerate and they go exponentially high and really fast. And at some point you get to penetration of a market and it starts to level off. And crypto is kind of very frustrating because it's such a cyclical industry. And a lot of the cyclicality comes from either macroeconomic and geopolitical risk or it comes from let's say behavior from individuals that is able to blow up the entire industry every couple of years. And so rather than something closer to the fundamentals of like, oh, this is a better way to pay people because there's less prefunding for a small business.

36:21So it's hard to tell where we are on this S-curve, right? Because in 2021 or 2019 you could say, look, we're about to go up the SRAM with D-500 million and stable coins at 5 billion. We're going to go up the SRAM. And here we are with 350 billion on the other side and stable coin assets. And depending on the day, decentralized finance between 100 and 200 billion and these much larger volumes coming in, real world assets and tokenized assets now in the 20 billion range. So there's lots of curves up. But at the same time, because you constantly have these bear markets, you also have these plateaus and canyons in terms of adoption. And so from where you sit, where are we in the S-curve? Is it going to be in four years if that's how long it takes us to talk again? Are we going to be sitting here and it's 5 trillion of stables? Or are we sort of at a local maximum? Like this is where we're going to hang out for a while. How do you think about that?

37:22So I think we're still incredibly early. I think we're nowhere near the maturity phase of the S-curve. No in there. And the reason for that is because of some of the frictions that I spoke about and the unlocks that it creates. So where we are today in the S-curves, you know, you can use different stats, but let me use some zero hash stats. All stable coin volume last year, grew 690% year on year. We expect a similar sort of growth trajectory this year. That is very meaningful. We saw 157% increase in average transaction size, which I think shows again an increase, enterprise, institutional, but also just trust factor and moving larger size on chain. So I think we're still very early. We solve some big problems, but the big problems that are still all the big opportunities, and you know, you can say, okay, this space has more volume than mass card and visa and then people always say, well, if you take out trade in volume, that doesn't matter. Well, I always push back and say, look, money movement is money movement, whether that

38:25be for trading or not. And frankly, if I move money for interactive brokers customer to fund a trade on a Sunday because they want to do something on a prediction market or because they want to do something based on the Japanese markets that have already opened, that is money movement, right? That counts. We need to think of this more broadly than just pure plate. I'm swiping my credit card. So I think that's really important. There's obviously some big unlocks. The big unlock that I mentioned is auth through usability, but also distribution. And so again, you've got to overcome that kind of first step in the adoption cycle. If you look at a Fortune 500, it's very, very under penetrated. If you look at the number, if you look at the number of people that have interacted with stablecoins, we're very, very under penetrated in terms of what this could be from an alternative payment method perspective. So I think we're incredibly early. And I think what will drive us to go up the S-curve is solving this usability challenge. And it's equally solving this distribution challenge.

39:26But also, look, we haven't even, genius passed. So I truly believe that every bank is going to enable stablecoins as an alternative payment method. I don't think they're going to hold stablecoins on balance sheet. I don't, because frankly, holding as a deposit is a much better business for the bank. It's a much better store value for customers in the sense of its FCI C insured. But the rules aren't even implemented and there's going to be a lag time so there'll be these considerations of lags, right? So there was the rule that was the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the blue all that was passed in the US. Then big F.I. is an enterprise needs to look at those rules. Think about how it impacts their business and then adopt. So we're still so, so early. I think we're no one near the maturation phase. No one near. That's fantastic. Five trillion it is. So then one of the stories that people tell us and let's land kind of on this question is around the machine economy and AI agents and I've been very vocal about this as a place of growth for crypto rails. But let's take kind of a skeptical view

40:29towards this question. I think a lot of people, whether it's Stripe or Coinbase are telling the story that the robots are coming, they're going to be using stable coins at huge scale and that's where a lot of the demand is going to come from. Number one is like, do you believe that story as well? Do you see it? But then kind of more critically, is there any evidence yet? Do we have any spiky demand maybe across your client footprint where you're starting to see much more automated types of use, which is this infrastructure where it is more fit for use than the visa network or the traditional rails? Great question. I think this is one of my pet peeves in the space is a lot of people talk at a high level or they're talking about POCs. Zora Hash we talk in terms of actual use cases and after applications and look, we live in breathed the space but by no means acolytes. Do I believe that other payment methods will exist?

41:32Other money movements will exist. 100% in the same way that when you look at communications, there are still other forms of communications even when the electrification of markets and the electrification of communications existed. So look, this isn't a binary construct and I think going back to the point of trust, I think it's always about having a healthy level of skepticism and applying that and actually solving the issues that lead to skepticism. So that's more of a general point in terms of how we think about building businesses and building trust. If you look at the agentic space and I've spoken about this recently at the alchemy event and I spoke with the founder of X402 and a bunch of other folks on this topic where I truly believe the stable coins intersect with AI is around agentic to knowledge transfer. And what I mean by that is the way that the internet is evolving is going to fundamentally shift.

42:32In a sense of today when you search on the web, the knowledge bank or the creator gets paid based on the click, the ad, the referral link, that is fundamentally changing in an agentic world where the content creator, the LLM, has pulled from, is not going to get paid in the same way. And so I do believe in a world where things are going to become more fragmented and the way that content creators have to be paid has to shift. And so what I see the world moving increasingly towards is if you have billions of agents and billions of content or knowledge creators, how do those two systems interact? And I do believe that one of the only ways to do that is with a payment rail that is global because you're going to have an agent from somebody in Mozambique pulling from a content creator in Brazil. So the importance of global money movement is important. Then I think secondly, the big value proposition

43:33of stablecoins is the ability to make money like software, making it programmable. In the sense of the knowledge is only transferred to the agent when the money is delivered and then the knowledge effectively DVP settles. Now that is a little bit behind the sky, but that is where I see the opportunity exist in and the overlap to be incredibly real because that is where stablecoins have an unparalleled ability to serve as the agentic world, which is global and programmable. In terms of what are we seeing from clients today, we are seeing and having conversations with the largest providers of web infrastructure looking at this in a very, very material way. And we're much more focused on the money movement piece between agent to agent or agent to knowledge creator then, for example, me being able to swipe my, so you know, use my stablecoin balance to buy a pair of sneakers. We're still early, but that is where I think to your point about what is real,

44:35it's those value propositions and coming back to where is value created, where is it uniquely positioned. So like where I pushed back, for example, recently on this panel, was somebody else panel was saying, you know, well, stablecoin is sold for as micro-payments. My repayments are unbelievable for agent commerce. And I said, well, let's hold on. When we look at iTunes, for example, actually when iTunes started, it was a dollar or so. Actually Apple lost money on that, right? But what they did was it's called, you know, they just batched the payments. Most people don't come and just pay for one thing. They don't just buy one thing. And that is effectively batching exists. And so in stablecoin world, right, like this concept that an agent needs to be paid a fraction of a penny in real time, I just don't subscribe to. I mean, I think that the agent will pay on a weekly, a daily or an hourly basis. And that is where you aggregate these individual sub penny or penny amounts of value transfer into a batched payment. So I think again, it comes back to,

45:35what is the value proposition really needed into those value propositions? I'm very happy for people to be trying to think about the batching, like this concept of micro-payments. I just think that that's not an edge that is long term sustainable. Edge that is sustainable, that is unique to stablecoins, is this global network of networks coupled with the programmability. So that's where we're spending time with clients and with prospects, is around those two key value propositions. But again, we're early. But the compression in that cycle is enormous. If you look at the, I think if you look at the evolution of the models, just in the scale at which they're scaling, the importance of these ability to move value in the same way, I think is equally as important. The conviction you have about the future is one I share and also I think draws kind of a straight line from the founding of the company to where the future is going to be. So congratulations again on all the success, excited to hear about the announcement

46:35that you're talking about. If our listeners want to learn more about you or about ZeroHash, where should they go? Follow us on x, just ZeroHash x, or on LinkedIn, or feel free to contact us at contactatzerohash.com. Love to hear from you. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Lux. Hi, everyone. That's it for this week's episode of The Fintech Blueprint. For more technical deep dives into all things Fintech and decentralized finance, check out FintechBlueprint.com and grab a free subscription to the newsletter. This is Lux, and I'll see you next time.