How Zerohash Grew Stablecoin Volume 690% and Won Over Morgan Stanley, with CEO Edward Woodford

In this episode, Lex chats with Edward Woodford — Founder and CEO of Zerohash, a crypto and stablecoin infrastructure platform that lets banks, brokers, and fintechs embed digital-asset trading, payments, and tokenization through a single API. Four years on from their last conversation, Zerohash has settled over $65 billion in volume across 7 million customers, gone global under MiCA and EMI licensing in Europe, and onboarded institutions like Morgan Stanley.

They discuss the pivot from embedded crypto to pure-play B2B infrastructure, and why the product Zerohash actually sells is trust — with licensing treated as a bar, not a goal — in a world where state actors are now the primary threat.

Edward breaks down the three core rails (Trade, Transact at roughly 70% of revenue, and Tokenization), and unpacks the emergence of "on-chain money" as a legally fragmented category — stablecoins under GENIUS, tokenized deposits, tokenized money-market funds, and CBDCs, each a distinct form of dollar created inside twelve months. They explore how velocity of money and just-in-time funding reshape SME payroll, why the new Auth product aims to be the open banking of stablecoins, and where the industry sits on an S-curve Edward insists is still nowhere near maturity. Finally, they take a skeptical pass at the machine economy, landing on agent-to-knowledge payment — not consumer micropayments — as the durable intersection of stablecoins and AI, and on the convergence that will pull traditional and crypto-native payment firms into aggressive consolidation.

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: 140 Company Stablecoin Consortium.

NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS:

1. Trust is the product; licensing is just table stakes. Edward’s sharpest framing is that “licensing is a bar, not the goal” - getting licensed actually opens you to new risks to manage at scale. For an FI like Morgan Stanley, whose crypto revenue is trivial next to tens of billions in quarterly profit, the deciding factor isn’t upside but de-risked entry: FIPS/government-grade compliance, an eight-year clean track record, and a threat model that now treats state actors as the primary adversary.
2. “On-chain money” has fractured into distinct legal categories in under a year. Post-GENIUS and MiCA, stablecoins (backed 100% by short-term government debt) are now legally separate from tokenized bank deposits (e.g. JPMorgan), tokenized money-market funds, and CBDCs - each a different form of dollar. Edward predicts this taxonomy keeps multiplying, and treats the resulting complexity, including cross-chain stablecoin interoperability, as a widening moat rather than a nuisance.
3. The real AI-stablecoin use case is agent-to-knowledge payment, not micropayments. Edward pushes back on the popular “sub-penny real-time micropayments” narrative - invoking iTunes, where payments got batched rather than charged per song. The durable edge, he argues, is a globally programmable rail where an agent in Mozambique can settle with a content creator in Brazil, with knowledge released on a DvP basis as payment clears. Sub-penny amounts get aggregated into daily or weekly batches.

TOPICS

Stablecoins, EmbeddedFinance, Tokenization, DigitalAssets, Payments, GENIUSAct, MiCA, AgenticPayments, DeFi, RWA, Web3, Fintech, Zerohash, MorganStanley, Gusto, Stripe, Circle, Tether, Plaid, Mastercard

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