zerohash CEO: Wall Street's Biggest Are All In On Tokenization (What This Means)

ZeroHash, founded in 2017, has grown to roughly 220 employees and close to 10 million end customers, with licenses across all US states, Europe, Brazil, and Canada. CEO Edward Woodford says that by the end of the current year the company will reach approximately three-quarters of US households through partners including Morgan Stanley, Stripe, Gusto, Visa, and Marqeta.

The Visa partnership is live as a generally available product covering two applications: merchant pre-funding and global payouts. Merchant pre-funding via stablecoins allows just-in-time capital deployment, freeing funds that would otherwise sit idle as float. Stablecoin payouts to a freelancer in the Philippines settle in seconds rather than the days required by SWIFT. Woodford argues that faster settlement could eliminate the need for short-term loans by enabling daily or per-service payment instead of biweekly pay cycles, which he frames as a structural economic benefit rather than a marginal convenience.

Woodford treats the velocity of money as the central variable. For an SMB paying workers across 100 countries, pre-funding payroll can tie up four or five days of working capital as float, a significant burden given that 60 to 70 percent of SMB costs are payroll. He argues stablecoins directly attack that friction and that the benefit compounds at scale across global supply chains.

Woodford says there are now 2.5 billion stablecoin-enabled accounts globally, including users of Revolut, Robinhood, GCash, PayPal, and Cash App. He argues that assets under custody and total value locked are becoming outdated metrics, and that total processed volume on chain and the number of stablecoin-enabled accounts are the figures that should define the industry going forward. This framing positions stablecoins as a payments and settlement layer rather than a speculative asset class.

Large financial institutions have moved from a defensive posture to one of aggression on stablecoins, according to Woodford. He says major firms now view stablecoins as an opportunity to cannibalize downstream players in the money stack and expand their own economics. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, described as one of the largest on-chain yield-bearing instruments and a ZeroHash partner, is cited as a proof point that accelerated broader institutional interest. Passage of the Genius Act and the resulting regulatory clarity are among the additional factors Woodford identifies as driving adoption.

Woodford connects stablecoins directly to tokenization, arguing the two are intertwined because both require instant, real-time, global settlement rails. Stablecoins function as a proof point and accelerant for tokenization because they share the same underlying value proposition, and he describes them as a building block from which further asset classes can be tokenized using the same infrastructure. The implication is that the stablecoin buildout is not a parallel track to tokenization but a prerequisite for it.

ZeroHash released an agentic finance suite approximately two weeks before the recording and announced a partnership with Marqeta to enable global card issuance backed by stablecoins. On agentic finance, Woodford focuses on agent-to-agent and agent-to-creator payment flows as the primary use cases. He contrasts ZeroHash's approach with Cloudflare's, saying Cloudflare assumes one entity can control access of billions of agents to billions of information sources, which he likens to the Spotify model, while ZeroHash targets the fragmented, decentralized portion of the internet not covered by that model, making the two strategies complementary rather than competitive.

Woodford describes ZeroHash's core function as abstracting both technical and regulatory complexity so that partners can offer stablecoin and on-chain finance capabilities without end users needing to understand the underlying infrastructure. He uses the analogy of the iPhone requiring broad distribution before the App Store could be built on top of it, and acknowledges the industry is still at an early stage of that app layer being constructed. The honest caveat embedded in that framing is that the most valuable applications of this infrastructure have not yet been built.