It may have been inconceivable just a year ago, but soon most banks could be offering crypto trading services.
Embedded infrastructure platform Xero has expects every major bank will offer cryptos, stablecoins, and adopt tokenization within the next 18 to 24 months.
And while Congress is on recess this week, the banking industry is still on the lookout for greater crypto clarity.
The House passed Clarity Act would serve as a key part of this, though the industry saw some big wins last.
With the SEC warming up to generic listing standards for ETS.
Joining me this morning at the New York Stock Exchange is Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of Zero Hash.
Edward, welcome.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Well, today is a big day for you and your company given the raise announcement.
So for our viewers out there, give us an idea of the different type of offerings and products.
Yes, er, we founded the company in 2017, so that's a long time in crypto world, and And really our business is broken down by 3 core areas.
We offer crypto as a service product which allows groups like Interactive Brokers and Morgan Stanley to offer effectively crypto out of the box.
We then have a stablecoin product which is effectively for payment groups, everything from being able to be paid in stablecoins for freelancers to be paid out in stablecoins, and to be able to fund your brokerage account in stablecoins, for example.
And then finally is tokenization, everything from being able to tokenize a stock to being able to tokenize a dollar and effectively white labeled issuance.
And Edward, of course with every raise comes opportunities.
So what are you looking forward to here?
Yes, we're really excited that this raise really brings in some major strategics into the round.
Obviously some major banks, Morgan Stanley, soy, other strategics like Apollo, Interactive Brokers, Jump trading, IMC, so really a huge range of groups that we really think.
Bows a lot of trust on 0 hash.
For us, we're really looking forward to the continued momentum from a regulatory perspective across the world.
We've been able to scale revenue across the last 3 years in a market that has been a little challenging at times, so we're pretty excited by now with some significant headwinds tailwinds in our favor, we'll be able to grow at an even faster rate.
Yeah, and Edward, as you mentioned, both headwinds and tailwinds, especially since you've been in the digital asset space for many years, but some of the companies involved in the raises are also your clients, so tell us a little bit more about E-Trade.
Yeah, so ETrade, they did an interview this morning with Bloomberg which really goes into a lot of detail around that offering, but effectively they see the world as needing to offer crypto to their clients.
Their wealth clients are demanding it.
The clients are already doing it elsewhere, and this is a real asset class where people want to put real money to work and so.
Effectively, very simply, like they offer any other asset class, they think it's important to be able to offer that side by side with an offering that they already offer today.
So the beauty of Xero Hash is that they're able to effectively go to market very, very quickly, build out the front ends, create an experience their customers are used to, and embedded experience and be able to offer that to market very, very quickly to their clients.
So they announced today that they'll be launching this publicly in Q1 of next year.
And of course as we look ahead 2025 has turned out to be quite the year when it comes to digital assets.
So we saw in terms of IPO bullish go public, we also saw Circle go public, and I think the American retail consumer out there got a good overview of stablecoins because when we're thinking about use cases, other Economies outside of the US may be more familiar.
So tell us about what you're doing when it comes to tokenization and staple coins.
Yes, so I think stablecoins are a really powerful store of value for people outside of the United States.
What really excites us is that we've used stablecoins effectively as one of the most powerful alternative payment methods in the globe.
It's instant.
It's global.
24/7 365.
So we actually have a large number of US-based customers using stable coins every single day.
So for example, if you want to fund your brokerage accounts, if you want to fund your events-based trading accounts such as CalSci, if you want to fund your equities accounts such as Tastyrade, these are live implementations today where you can fund your account.
So for us we really view stablecoins as an incredible APM.
And what we're excited about with Genius is that effectively stable coins will become accessible to everyone's primary bank account.
So if you want to trade on a Saturday morning on some news, you'll be able to do so.
So really that's really important, and I don't think it's just a non-US phenomenon.
Increasingly we're seeing a large number of use cases in the United States and you know, billions of dollars used in the US, unlocking that value of instant real-time and global.
Yeah, and finally, before I let you go as we head into the final quarter of 2025, the conversation isn't just about Wall Street versus Main Street or what happens in the nation's capital, even Trad 5 versus D5.
So as we move forward into the end of this year and 2026, what are you looking for when it comes to regulatory clarity here stateside?
Yeah, I think what's important is that the two worlds are effectively becoming one and the same.
And so from a regulatory clarity perspective, obviously we've got Genius, which provided a great amount of certainty in terms of the issuance of stable coins in terms of in terms of effectively non-stable coins, what people term market structure, what we're really looking for is clarity and largely. within existing structures, crypto is no different than any spot asset, and it really should be seen as that.
What we're really focused on is ensuring that legislators understand that this is a technology.
This is different than it was two years ago.
The applications of this are so diverse that we need to be careful to legislate to ensure that innovation continues to exist and for the US to be the core of that innovation.
OK, Edward, well, we will have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining us on this big day for h.
Thank you.
Thank you.
