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I sat down with Edward Woodford, CEO and Founder of Zerohash, the crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company powering some of the biggest names in finance.
In just eight years, Zerohash has grown from a scrappy Bitcoin exchange into the backend for Stripe, Morgan Stanley, Interactive Brokers, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton. They recently rejected a $2 billion acquisition offer from Mastercard, and Edward believes what they’ll build in the next two years will dwarf everything they’ve done so far.
We discuss how they nearly shut down during COVID when an investor attempted a hostile takeover, why he’s “grieved the business” four times, the pivot from B2C to infrastructure that changed everything, and his bold vision to have 20-50% of the world’s population transacting on Zerohash rails.
Rejecting a $2 BILLION acquisition offer to stay independent
Conviction in the mission outweighed a life-changing exit
Just a few weeks ago, Zerohash turned down a $2 BILLION acquisition offer from Mastercard. Edward describes this decision as “actually very easy.” His reasoning is straightforward: he believes what Zerohash will accomplish in the next two years will dwarf everything they’ve built over the past eight. The dominoes are finally falling. Regulatory clarity is emerging, institutional adoption is accelerating, and the company just posted record revenue.
That said, conviction alone doesn’t pay mortgages. Edward thought carefully about the practical side. Secondary markets have matured enough that early employees can now get liquidity without a full exit. The IPO window has reopened for companies with real revenue. These factors meant he didn’t have to choose between his team’s financial security and his vision for the company.
The acquisition process itself proved clarifying. Going through diligence, fielding offers, and ultimately saying no forced him to articulate why he’s doing this. As an independent company, Zerohash can move faster, think longer term, and build something that touches billions of people. That’s the bet he’s making.
There’s also the Zuckerberg question: what else would he do? If Edward sold, he’d probably just build something similar. He loves the space, believes in the technology, and thinks this is the most exciting moment to be building financial infrastructure.
Surviving four near-death experiences
Zerohash has nearly died four times. The closest call came during COVID, when the world stopped for six weeks and the company had roughly one week of runway. An existing investor saw an opportunity. They put an aggressive term sheet on the table and proposed having a portfolio company acquire Zerohash at a fraction of its potential value. It was a hostile move dressed up as a rescue.
Edward’s mentor and Zerohash investor, Tom Sosnoff, stepped in over a weekend and closed a deal that kept the company alive. Sosnoff, a celebrated and successful entrepreneur, having founded multiple billion-dollar businesses, understood what Edward was facing.
The biggest lesson from those experiences was to separate your identity from the business. Early on, Edward couldn’t. He saw every setback as a personal afront and considered every crisis existential, but after grieving the company multiple times, he learned that attachment approach was toxic. He still loses sleep over Zerohash and worries constantly, but he shared with me that he no longer believes the company is the only thing he could ever do. His dad’s advice helped: don’t be completely wedded to the idea. You can do other things if you want.
Interestingly, adding this psychological distance between him and company has made Edward a better founder. This approach allows him to evaluate acquisition offers rationally and make decisions based on what’s best for the business rather than what protects his ego. Edward believes that the best founders, the ones who survive in the long term, are the ones who learn to hold their companies tightly and loosely at the same time.
Finding good investors and getting rid of bad ones
Look for influence, not power
Not all of Zerohash’s early investors were helpful. Some actively pushed for a premature sale when the company was struggling, advocating for exits at $50 to $75 million when Edward was certain the business could be worth far more. The pain and stress these investors caused was counterproductive at best and nearly fatal at worst and they broke my number one investor rule: Do No Harm.
It’s hard to anticipate which investors could be harmful to you down the line, especially when you are desperate for capital at the earliest stages. Edward says founders should try to distinguish between investors who wield power and those who exercise influence. Power is contractual: board seats, veto rights, protective provisions. Influence is relational: credibility earned through helpful advice, credibility and patient support. The best investors focus on influence because they understand that using power destroys the relationship. Once you force a founder’s hand, you lose their trust permanently.
The practical advice for early-stage founders is limited and early on you can’t always be selective. But Edward recommends asking investors how they behave when things get hard. Do they offer soft guidance or issue ultimatums? Have they ever pushed a founder to sell against their will? The answers reveal a lot.
Building infrastructure that powers Stripe, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock
Zerohash started as a B2C Bitcoin exchange in 2017 and quickly realized customers didn’t want the exchange itself. They wanted everything behind it: the custody, the compliance, the settlement rails. So they pivoted to infrastructure-as-a-service, a model with B2B costs and B2C margins.
Today the company operates three business lines.
Trade - provide crypto access to partners like Interactive Brokers and Morgan Stanley who want to offer digital assets without building the backend. There is a massive convergence happening in this space: crypto companies are adding traditional financial products while traditional institutions are adding crypto, and Zerohash sits at the center as the gateway for both.
Transact - powers stablecoin movement for companies like Stripe and Gusto. This includes account payouts and account funding, allowing businesses to move dollars globally in real time.
Tokenization – offers infrastructure for asset managers like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton. This kind of tokenized infrastructure has the power to rewire how value moves globally, whether that value is a real world asset, Ethereum, or USDC.
The common thread is regulated, institutional-grade plumbing that lets financial services companies move into digital assets without reinventing the wheel.
Although Zerohash has great infra and technology, their real moat is trust. Do these financial institutions believe you can handle their most sensitive infrastructure? Zerohash sells to risk committees and compliance officers who think in terms of downside protection. Pitching innovation is not enough. It has to be innovation that does not compromise trust. Edward believes that combination is what will allow them to touch 20 to 50 percent of the world’s population within five years.
Book Recommendations
“Stable Coins for Babies,” which Edward wrote himself. It’s the book he gives to pretty much everyone he knows who is expecting a child. He describes the joy of watching his own kid pick up a book their dad wrote as one of the more rewarding experiences of building in this space. At an age where friends and colleagues are starting families, it’s become a way to have fun and introduce the next generation to the technology he believes will reshape global finance.
The Unfiltered Q&A: Edward Woodford on Building Zerohash
Miguel Armaza: You just rejected a $2 billion acquisition offer from Mastercard. Can you tell us about it?
Edward Woodford: We put out a public statement, and my view is that I’ve been doing this since 2017 and I’m a true believer in blockchain technology and what it can do. I just fundamentally believe that what we can do in the next two plus years will dwarf what we’ve done in the last eight years. As a founder in a new space, we’ve been waiting for the dominoes to fall, and it just feels that every domino is accelerating.
We had a record year. We had a record quarter. And you take a second when you’re like, why am I doing this? It’s not cheesy. I actually believe that one, we can be significantly bigger. Two, I believe that as an independent business, we can have materially more impact. That’s the quadrant you make a decision by. It was actually a very easy decision.
Sometimes when you go into a process like an acquisition, it can be really tiring. And the energy to say, look, we’re actually going to take a bigger swing and try to accelerate the momentum we have, it’s revitalizing. It’s like you almost fall back in love with the business.
Miguel Armaza: Is there an element of “what else would you do?” Like the story of Facebook rejecting a billion-dollar offer because Zuckerberg would just build Facebook again anyway?
Edward Woodford: I really try not to associate my complete identity with the business. That’s partly come from the journey, especially in this space. We came close to having to close up the business. When COVID happened, there was a six week period where the world almost stopped. We had an investor try to effectively do an aggressive takeover by putting a term sheet on us and saying they’d get another portfolio company to buy us.
You have to separate yourself and identity, otherwise it will completely destroy you. I’ve almost grieved the business three or four times. Do I want to spend time with people that just associate me with the business and our success? That’s not who I want to spend time with socially. You have to create a little bit of distance between yourself and the business to have a healthy balance.
There’s certainly an element where I love building. I really believe in the space, and I think we’re at this massive inflection point. So what else is more exciting right now with my skill set and knowledge? There’s probably very few other options. But one of the pieces of advice I got from my dad was don’t be completely wedded to the idea. You can do other things if you want.
Miguel Armaza: Tell us about your background. You’re from London but have lived in the US for a while now.
Edward Woodford: I grew up in the UK, half Spanish, half English. I moved here when I was 20 or 21, came to grad school, and just stayed. It’s a great place to build businesses. The reason I came honestly was I got rejected from Oxford. I always say that was the best thing for me because it gave me this itch to get a pedigree university on my resume. For me, that was MIT.
I think I cried when I got rejected. My dad actually didn’t go to university. It was honestly the best thing for me. It gave me a chip on my shoulder. I got everything good at school, and it teaches you there’s randomness to life. That was a really good lesson as an 18 year old. I went to a great place, made a lot of great friends, had a great education. But when you’re sitting there as an 18 year old, it is downbeat. That’s your north star. I came to the US because I wanted that pedigree. I’d probably watched Love Actually too many times, and came and then stayed.
Miguel Armaza: When did you get interested in the future of financial technology?
Edward Woodford: When I was at MIT, there was a professor called Christian Catalini who was at the forefront of Bitcoin. At MIT, they gave Bitcoin out to every undergraduate student. I did a class with him which really got me interested in Bitcoin. Actually, the year before me, it was Alex from Deel who was in that class. So this class has done a great job of spitting out entrepreneurs.
I always say if you go to a place like MIT and you don’t reconsider what you want to do, you haven’t really done it right. If you say you want to be a consultant afterwards and then still say the same thing, have you really taken advantage of all the options? For me, it broadened my horizons. Wow, this is technology. Wow, you can start a business and people give you probably more credibility than you’re due. I bought my first Bitcoin at the MIT bookstore, and it just gave me a desire to build and get that core excitement when you start a business. That’s an addictive feeling.
Miguel Armaza: Was Zerohash the same idea at the beginning as it is today?
Edward Woodford: No. Zerohash was founded in 2017 when Bitcoin was super early. We were trying to build an exchange for institutions. Then very quickly we realized customers were coming to us and saying, we don’t want your exchange piece, we want everything behind the scenes. The infrastructure as a service.
It started basically as just Bitcoin and Ethereum, but that technology has evolved into stablecoins. Actually, stablecoins are now the majority of our business. It’s evolved into tokenization, which could really be anything. Tokenized infrastructure is going to rewire the way that value is moved globally. We actually started as a B2C business and then shifted into a B2B2C business, which is often a common trend.
The attraction of this business is that we have B2B costs but B2C margins. It’s a very attractive business from that perspective. Our thesis was that this was going to be technology that would be fundamentally disruptive to the way that value is transferred. And value can mean anything. Yes, there will be creative disruptors like Coinbase. But if our thesis was that this technology was going to be a rewiring, then are we better placed helping businesses move into the space and evolve? That was the evolution of our thesis.
Miguel Armaza: Can you give us a tokenization 101? It’s the least understood by the public, and we might be at the beginning of a massive wave.
Edward Woodford: Tokenized stablecoins are effectively tokenized dollars. Tokenization is a mechanism, a ledger of ownership that is decentralized and can remove intermediaries. That’s valuable for a number of reasons, but it’s not the silver bullet for every use case.
Often when people talk about tokenization, they talk in binary terms. Something is tokenized, it can never be untokenized. Everything is tokenized or nothing is tokenized. That’s not how we view the world. Tokenized dollars are an incredible way to move value, but that dollar can also become untokenized when it’s at rest. For most people in the United States, it makes sense for them to hold actual dollars, not tokenized forms of dollars. Stablecoins have to be backed by short term treasuries, you’re not allowed to do interest currently, and they’re not FDIC insured. Tokenization typically adds value when money is in motion.
It also creates this global connectivity layer. Anybody with a smartphone can access this technology. When text messages started, you could only text people on Verizon if you were on Verizon. What really allowed that to explode was when you had interoperability. I could send a text message from Verizon to T-Mobile. The same thing is happening with tokenization right now. It’s very fragmented. Some people are building on Ethereum, some on Solana, some on Canton. The connective tissue is now starting to form. When you make this technology with immense value and connect it all, that’s where you have the unlock.
Miguel Armaza: What’s an early decision you made that has had positive ripple effects on the company?
Edward Woodford: Probably a lot of the core team. We have this concept at the company of a founding team. These are people that were there with me from the start. Often founders get the kudos, but really the founding team have been there since day one. Many of them own equity. Some are C-suite, some are mid-level, some don’t manage anyone. They’re individual contributors. But they’ve set a culture and a tone.
That’s why we created the concept of founding team. Wherever they are in the company, they drive and instill the values of a founder, which is constantly pushing to be better. A lot of the culture has been set by those people that came in early. That’s been incredibly powerful. As the company gets bigger, you travel a lot, you’re not as engaged in every single part of the business. But to have these people that really set the tone, the culture, the demands, up, down, and across the business, that’s something that’s really helped us. We made a lot of mistakes over the last eight or nine years, but that’s something I look back on with a good amount of pride.
Miguel Armaza: What’s a decision that turned out to be wrong that you learned from?
Edward Woodford: There were one or two investors that weren’t good investors. The best advice I got was from a mentor of mine, Tom Sosnoff, who stepped in when we had a week’s worth of runway and did a deal over the weekend. He’s founded multiple businesses and really helped us get to where we are. He helped me unpack the psychology of investors.
These investors were pushing for us to sell the business at a $50 to $75 million valuation. Every investor says they want a 20x or 30x, they can’t say they don’t want that. Tom said, look, I’ll buy your equity tomorrow at that price. From that point on, it was very different. The agitation and stress that bad investors can cause is damaging. I sometimes envy stories about early investors that were incredible. We had some absolute standout investors, but there was a balance of not so good investors that can be very counterproductive.
The lesson I learned was if you don’t want to be here, I’ll find you an exit. We can help you find a secondary. The company will buy back your equity. If you don’t like it, there are two options: either be quiet and help, or get off. It’s not about not taking feedback. It’s about just negative agitation that can be incredibly damaging.
Miguel Armaza: How should founders think about avoiding bad investors when raising capital?
Edward Woodford: It’s really hard to get to know people when you’re trying to raise money. At the start, it definitely wasn’t easy for us to raise. We’re in a very different place now with optionality. We probably didn’t have that many options back then. You can do reference calls, but at the end of the day, it’s really hard to figure out.
What I would say is look at investors that are more focused on displaying influence versus power. Influence is very different to power. Once you display power, you actually lose influence. If investors had power and then tried to use it, they frankly lost influence with me. But if you have investors that are really focused on influence, that tends to be the better investor looking for a multi-generational relationship. They understand that if you use that power, it’s very hard to come back from that.
Talk to them about how they interact with their founders. You really test the relationship when it gets hard. Ask how they’ve deployed that. Is it softer influence or harder power? That’s an important delineation I’ve seen with interactions with many different investors over the years.
Miguel Armaza: If things work out for Zerohash in the next five years, where will you be?
Edward Woodford: We want to intersect with billions of people globally. We want to provide infrastructure to those people. We want to have surface area of 20 to 50 percent of the globe’s population intersecting on our rails in some capacity. And I truly believe that will be the case.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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