Edward Woodford on the Future of Crypto Infrastructure and Stablecoins
At a Clear Street Innovator Insights fireside chat, zerohash founder and CEO Edward Woodford laid out a grounded, infrastructure-first view of where crypto, stablecoins, and tokenization are headed next, and why the most important changes are happening quietly inside traditional financial institutions.
Speaking with Clear Street FinTech Analyst Owen Lau, Woodford walked through zerohash’s evolution from a crypto trading API into a broader financial infrastructure platform that now sits behind banks, brokerages, payment companies, and marketplaces. The conversation focused less on market cycles and more on what it actually takes to move money at scale in a compliant, enterprise-grade way.
Crypto as technology, not an asset class
Woodford opened by reiterating a core zerohash thesis: crypto is best understood as a technology layer, not a standalone asset category. Since founding the company in 2017, zerohash has organized its business around three interconnected pillars, trade, transact, and tokenize, which increasingly converge inside the same institutions.
On the trading side, zerohash enables traditional brokerages like Interactive Brokers and Morgan Stanley to offer crypto alongside equities and other assets. The long-term trend, Woodford argued, is convergence: crypto-native platforms are moving into wealth, while traditional financial firms are embedding crypto to meet customer expectations. Over time, the product sets—and even revenue profiles—of these companies will look increasingly similar.
Stablecoins and the velocity of money
The conversation then shifted to payments, where Woodford positioned stablecoins as a fundamentally better rail for moving money, especially across borders and outside of banking hours. zerohash’s role, he explained, is to abstract away the complexity of stablecoins (different assets, different chains, different compliance requirements) so partners can offer modern payment experiences while still receiving dollars on the back end.
This abstraction is what enables use cases like 24/7 account funding, real-time settlement, and global payouts without forcing end users to think about wallets, addresses, or blockchains. In sectors where velocity matters, like trading, gaming, marketplaces, and payroll, those capabilities are becoming table stakes.
Woodford emphasized that stablecoins are already widely accessible through mainstream financial apps around the world, even if consumers do not label them as such. From Brazil to Europe to Southeast Asia, the infrastructure is in place, which is accelerating adoption on the merchant and enterprise side.
Tokenization and the next phase of infrastructure
On tokenization, Woodford framed the opportunity less as a speculative bet and more as an inevitability. Tokenized assets, he argued, will reshape how value moves across financial markets, but only if the infrastructure is built with the same controls, compliance standards, and risk management expectations as traditional finance.
zerohash's role is to provide those rails so institutions can experiment and scale without reinventing their core systems. Over time, tokenization, stablecoins, and crypto trading will increasingly operate as one integrated stack rather than separate initiatives.
Why banks are moving now
A major theme of the discussion was timing. For years, banks hesitated to enter crypto due to regulatory uncertainty, enforcement risk, and accounting constraints. Woodford described this as "regulation by implication" and "regulation by enforcement," which effectively froze innovation.
Over the past 12 to 15 months, that dynamic has shifted. Regulatory guidance has become clearer, risk assessments have changed, and the cost of doing nothing has begun to outweigh the cost of moving forward. As a result, many large institutions are now executing plans that were quietly developed years ago.
Importantly, Woodford cautioned against viewing crypto adoption as purely reactive to new legislation. Large financial institutions move deliberately, but once decisions are made, they deploy significant resources quickly. Recent launches reflect not sudden interest, but long-standing preparation finally meeting a workable regulatory environment.
zerohash's long-term vision
Looking ahead, Woodford described zerohash’s ambition as becoming one of the most widely used financial infrastructure companies that most consumers never think about. The goal is scale without visibility—powering millions of transactions daily while remaining embedded behind trusted brands.
Whether through partnerships, organic growth, or strategic expansion, the company’s north star remains the same: make modern money movement simple, compliant, and accessible, without forcing users or institutions to confront unnecessary complexity.