How zerohash won Morgan Stanley's crypto business

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.