When BlackRock wanted a settlement layer for its tokenized money market fund BUIDL, it did not build one. It plugged into a Chicago shop most retail crypto users have never heard of. Zerohash, founded in 2017 by Edward Woodford and Brian Liston, now sits behind the digital asset plumbing at Interactive Brokers, Stripe, Shift4, BlackRock's BUIDL Fund, and Franklin Templeton [zerohash.com, 2025]. The pitch to those customers is narrow and unglamorous: do not touch the regulated crypto stack yourself, rent ours.
That pitch is paying. In September, Zerohash closed a $104 million round from Morgan Stanley, SoFi, Apollo Global Management, Point72 Ventures, and Interactive Brokers, valuing the company at roughly $1 billion [CNBC, Sep 2025] [Blockworks, 2025]. A month later, Fortune reported Zerohash was in late-stage acquisition talks with Mastercard at a $1.5 to $2 billion price tag [Fortune, Oct 2025]. Either outcome, independent scale-up or strategic exit, validates a thesis that looked unfashionable for most of the last crypto cycle: the money in digital assets is in the rails, not the tokens.
The bet
Zerohash sells three things to banks and fintechs: crypto trading, stablecoin payments, and tokenization infrastructure [CNBC, Sep 2025]. The wedge is regulatory. Zero Hash LLC and Zero Hash Liquidity Services LLC hold a New York BitLicense from the Department of Financial Services [docs.zerohash.com, 2025], a credential that takes years and millions of dollars in legal spend to obtain. For an Interactive Brokers or a Stripe, the calculation is simple. Building an in-house licensed crypto entity is a multi-year detour from the core roadmap. Embedding Zerohash is an API integration.
The company says it has supported more than 5 million end users across 190 countries through its customer platforms [zerohash.com, 2025]. Revenue was reported at $73 million in 2025 against a 222-person team [getlatka, 2025], implying revenue per employee well above the median for a crypto infrastructure business at this stage. A November partnership with Plasma extended the stablecoin payments product onto a dedicated layer 1 blockchain for instant cross-border settlement [GlobeNewswire, Nov 2025].
Why it could be big
The tailwinds are unusually concrete for a crypto story. Stablecoin volume is becoming a line item in real treasury and payments workflows, and the named buyers of Zerohash's product, Stripe and Shift4 in payments, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton in tokenized funds, Interactive Brokers and SoFi in brokerage, are not speculative customers. They are firms with compliance officers who said yes after diligence. The Series C cap table tells the same story. Morgan Stanley and Apollo are not crypto-native funds, and SoFi and Interactive Brokers are operating customers writing checks into their own vendor [CNBC, Sep 2025].
Series C round Sep 2025 | 104 | $M
Reported 2025 revenue | 73 | $M
Total funding raised | 286 | $M
Reported valuation | 1000 | $M
Reported Mastercard bid (low) | 1500 | $M
Reported Mastercard bid (high) | 2000 | $M
If the Mastercard talks reported by Fortune close at the upper end, Zerohash would print a roughly 7x return on the $286 million in disclosed total funding [Tracxn, 2025] [Fortune, Oct 2025]. If they do not, the company has a freshly funded balance sheet, an enterprise customer list competitors would pay to poach, and a regulatory perimeter that is genuinely hard to replicate.
The team and traction
Woodford and Liston met in graduate school at MIT and started the company that became Zerohash in 2017 [Forbes, 2019]. Woodford, the CEO, was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list in 2019 and recognized as a 2025 Chicago Titan 100 [Forbes, 2019] [Business Insider, 2025]. Liston serves as COO [Forbes, 2019]. Matthew Weis is listed as CTO [Crunchbase, 2025], and Stephen Williams as SVP of Legal and Deputy General Counsel [LinkedIn, 2026], a senior legal hire that fits the company's compliance-first posture.
The customer roster does most of the talking. Powering crypto for Interactive Brokers and stablecoin flows for Stripe is a different sales motion than chasing retail exchange traffic. Each integration is multi-quarter, contractually sticky, and accompanied by joint regulatory review. That is the moat.
What the bears say, what the bulls answer
The credible bear case is competitive. Paxos, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, BitGo, Bakkt, and Blockdaemon are all chasing some version of the same enterprise crypto infrastructure mandate, and several have larger balance sheets or longer custody track records. Paxos in particular competes directly on the stablecoin issuance and brokerage layers. The bull answer, supported by the September round, is that Zerohash has won the specific customers that matter most for distribution: a top-three US online broker, two of the largest payments processors, and the issuer of the largest tokenized money market fund [zerohash.com, 2025]. Those wins are reference accounts that compound. A new fintech evaluating embedded crypto can ask Stripe how the integration went, and that conversation is worth more than a feature comparison.
What to watch
The next twelve months turn on one binary. If the Mastercard deal reported by Fortune closes, Zerohash becomes the crypto and stablecoin spine of a global card network, and the competitive map redraws overnight [Fortune, Oct 2025]. If it does not, watch for two things: a Series D extension or growth round at a valuation north of the September mark, and the production rollout of the Plasma partnership for cross-border stablecoin settlement [GlobeNewswire, Nov 2025]. A live, measurable corridor with named enterprise volume would be the cleanest proof that the tokenization narrative has graduated from pitch deck to P&L.
The deeper question for readers: if the rails win, who captures the margin, the network like Mastercard that buys the rails, or the regulated infrastructure layer like Zerohash that built them?