[SaaS Series] Navigating the Crypto Landscape With Edward Woodford of Zero Hash

Edward Woodford is the CEO and Co-founder of Zero Hash, a leading crypto-as-a-service platform that enables businesses to integrate digital assets into their offerings. Under his leadership, Zero Hash has processed over $45 billion in transactions and secured over $170 million in funding from prominent investors, including Point72 Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.​

Before founding Zero Hash, Edward co-founded Seed CX, a CFTC-registered derivatives execution venue, and gained experience at various hedge funds and startups. He holds a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Warwick and a master’s degree in finance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.​

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:10] Edward Woodford discusses Zero Hash’s mission to simplify crypto infrastructure
• [04:40] How Zero Hash partners with major platforms like Stripe and Interactive Brokers
• [07:22] Use cases for crypto rewards and embedding digital assets into products
• [09:08] The evolution of Zero Hash from a B2C exchange to a B2B infrastructure provider
• [12:03] Lessons learned from early customer partnerships, including Moonpay’s success
• [13:35] How Edward built a founding team to drive Zero Hash’s early growth
• [17:04] Edward’s journey to Bitcoin and blockchain technology during his time at MIT
• [21:06] The three core theses on the future of payments, crypto, and tokenization
• [23:44] Challenges and strategies in scaling Zero Hash’s team during fundraising rounds
• [30:44] Macro trends driving crypto adoption across banks and brokerages

In this episode…

Many businesses struggle to navigate the complexity of integrating digital assets like crypto and stablecoins into their platforms. As regulations shift and technology rapidly evolves, companies face overwhelming barriers when adopting seamless, secure payment infrastructures. So, how can organizations overcome these hurdles to leverage emerging technologies and stay competitive?

Edward Woodford, an expert in crypto infrastructure and digital payments, shares valuable insights on breaking down these barriers. He emphasizes the importance of abstracting technical complexities through infrastructure solutions, allowing companies to easily embed crypto and stablecoins without getting bogged down in regulation or fragmentation. He outlines the value of stablecoins for instant, low-cost transactions, highlights the growing importance of crypto rewards, and advises businesses to pivot quickly based on customer needs and market signals, just as his team did during their early pivot from a B2C to a B2B model.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Edward Woodford, Co-founder and CEO of Zero Hash, about building digital asset infrastructure. Edward discusses simplifying crypto adoption, evolving company strategy through customer feedback, and the critical role of stablecoins in future payment systems. He also shares insights on team development, leadership growth, and scaling through major fundraising rounds.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Edward Woodford on LinkedIn
• Zero Hash

Special Mention(s):

• Brian Liston on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Impact of Automation and Email Marketing with Tom Kulzer Founder of AWeber” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Future of Ethereum, Ukraine Efforts, NFTs, and More With Dmitry Buterin, Co-Founder of Blockgeeks” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Our goal is to allow people to build on crypto and stablecoins by abstracting away complexity.”
• “Momentum is contagious and it takes on its own form — we’ve managed to leverage that.”
• “The success of today is tomorrow’s fish and chips paper; you have to keep moving forward.”
• “Stablecoins are instant, low-cost, irreversible, and fundamentally disrupt how we move value globally today.”
• “Risks are also opportunities; if there were no risks, everybody would be doing this already.”

Action Steps:

1. Simplify crypto integration for your business: Reducing the technical and regulatory complexity of crypto adoption enables faster product launches and broader customer access.
2. Leverage stablecoins for seamless transactions: Stablecoins offer instant, low-cost, and irreversible payments, making them critical for platforms needing 24/7 financial operations.
3. Embed crypto rewards into user experiences: Incorporating crypto incentives can enhance customer engagement, brand loyalty, and offer a modernized rewards system.
4. Adapt quickly based on market feedback: Pivoting your business model when customer needs shift ensures greater scalability and long-term product-market fit.
5. Prioritize building a resilient founding team: Recognizing and investing in early team members creates a strong foundation for weathering market shifts and rapid growth.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspired Insider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Edward Woodford of Zero Hash. You can check him out at zerohash.com. Edward, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast. People should check out since this is part of, I would say, SaaS series. You know, some interesting ones. I had one of the founders of Zapier on that was a really good episode and how they built it up. One of the founders of Pipedrive, I think Edward and I had him on. They had 10,000 customers. Now they have over 100,000. And a Weber and just many more and kind of that SaaS journey. And so interesting. Check them out on inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25 and Rise25, we all businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run a podcast. So we’re an easy button. We do the strategy, accountability and execution. Number two, we are an easy button for companies corporate gifting. So we make gifting staying top of mind easy, simple, seamless. You know. And for me Edward, I always like it to be affordable. So people send us a list of their people. We do everything else to curating the gift, sending the note, you know, packaging, logistics and everything. So we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the company to build relationships on the podcast front and also on the gifting front. You know, for me, You know, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships. I found no better way to profile the people and companies I most admire, and having him on the podcast and sending them tasty treats in the mail as well, so you can go check it out rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I am really excited to introduce Edward Woodford is the founder and CEO of Zero Hash. Zero Hash is a leading crypto infrastructure platform. It’s trusted by industry leaders that you’ve heard of. Like stripe, we use stripe, Franklin Templeton, shift four and Interactive Brokers. Zero Hash has actually secured over a $170 million in funding with companies such as Bain Capital Ventures, Point72 NYC and Tastytrade, and they’ve settled over 45 billion in transaction volume and onboarded 5 million plus people to the crypto and stablecoin Coin economy. Edward, thanks for joining me.

Edward Woodford: 02:58

Yeah. No, thanks for having me. Great, great.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:00

Super impressive with what you’ve done. Just talk about Zero Hash and what you do. And as you do that, I’m going to pull up your site so people can check it out.

Edward Woodford: 03:10

Yeah. So our goal is to allow people to build on crypto and stablecoins. Ultimately we view cryptography as a technology as opposed to a standalone asset class. And so we provide the infrastructure via both APIs and SDKs to abstract away the complexity of building on this technology stack, as well as some of the regulatory and technical complexities around doing so. So, for example, if you take stablecoins, there are increasingly more stablecoins. Some people may have heard of tether, for example, or Usdc. Bank of America, for example, announced that they were thinking about launching a stablecoin. So there’s ever more fragmentation.

And one of the nuances there is that stablecoins are built on multiple chains. So our goal is to allow our partners to think about account-to-account transfers as opposed to needing to think about. Okay. Jeremy wants to receive USDC sole, but Edward wants to send USDC. Or for example, I want to send USDC, ETH. We abstract away all of that complexity to enable partners to leverage this technology to fundamentally disrupt the way that they move value. And allow partners to do that in a very seamless way and lower the barriers to entry, to doing so. And so you mentioned some of our partners, Interactive Brokers, stripe, Shift4, Nuvei, Franklin Templeton and others all leverage us for that infrastructure.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:30

Talk about that a little bit, Edward. So you could choose any of them. Franklin Templeton, how does it work? When you partner with the platform.

Edward Woodford: 04:40

Yeah. So one of our fastest growing products is what we call account funding. So I’m sure many people have a brokerage account or a trading account or for example, a fantasy sports account. And as you think about that? There may be an opportunity on a Saturday or Sunday, and you can’t use traditional rails to do that. So a great example here is, for example, a Cauchy. Cauchy provided the opportunity for the first time for people to speculate on the election. So the election was on a Tuesday. So the problem set that their customers faced is if you’re using ACH there’s a two-day settlement period. So the only way to actually fund that account in a seamless way was through stablecoins. And so the value of stablecoins is that you can leverage them 24 over seven 365.

They’re instant, they’re low cost. And from the platform’s perspective, they’re irreversible. So there’s no chargeback risk. So they can give a lot more. They can raise limits on customers that are using stablecoins. And so effectively, at the end of the day, this flow of funds is really, really simple. How she wants to receive USD the customer sorry, the customer received USD and the customer wants to leverage USD. See from. For example, they may have an account at Robinhood, they may have an account at Coinbase, and they may have an account at Venmo. And so they can leverage their existing account to fund their brokerage account at Kaushik instantly, seamlessly and cheaply. And that’s the beauty of it. And I think what people don’t quite fully appreciate yet around stablecoins is that in the last 18 months, 750 million people around the globe now have access to a stablecoin through a primary account. By that, I mean where you already have money.

So think of the number of customers that now have a Revolut account, a Robin Hood account, a new bank account, a PayPal account. All those people now have access to a stablecoin. And so what our goal is to make that alternative payment method really, really easy to embed. And that example was just one of those examples through an account funding mechanism.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:41

I do want to hear what’s interesting is there is an interesting evolution to Zero Hash which I want to talk about. It’s not like you just landed on this and you’re like, bang, it’s all here. It’s. It’s nice and neat. It started off and it’s evolved. I do want to point out so we’ll talk about the evolution. But one of the interesting pieces there’s a lot of we’re on the website here. You can see you could send and receive stablecoin crypto. Talk about the crypto rewards piece. That kind of stuck out to me as an interesting use case. People are using it from a reward standpoint.

Edward Woodford: 07:22

Yeah. So our goal is to allow partners to embed digital assets or stablecoins into the product offering that they see most fit. So one of the opportunities that partners leverage us for is what we call crypto rewards. So this may be, for example, a roundup product. One of a group that I think has done this exceptionally well that is not yet a customer, but I think is very illustrative that most people appreciate is, for example, CashApp. So for example, when you have CashApp, you can use a concept of boost. And that boost gives you rewards. And so we basically make any company in the world be able to offer a crypto reward in the same way that CashApp does. So we make that very, very simple, very, very easy, very, very seamless.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:07

Yeah, it’s very cool. Some of the use cases here so people can check out Zero Hash. I do want to say if someone’s listening and they’re like, I am not that familiar with crypto and NFTs and Ethereum and Bitcoin. I did do an episode with Dmitri Buterin who co-founded Block Geeks, and he kind of, you know, he put it, for me at least, Edward, in layman’s terms, so people could check that out. And he did a good job and kind of going through those things. So check that episode out. Talk about that evolution you were doing an actual — there was a great interview, actually, with you and Tom Sosnoff, the one of the founders of Tastytrade. And you were talking about some pivot points. Yeah, talk about that. Maybe start from the beginning what the original idea was. And we could talk about maybe some of the pivots to how you got to where you are today.

Edward Woodford: 09:08

Yeah. So I think no business is a straight line by any means, especially in a marketplace whereby there’s constant technological evolution and adoption. And one of the challenges, I think, and I always say this, of building in a space that can be very hot and then very cold is effectively trying to narrow your emotional bounds as much as possible, not being overly aggressive when times are good and not being overly fearful. So that’s one of the challenges of building in a space that radically changes. And the changes are amplified by, I would say, the public psyche or the zeitgeist, so to speak. But the business started in 2017 primarily as an exchange business. Right. We wanted to make it really, really simple for people to do an exchange.

And we sat back and we said, okay, if we believe that this technology will be present everywhere, why are we narrowing ourselves just to people that come directly to ourselves? Why do we make it really easy for everybody to leverage what we’ve built? And so effectively, we went from what you may call a B2C business and effectively transform the business very quickly into A, B to B to C business. And so that’s effectively the pivot. We started saying we’re going to be direct to consumer, whether that be institutions or not what. But we very quickly realized that people were coming to us for saying, hey, I don’t I care about what you’ve built on the back end. I care about the infrastructure that you’ve built, not really the front-end piece. And so we realized that our thesis was not cohesive with our strategy, and we shifted into that, that, that, that, that, that that approach. Of course, it’s never a straight line. There’s lots of twists and turns. I mean, obviously Covid was an element where we were looking to raise money during, you know, just before Covid hit, Covid hit.

I mean, people forget during that 8 to 12 week window at the start, everything dried up and then everyone got very bullish. But during that 8 to 12 week period, it was an incredibly fearful time for us because we had a term sheet, we had a raise and that got pulled. And so there are these twists and turns. There are obviously these macro factors that affect our business. I mean, right now, you’ve seen very quickly the new administration has made a couple of changes that has radically accelerated the adoption, for example, by banks. And that’s just the reality that we are very well positioned. But there are these dominoes that fall. And we’re in a place right now where the dominoes are falling very quickly in terms of the adoption of this technology.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:44

Did that pivot come from customer conversations like, obviously you were going B2C at first and then you’re like, you know what? It’s going to be way more leverageable from a B2B perspective. Was there a specific conversation that sticks out that you’re like, yeah, this is an. Yeah. For you?

Edward Woodford: 12:03

I think the conversation that stuck out was we signed a deal. We were very experimental. We said, okay, let’s be experimental. And the first customer that we closed on that was a group called Moonpay. Now Moonpay at the time was a four-person company. They’re now a multi-billion-dollar business. And there’s still a customer of Zero Hash. And in a week of taking them live, we made more money than we’d had in the previous couple of months from our other business. And so it felt very obvious and instinctive that this group was there were lots of builders in the crypto stablecoin space. They all needed what we had built and offered.

And so let’s be that gateway to enable partners to innovate very, very quickly and accelerate their growth, whether that be small companies at the time, which was moonpay. And then we started to go upstream and say, okay, the large businesses will also need this tech stack and infrastructure and regulatory compliance piece as well, lowering the barriers to entry. And so it was really that first, this uphill battle that we’d faced on the B2C side. And then very quickly realizing that, okay, Moonpay starts and then you start to get other customers come very, very quickly and you start to get that momentum. And momentum is contagious and it takes on its own form. And we’ve managed to leverage that.

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