Interview: zerohash's Founder & CEO Edward Woodford

[MUSIC] Welcome back to FinTech Business Weekly. Today, I'm joined by Edward Woodford. Edward is the founder and CEO of crypto, stablecoin, and tokenization infrastructure platform, ZeroHash. Edward, you're actually in Chicago, my hometown, and I'm in Europe, at least directionally, I assume closer to your own town. Thank you for joining me. You found a ZeroHash in 2017. So you have seen the crypto industry go through quite in evolution since then. What about crypto and stablecoins and tokenization now in 2026 would be the biggest shock if you could go back in time and tell yourself in 2017? Yeah, I mean, look, I'd love to have said we had all the four sides in the world. We certainly didn't. I think I would say it's the breadth of just how broad this technology has gone. We certainly viewed this as a technology play as opposed to pure play and asset class. I think that has manifested itself in obviously these different buckets, and kind of we gave you a bit of a tongue twister, describing our business, because the way that this technology has been applied has been applied so broadly now. So for example, it's been applied to stocks. It's been applied to tokenized dollars, tokenized deposits. So when we talk about stablecoins, I think actually we're going to go up a stack and start talking about on chain money. So for me, I think it's just the fundamental breadth of where this technology has been applied. And I think, look, some of it has certainly been good. And some of it has been less valuable, right? That we went through the NFT phase. So probably one of the things that surprised me is just I would call the MagPie effect in this space. People love shiny. And so maybe that I'm kind of more in tune with human, human dynamics now that people like the shining. And as a firm, I think we've done a pretty good job of avoiding the shining. If it's too good to be true, it often is. But that's sometimes really, really hard. So fundamentally, I think what surprised me is that she learning more about myself and just saying no to things. And that's been incredibly important, whether that be the MagPie effects that are not penicious, but certainly can be very threatened into a business. If that's all you focus on, but also just kind of penicious people, dangerous people that we've seen over the years. And I've been surprised by the characters. And frankly, the ease of which these characters were able to buy credibility. So probably, probably it is, I've learned more about myself. Then than anything. I mean, I've, I guess I've always considered myself somewhat of a, let's say either outsider or to be a little bit more critical, like skeptic of what I'll call like crypto industry classic. So I mean, like the heyday of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And you mentioned NFTs, which always felt a bit, I think shiny object is a good way to describe it. But I think to link back to sort of where you started, things have progressed very substantially. And coming from the world, I come from, which is more like traditional financial services, consumer lending, like a bit more, whatever, down to earth or tangible. Like in the past, one, two, three years, people have been sort of complaining, or people in my world have been complaining about like, oh, what's the use case for this? What's the use case for this? Very rapidly, we are seeing those sort of real life use cases emerge, whether it is stable coins for cross-border remittances, or sort of like, you know, neo bank type products that are built on those. Stable coins is supposed to more traditional bank partnerships, bank rails. So I do think there is quite a broader set of areas within financial services, and then by extension within the economy, where to your point, these are being applied as technologies, as opposed to, I'm going to buy this thing, and I hope the number goes up, which for a long time, again, is somewhat skeptic of parts of this industry. For a long time, it felt like the game was number go up. Yeah, I mean, look, I think sometimes people ask me, what does success mean in this space? And frankly, I say, look, when you stop asking me about the price, or projecting the price of this asset class. I mean, obviously, I always draw this distinction. I do struggle with, sometimes, people say, look, and this is sometimes more of a commonality in banks. I'm a big believer in blockchain, but I'm not a believer in crypto. And I always say, well, you know, what do you believe in public blockchains or private blockchains? And I think now inherently more and more people believe in public blockchains as opposed to private blockchains. And so I say, okay, you can certainly, if you believe in public blockchains, the economic incentive is a decentralized economic incentive structure. And so fundamentally, you do need the underlying economic incentive structure, which is the underlying crypto. So Ethereum and Solana. And so I say, look, you can kind of have a view that these things are overpriced. But fundamentally, the two are into woven and fundamental to each other. In the sense of, if I am sending, for example, one of our clients is gusto, and if you're sending a payment across the world on the Solana or the Ethereum or the Polygon blockchain, you need a fraction of that to effectively pay for the decentralized network. Now, our goal is to abstract away that complexity, such that customers don't even think about, I'm paying a network tree in the same way that when they swipe their credit card, they're not thinking of all the complexities around interchange. So that's kind of our objective, but I think that the two are very into woven. And that's why at a core, we support both a crypto business, such as what we do with Morgan Stanley and others. Also, for example, stablecoin businesses across a whole set of use cases. The two are obviously separate in terms of how customers perceive them. But they aren't into woven from a fundamental technology perspective. That is an interesting point that I honestly don't think I'd considered before that to have the benefits of the decentralized network. You have to have the economic incentives of the people who are the nodes that are making that network operate. And that's why they're trying to make that network work. premises. And so that's actually, I think, going to be an equally important time period. And we've seen that play out with genius, right? Genius, the rulemaking, some people have liked the rulemaking, some people have not. But I've always been encouraged by talking to these people that are actually inherently involved in the rulemaking process. They really want to get this right. And, you know, that can be a lifetime civil servant or that can be a political and pointy. Both really inherently want to get this right. So I think the bill is very, very positive. It's great momentum. It's great to see bipartisan support. But I always think it's important that, look, if the bill doesn't pass, we should recognize momentum that's been done. There's still other opportunities to move this forward. And look at where we are. We're at a point now where Morgan Stanley offers crypto trade in through zero hash. We're at a point where interactive brokers, one of the largest brokerage firms in the world offers account funding through state points with zero hash. So there's been a enormous momentum. We need to codify that. We need to protect that. And, you know, and that's the important thing for me is looking where we come from. And what are we trying to solve for? But also recognizing the rulemaking process is going to be critically important. And we are, you know, that's where we like to play. We're very detailed or orientated. We tend to play in the rulemaking stage a lot more publicly. Put it out public comment, or public, less so in the policy for casts that exist. We certainly put our opinions forward. But just where we are as a firm, we are a bit more behind the scenes and a bit more focus on the rulemaking stages. And that's where we spend a lot of time postgenious implementation. No, absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, any, any listeners who are followers of, of open banking are intimately familiar with the, the APA, the Administrative Procedures Act and how important moving from, you know, in that example, a very sparse piece of legislative text, like less than one page, to actually a set of rules and regulations that implemented, how sort of challenging and fractious and important that process is as far as sort of determining the sort of different, different stakeholders and different parameters for how they interact. And I'm sure we will, we're seeing a similar sort of issues play out right now. As you mentioned around genius as far as, you know, BSA AML or some actually quite novel things as far as sanctions compliance go as far as requiring, legally, at least under the regulations, potentially requiring a sanctions program, which it's hard to believe, but that actually is not, that would be the first time that is required by regulation. So it will be very, we'll be very interested to see, you know, if and when clarity becomes law, what that 360 day rulemaking process looks like and sort of how different stakeholders, like zero hash, like other players in the crypto and stable coin space, as well as, you know, banks, other entities within the financial services system, sort of battle it out in the comment letters and sort of what the end result of all of that is. Yeah, 100%. I think what's always interesting is that there's obviously a lot of public discourse on these topics. When you actually meet some of these people behind the scenes, it's actually less black and white. There's lots of nuance and I've actually been very, very impressed in all of my interactions and fundamentally people really want to drive this forward in the right way. This is not about, can't launch this, I really don't think this is a political issue and again, this is technology. Look, can any technology, can AI be politicized? Sure. But we really shouldn't. I think it's really really important that we understand this is a fundamental technology that is rewind the way that value is transferred globally. We're looking at NIC, NASDAQ, DTCC, move this forward and you know, it's a very important topic. It is about the value transferred globally in the same way that we've seen electrification of communications. This is effectively the electronic, it's an updated mechanism for moving value globally. I can send you a WhatsApp JSON, but I can't send you money and value that seamlessly and easily. That is fundamentally what this technology is. It's a technology to bring the same level of a lost tea low cost global nature to the way that value is transferred globally. That's it. So I realize I am probably a terrible interviewer because I've let you get this far without actually asking you to explain the different lines of business or what ZeroHash does beyond my introduction of crypto, stablecoin and tokenization. So perhaps we can take a little pause and provide some context on where you're coming from and the different lines of business or the different capabilities that ZeroHash offers and the sort of spaces that you play in. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we're applying that no introduction is needed, Jason. So yeah, fundamentally ZeroHash, we were founded in 2017 and we founded the business from the premise that this is a technology as opposed to an asset class, like I mentioned. And so we are now a business that provides infrastructure, both through APIs and SDKs and most recently through MCPs, the ability for people to build on this technology stack. And so that could be for example, what we call our trade business or invest in business, which is effectively allowing businesses, neo banks such as OnePay, which is Walmart, SpinOut, Retail, brokerage platforms like public.com and tasty trade as well as large globally systemically important banks like Morgan Stanley's wealth division to offer crypto as part of the stack. So there very simply, there's a convergence between traditional financial services and more crypto native. And effectively, we're allowing traditional financial service companies to have product parity with groups like Coinbase and others who are equally trying to offer more traditional banking and equities like products. So a very simple thesis that I think is accelerating and holding true very, very clearly. The second part of our business is what we call our transactional business. This is our largest part of our business. And this is allowing people to leverage stablecoins predominantly as a payment mechanism globally. And just two products that I'm incredibly passionate about, the first is account fund in, which allows people globally to fund their accounts in stablecoins from anywhere at any time. And it is increasingly important, especially as markets move 24/7, as the rise of prediction market to the rise of tokenization, the velocity of money in particular matters in capital markets. And so for example, in try to broker's leverages, our stablecoin account fund in product to allow customers to fund stablecoins from anywhere in the world. And what's really exciting about this is that the way that brokerage firms work is that they can reverse the list from pretty much anywhere in the world, because information is effectively free. People learn about Thomas Pettyfe, a self-made billionaire who has built one of the most incredible businesses and great trade in mind. People hear about this from all over the world. But the challenge is how do you fund your account if you're in X, Y, Z country? And so what's been incredible, we've released this data in the first two months of launching this product. Customers from over a hundred countries funded their interactive brokers account. So really, it's allowing money to move as seamlessly and easy as information. And that's incredibly exciting. And then we also have, for example, what we call our payouts product, which we believe every two-sided marketplace will offer. And this is where clients like Gusto and Stripe leverages to pay out people globally instantly real time. And this isn't, you know, a freelancer that has a necessarily a self-distorted wallet on their account. This is for example, a freelancer that has a G cash account in the Philippines, one of the largest fintechs, a new bank account in Brazil, a revenue account in Europe. And from that perspective, they're just getting paid more quickly, more easily, from their Gusto account to their revenue account. That is the custom experience that is productized now. And so that's our transactional business. And then finally, as our tokenization infrastructure business, and we work with groups like BlackRock and Frank and Templeton to leverage this technology to bring new assets, unchained, and to intersect and actually move these assets. So again, the commonality with all of these things is the technology. For us, fundamentally, our core engine to move a piece of Ethereum is the same as it is to move a piece of, for example, stablecoin on Ethereum as it is to, for example, move part of Biddle on Ethereum. It's the same underlying technology stack. And so that's the commonality of our business. Something else that I think is very interesting that's happening in this base and zero hashes part and parcel of this. We're seeing an increase in firms that are seeking bank charters. Both full service or insured depository charters. But in the crypto and stablecoin space, the preference seems to be for a national trust bank charter, which is a quite distinct thing that I think, you know, in traditional media, they do a fairly poor job of explaining like these are different things that sort of vary different purposes. For listeners that might not be familiar, can you explain exactly what a national trust bank is and give a little context on why zero hash is pursuing such a charter? Yeah, so absolutely. So effectively, it's a license under the OCC framework that more and more groups are getting. I think fundamentally it's important to understand that zero hash has been regulated since day one, since 2017, as a money transmit in every single state. We also hope a bit less instant. States of New York and that's just our European presence. We also have a state charter trust in the state of North Carolina. So we have this complex and mature regulatory infrastructure that we've been operating since inception. The reason that people are getting this trust I think is too bold. I can explain to why we're getting the trust that will be receiving very very shortly. The first is what the predominant reason is under the under the genus act to issue a stable coin above $10 billion. It needs to be out of an OCC entity and so very simply that is why we're getting it. We have customers that want to issue stable coins. They are large financial services companies but they're not regulated onto the OCC framework and so we can effectively issue a stable coin on their behalf. Secondly also gives us just flexibility. The business is going you know this base evolves at a million miles an hour and the regulatory patchwork shifts as well and so it gives us optionality at the federal level as well. Now I think some people are guessing the OCC charter purely because they believe look we can do anything we want and not have regard for the states. I do believe that no one actually that actually operates these regulatory structures actually believes that there's not going to be a role for the states. I think it's going to be I think it's going to depend on the actual underlying functionality but fundamentally Zyrahash is going to maintain at state licenses and also going to operate under an OCC framework and we're going to we are putting some functionality such as issuance of stable coins underneath the OCC entity acting as a fiduciary custodian under the OCC entity and then other services will remain at the other entities that we service today. So that's just fundamentally how we think about it. It gives us gives us gives us optionality it allows us to expand our products stack and it's as simple as that. The optionality piece makes a ton of sense I mean whenever I whenever I have to explain the US dual state federal banking system to like European people or people who have not like worked like professionally worked in that system. I always get a very physical and confused look of like why would anyone ever build like a governmental legal regulatory system this way. In fact no other country has that type of dual state federal system and then you know you mentioned M. T. L. Sir money transmission licenses other sort of categories of permission and categories of regulation layered on top of it. I mean what you're describing as far as your approach definitely makes sense given that you know it's hard to say how will any individual state you know react or respond to developments in the current environment. So for example we recently saw the state of California create sort of an umbrella body over some of its financial regulators at a point former CFP director Roe Hitchopra into that role. So you can imagine a more muscular I'm guessing in that specific example like a more muscular consumer protection posture but that could extend to stablecoins to crypto obviously NYDFS in New York has been quite active in the space and you know no one can really well I would not want to predict what's going to happen you know in the next midterm elections in the next presidential elections. So like having an approach to running your business that is sort of durable redundant sustainable across changes both at the state and the federal level seems in my in my bias thinking seems like a I don't know safer and more responsible way to sort of orchestrate to architect your business. Yeah yeah look I mean our goal is to be foolproof to abstract away these nuances and complexities for partners as well as solving the technical challenges and complexities that exist. So at its core we want to provide as much coverage as possible and to abstract away some of these nuanced discussions that we find interesting from from hot clients. Not everyone wants to have these discussions so that's that's okay that's why you that's why you're here to abstract away that complexity. Exactly. So one of the talking points I've heard again and again on the conference circuit probably for four or five plus years now is talking about crypto and then increasingly stablecoins as quote unquote programmable money. You've used somewhat different language talking about crypto as software so and you know we've already sort of talked through some of these ideas but that it's not an asset class it's really the technology and the rails that money and not just money but value will increasingly move on. Can you like expand a little bit on what you mean by like crypto as software. Yeah so fundamentally we're talking about cryptography as a software and the ability for any asset that's built on this fundamental technology to be programmable. So I think most people are now familiar with smart contracts the ability to program from a software perspective the ability to automate certain activities based on certain functions and that is effectively a smart contract implementation that you could imagine could be applied to a ton of financial services kind of use cases. I think one that particularly excites me around programmability is for example I've spoken about this a lot recently and we've deployed some infrastructure around this is around AI and so if we think about what the world looks like in a very short period of time increasingly so I think we're going to pass the past the contract where effectively we aren't googling things anymore and so the economics of the internet are fundamentally shifting. This is obviously important for someone like yourself as a what you can call knowledge bank or a creator but effectively you customers are not going to be you know if we just look at your use case cut and you know people that are searching things and no longer going to be routed to your website right so you're not getting the ads or referral links or whatever else that's kind of how the e-commerce the internet works. Now that is fundamentally going to shift in an agenteic world it already is I think if you ask most people today how much do you search in Google relative to search in for example chat I think more more people it's skewing towards they're almost going away from that and so it's really important because these products rely on knowledge creators right and so how does the world look where you no longer are routed to the websites how does that like fundamentally it's a really really important question so you've got this contract that exists where you're going to have millions of content creators millions of knowledge banks right millions of Jason's billions if not of Jason's and other store sorts places of knowledge and then you've got billions of agents and these are very fragmented ecosystems there's not going to be a marketplace of knowledge is my view it's going to be a very fragmented world exactly where the program but it's too many makes it's on a sense so you can imagine a world where an agent wants to crawl for example Jason Mickler's website and effectively they pay a very small fee for pulling that data for each pull in the same way that for example if I stream music from Spotify I get you know the artist gets a small small fee so I think conceptually that's how I see the the future of the the internet knowledge bank working and I think that's what programmability really matters because if you have billions of agents and billions of sources of information how do those interact when you've got people across the world you've got for example content creators in the Netherlands and then you've got an agent in Brazil how's that going to work and that is fundamental where stablecoins add a huge amount of value just by fundamentally being global in nature but also programmability matters so you could have in theory that the money only moves when the knowledge is transferred and I think that's incredibly important so what we mean by programmability is the ability for example to treat money of software and that is one example that I see that is a very very important question frankly for the world and that is where programmability of money matters and that's why I view it as software it's it's it's the same way that I can transfer data I can transfer pictures I can transfer knowledge but you need the the transfer mechanism money to also be equally on the same effectively the same rail the same mechanism and easy to transfer as as as the actual underlying you know content that's been transferred but that makes a lot of sense and you are speaking directly to what am I I want to say nightmare or so much as preoccupations of like okay like how people go about accessing organizing analyzing information you know as you pointed out already has changed radically and I mean it's easy to be in our sort of like technology bubbles which may or may not map clearly to like what is happening in Omaha or Kansas or wherever. But if you look at the stats as far as adoption and usage. I think it's directly correct that people are making whether it's Claude or Chad G.P.T. or something else. If not, they're only port of call, increasingly they're the first port of call over Google. There's a whole bunch of reasons why, including the quote-unquote "insertification problem" of platforms and ringing out more revenue by cramming in more ads or making an order to distinguish an ad from organic results, etc. But I tend to agree with you that poses a real risk to whether it's legacy news outlets like CNN or the New York Times or sort of solo or small creators like myself or industry colleagues who do similar things. If you're not monetizing through an ad or there is an ad, but somebody's never going to see it because they're scraping your content through Claude. They're also much less likely to actually visit your site, sign up for a subscription or potentially what paid tier. How do you think about a fair exchange of value? Which is, I think I would argue is a problem that Google never really solved. They just became more aggressive about sort of surfacing information within their own results page to dissuade it a user from leaving and like going to visit the source of that material. So hopefully, hopefully, the sort of developing AI world in combination with the programmable money movement that you're describing gives us another bite at that apple and solving that sort of problem around exchange of value between people who are sort of creating net new knowledge or net new analysis and how people are actually discovering and accessing that information. Absolutely. And that is exactly the question and that is exactly where programmable to see money. So you've been busy on the conference circuit this year. I myself am trying to like consciously go to less events, but you are in semaphores world economic forum. You're at the crypto focused event consensus down in Miami earlier in May and you're going to be at CNBC's CEO council shortly. I'm curious from like the sort of different sets of people at these different events. If you have a sense of to what extent executives in non financial businesses are paying attention to developments in crypto, in stable coins, in blockchain. Is this something they spend time thinking about? Do they identify it as something that has potential to enhance their businesses? Is it something they view as a risk to their businesses? Like what are you hearing out there in the marketplace? Yeah, no, I mean, this has certainly been a busy year. I started off with Davos, which is an interesting event. It was my first time, but incredibly productive. I think, look, in terms of non financial companies, I think that there's two conversations. One is again, the Unises Technology. And how does that change things? But secondly, every business ultimately moves money. There's this theme that every business is going to become a FinTech at some point. I don't necessarily believe that it's necessary a trend that we're seeing across every type of enterprise. But every business ultimately cares, I think, about being more global and about the loss of money in certain applications. So look, if you are a two-sided marketplace, if you are a fibre and upwork, you care about potentially freelancers being able to get paid more quickly. So after every job, they don't have to wait six, seven, eight, nine days. And that can be seen as a differentiator. You can imagine, for example, Uber drivers being paid more quickly, instantly, globally, anywhere in the world. So that's kind of the content creator side. Look, if you're more of an international business, there is a value proposition around being able to potentially be paid in stablecoins. Again, it just doesn't alternative payment methods. So it's not saying, hey, I'm going to bring all of my infrastructure over to stablecoins. It's saying, look, if I'm a global business, if I'm a VPN business, for example, I'm global in nature inherently. I'm a software business. But one of the frictions is sometimes the cost of getting paid in certain places. So that is where it can compete. So typically where we see, I would say, the type of enterprise that is particularly interesting in the pay and use case, the characteristics, again, trying to make it very, very tangible for people, is it tends to be a business that has relatively small quantum in transaction size. So having to pay a dollar really eats into their margin. And so this could be, for example, a subscription business, a Spotify, a Nord VPN, relatively low monthly amounts. But that where if you're losing 30% because of effects or because of traditional rails, that really is material. And then nature is global. Look, stablecoins and this blockchain infrastructure is not necessarily relevant every CEO of the Fortune 500, but I think it's relevant to majority in the sense of their global, their move value. And they think about that in a very meaningful way. And then you could even bring that forward to a treasury use cases as well. So we certainly are seeing a huge evolution, not only in the traditional financial services space or FinTechs, but also other businesses. I mean, I met a business the other day. It's really incredible that they're a global business in nature. They provide clipping services and they've been able to go global instantly because of stable coins. That previously was a very, very complex thing to do. And it's reflected in how quickly these people are growing. Now all of a sudden, information and clipping is global, right? Everyone has Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. And the ability to move value, though, was always the friction. And so it's incredible when you see new businesses be created. It's the same way that if you're starting a business today, if you're not starting as AI native, I think that's an issue, right? It's the same way that if you're building a global business, if you're not inherently put in stablecoins, then you're naturally going to go slower. You just are. And so that to me is where we're seeing a lot of excitement. I mean, I guess to follow up on that, to what extent, using the sort of like Fortune 500 as the context or the example, to what extent do non-financial companies in that sort of large corporate space need to evaluate, consider trying to build these kinds of solutions, whether it's crypto, stablecoin, tokenization on their own versus leveraging service providers, partnerships, companies like ZeroHash to sort of build out the use cases that are trying to build out, whether that is Treasury management, whether that is localable payment acceptance and so on. Yeah, look, I think there's a lot of unknown unknowns. And these companies, I think that I'm sure have noticed. And so that is inherently a point where they look to partner as opposed to necessarily build internally. Also velocity matters. And again, we've been doing this for eight and a half, nine years now. We're able to get clients live very, very quickly. And it's only shortening. This is what's fundamentally interesting about the intersection of infrastructure business like us and where we play. We've decided it's been independent business. And inherently, you're trading off to some degree, a distribution game that has historically existed as a bigger business. Bigger businesses have distribution. It's easy. Let me just flip a switch. What I find really interesting with MCPs and AI Agente code in is the barrier to going with a best in class partner. I think is significantly less. Now it's not the only thing the technical development is a part of the puzzle. There's obviously PDD, there's commercials, there's all these other things. But I think fundamentally in the same way that AI has made moats less deep for a lot of companies. I also think it's made distribution value propositions also less deep. And what I mean by that is we're able to get a partner up and running very, very quickly. And especially as we've developed MCPs and partners of building themselves, the ability to pick zero hash versus say, hey, I'm just flipping us in very loose terms. I'm flipping a switch with another partner, which fundamentally isn't the case, but that sometimes can be the challenge. I think that's changing. So that for us is a very, very interesting development as an infrastructure business. So we've talked a lot about stablecoins, crypto, obviously, that's what you do. But I do want to sort of be cognizant that, you know, particularly in some of these more like real world money movement use cases as opposed to that sort of asset class discussion or asset class use cases, they are at least, you know, implicitly, if not explicitly, competing with a whole slew of existing mechanisms that exist to move money, whether it's ACH, whether it's wire. I think the comparison to the card networks tends to be the one that comes up the most, particularly in the context of some of this programmable or like agentic payments or agentic commerce conversations that are very, very, very popular right now. You know, I guess to my mind, like, it sounds great in theory, but I sometimes question what it looks like in practice. You know, I feel like there's a lot of antipathy, some of it understandable towards the card networks, you know, views a master card, but I guess to play Diffle's advocate for a moment, the networks do serve a purpose by creating an at least in theory, enforcing a common set of rules, including for consumer protection, you know, dispute resolution and so on, and that those, that that framework creates consumer trust, right? People see the visa logo, they see the master card logo, and I mean, you could debate or argue this, but they see that and they think, okay, like my payment's gonna be accepted, and if something goes wrong, it's gonna get taken care of. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not true, but like, at a high level, I think that you can make that case. Do you think consumers are ready to trust AI agents to make payments on their behalf, whether it's using some kind of crypt over stablecoin, you know, or traditional, you know, card payment mechanisms? - I mean, I think ultimately we're gonna get to yes, and I think it's going to be a question of authentication and controls and permissions, and this is where fundamentally, and I'm not, again, not saying, I like not to think of things in binary constructs, but I like to show additive value with this technology, is for example, the ability, so it's kind of interesting if you work with agents. Sometimes agents are like temperamental, right? They almost have it. - I guess they are. - And, you know, it's interesting, sometimes they want to do their own thing. And so fundamentally, if you think about giving agents more control over spending, I think there's obviously a lot of questions around authentication, know your agent. I mean, ultimately agents have to roll up to people or to NMPs, ultimately, right, whoever's deploying them. I think, in traditional financial services speak, but I think where stablecoins and cryptography have unique value is, and again, we are going to technical, but if you're able to, so the way that NPC works, effectively, I can create a lot of policies that are hard-coded cryptographically into the system. So the agent that is temperamental can't do whatever it wants. And so effectively, you could imagine a world where I have a stablecoin wallet, and I say to my agent, "Hey, agent, I'm going to give you the ability "to spend up to 100 bucks, and you can just do that." Anything above cryptographically needs me to authenticate. And that could be very, very simple. That could just be almost like an OTP-like experience, where agent pushes a notification, and then effectively the way that the underlying stack is being done is through NPC mechanism. So I think there is an interesting intersection. Again, my view on agents is that it's going to be less in terms of, I think where we're more excited is less in terms of the consumer using the agent. It's more about the agents communicating with other agents or agents communicating with effectively content. That's where we're spending a lot of time as opposed to the end retail user spending with their stablecoin wallet. But I do think that there's actually some very unique pieces that people are concerned about with agents that, again, this technology can help solve. So I will close with a question, or I guess a couple of questions actually, that take us full circle to where we started. So a lot has changed since you founded ZeroHash in 2017, while still relatively small in the scope of the entire financial services sector, crypto, and stablecoins and tokenization have become much larger and much more intertwined with the traditional financial system since you started ZeroHash nine years ago. When you look at where the market is today and where it's heading, does anything concern you? Anything keep you up at night? - Yeah, I mean, I actually sleep pretty, pretty pretty well. (laughing) I think the fundamental point is, it doesn't mean I don't worry about things. I think I'm just good at capitalizing at this point. Look, I think things that we've been public about and we've spent a lot of time with rulemaking is the way that stablecoins operate. We live in a world where stablecoins did depeg a couple of years ago, and if you're using this technology every single day, I think you understand the risks actually better than most. We live in a world where a stablecoin depeg'd to 65 cents, you know, you know, you world liberty finance is stablecoin, and people aren't talking about it. And I think then this was issued by a partner that will be genius compliant. One of the rules are actually made. - Well, one is possible to be a genius compliant. - So look, the way, so what we think is really, really important with stablecoins is the ability to ensure that they are backed fully, and that's where people spend a lot of time. But what we think is equally as important is the redeemability of stablecoins. I mean by that is that the issue it gives you dollars if you want dollars. I think that is critically important. When you look at the data and you look at depeg's, depeg's don't just exist because of concerns about fundamentally where the assets are held. Like the very simple narrative that SVB caused the USEC depeg, it's not as simple as that. There are a lot of other drivers. And so what we spend a lot of time thinking about is redeemability, ensuring the issue is able to redeem in a timely fashion because ultimately, that is important. The interoperability between a stablecoin and a traditional dollar is very, very important. So that we've put out papers on this topic, and it's a very niche topic, but I think that's important as well. And look, you've covered some good things. I mean, there are some companies out there that are like Teflon. And look, I think businesses need to make determinations as to look, it's do you want to be on the Wall Street Journal front page? I don't know if people even care anymore sometimes. And that kind of concerns me. Like do you want to be in Jason McCoolers, Sunday newsletter? Like there are Teflon companies out there. And it's ultimately up to larger companies to make a determination as why are we doing this? And ultimately, it's not just a risk assessment, but it's ultimately about why am I doing what I do every single day? And making decision on partners that culturally align with your vision of trying to make and bring value. And if you don't want to bring value, that's fine. But I don't think you can say, I want to bring value to XYZ, yet I'm going to choose a partner that doesn't have the same values as me. And making that a very clear, it's almost like VDD, can, you know, VDD a lot of times just confirmatory. But I think the leaders upfront saying we need these companies to culturally align. I think where we've seen a normal success of ZeroHash, where we've been doing things the right way for nine years, is a particular big banks. Whether or not it's because a reputational, because of what you can have your own thesis as to why. But they live in a world where they operate global businesses and they have to do things globally in the right way. And that is where ZeroHash has, I think, an unrivaled ability to win. And, you know, we've announced one USG-SIP. We will be announcing at least three by the end of this year. And that is where we see a massive cultural alignment where Teflon companies, you know, it just doesn't work. And so that's a really important thing for us. And like I always say, regulation is the flaw. It's not the objective. It's the flaw. - Absolutely. And look, we want to build a business that has long-term sustainability. And frankly, look at ourselves and say, look, we've created value. That's sort of very simple, black and white decision that we've made. - We will have to leave it there for now, Edward. For those that want to keep up with the latest at ZeroHash, where can they find you? - Yes, so you can find us on LinkedIn, just ZeroHash or on X. Our hand is ZeroHashX, or you can also follow me on X as well. - I am still on X, even if I struggle to call it that sometimes. All right, Edward, thank you so much. I will have to catch up with you the next time I'm in Chicago. - Look forward to it.