Morgan Stanley will be bringing crypto trading to its digital investing platform next year, the latest in a series of moves by U.S. banks and investment firms to incorporate digital assets into their offerings.
“The underlying technology has been proven and blockchain-based infrastructure is obviously here to stay,” Finn said. “Clients should have access to digitized assets, traditional assets and cryptocurrencies, all in the same ecosystem that they’re used to.”
Zerohash announced on Tuesday it has reached unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation after raising $104 million in a new funding round led by Interactive Brokers, with Morgan Stanley, SoFi and others participating. The recent round brings Zerohash’s total funding to $275 million, according to the company.
“We are building the AWS of on-chain infrastructure,” said Edward Woodford, CEO of Zerohash. “This raise, and the caliber of our investors and clients, is testament to the trust we’ve built. Crypto, stablecoins and tokenization aren’t coming, it’s here, and Zerohash is the engine behind the scenes.”
Investment in distributed ledger providers like Zerohash comes amid
“I’ve recently met with multiple large bank CEOs and financial services executives … who said that they are spending more than 50% of their time driving on-chain innovation at their firms,” said Adam Berg, chief financial officer at Zerohash.
Woodford told American Banker that Zerohash provides infrastructure for three types of digital assets — cryptocurrency, stablecoins and tokenized assets — because the company views each type as having the same fundamental technology stack behind it. For instance, Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the distributed ledger ethereum.
“ETH, USDC.ETH and a tokenized stock on ETH are all built on the same technical stack,” Woodford said. “Additionally, from a business perspective, clients will leverage all of them. For example, Interactive Brokers started working with Zerohash to offer crypto to their clients and has publicly announced expanding into stablecoin account funding with Zerohash this year.”
Zerohash is designed to work with all types and sizes of banks, according to Woodford, and currently works with neobanks such as Current and MoneyLion in addition to its partnership with Morgan Stanley. Zerohash also works with payment processors such as Stripe and Shift4.
Young Pham, chief strategy officer at technology firm CI&T, sees the funding round as “great validation” for Zerohash’s role in cryptocurrency and stablecoin infrastructure services.
“Our traditional financial services clients, such as banks, asset management and investment firms, are more aggressively pursuing digital asset management with the hesitancy around governance and regulatory compliance [dissipating],” Pham told American Banker. “This investment will encourage financial institutions to accelerate their capabilities around digital payments, asset custody and settlement. The move to stablecoin isn’t just about the volatility of the cryptocurrency, but also stability of the service providers.”