Suit Up · Asia's institutional desk on tokenisation

Zerohash is the institutional crypto and tokenised-asset settlement infrastructure that sits behind a long list of TradFi platforms wanting to offer crypto trading, stablecoin payments, or tokenised securities settlement without standing up the licensing, custody, and operational stack themselves. The company holds money-transmission licences across the US states, a New York BitLicense, and a US trust charter through its subsidiaries, and it operates as the regulated counterparty of record for embedded crypto and stablecoin flows on platforms ranging from broker-dealers to fintech wallets to tokenisation platforms. For a tokenisation operator, Zerohash matters because it is one of the few US-regulated infrastructure vendors that combines settlement, custody, on/off ramp, and stablecoin orchestration in a single API surface, and it has been a recurring partner on the back end of Securitize-issued tokenised products for retail and accredited-investor flows.

What it is

Zerohash is a B2B2C infrastructure provider, not a consumer venue. The end-user-facing product is whatever the platform on top has built: a broker-dealer's app, a fintech wallet, a tokenised-securities issuance flow. Zerohash sits underneath as the regulated counterparty handling KYC, asset custody, on-chain settlement, on/off ramp, and (through Zerohash Liquidity Services) the matching and execution layer on the supported asset set. The legal structure is several entities: Zerohash LLC for money transmission, Zerohash Trust Company, LLC, Zerohash Liquidity Services LLC for execution, and entity wrappers in the UK, Australia, and other markets where local activity has been licensed. The combined perimeter is what allows a US broker-dealer to embed crypto trading or stablecoin settlement under Zerohash's licences rather than seeking its own MTL coverage in fifty-plus jurisdictions.

The asset coverage spans major cryptocurrencies, USD stablecoins (USDC, RLUSD, and others depending on the platform configuration), and increasingly tokenised securities and tokenised-fund interests where the partner platform has primary distribution rights.

Operating model

Zerohash's design point is the embedded-finance pattern applied to digital assets. The partner platform integrates the Zerohash API, Zerohash holds the end-user's KYC, custody, and asset balances on its books, and the partner platform never directly touches the regulated activity. Settlement happens between Zerohash's own omnibus or segregated balances on-chain; the end user sees their balance through the partner UI, but the underlying ledger entry is at Zerohash. That structure is recognisable as the same one Galaxy Digital, Fireblocks, BitGo, and Anchorage operate in different configurations; Zerohash's distinguishing factor is the breadth of the embedded use cases and the depth of the US state-by-state money-transmission licence map.

On the tokenised-securities side, Zerohash has been a settlement infrastructure partner for Securitize-issued products, particularly where the distribution platform on top is a US broker-dealer that needs the on-chain leg to clear under a regulated wrapper without building it in-house. Public coverage of the specific Securitize-Zerohash workflow is light on operational detail. Reportedly the model is that Zerohash holds the tokenised-share interest in custody for the end-user account, with primary issuance and the share-register record sitting at Securitize as transfer agent. Operators integrating into this pattern should validate the live counterparty roles against current product documentation before assuming the design.

The stablecoin orchestration side covers fiat-to-stablecoin and stablecoin-to-fiat conversion, cross-stablecoin swaps, and increasingly the institutional payments flows where a US corporate wants to move USDC against a fiat invoice without holding the operating risk of the conversion. The growth area in 2025 was the expansion of stablecoin payments use cases as the US GENIUS Act cleared Congress and the fiat-stablecoin issuer perimeter (Circle, others) became more legible to corporate treasurers.

Why it matters

Two structural reasons. First, the licence-stack moat. Money transmission in the United States is a state-by-state regime; standing up a fifty-state MTL programme plus the New York BitLicense plus a trust charter is a multi-year, multi-million-dollar undertaking, and Zerohash is one of the small set of vendors that has done it. That makes the company structurally important to anyone wanting to embed crypto or tokenised-asset flows into a TradFi-fronted product without owning the regulatory perimeter. Second, the settlement-infrastructure positioning. Zerohash is not competing with the issuers (BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo) or the issuance platforms (Securitize, Tokeny). It is competing with the other infrastructure vendors that sit underneath, including Fireblocks (more on the institutional custody and treasury orchestration side), BitGo (more on cold storage and qualified custody), and Anchorage (federal trust charter). The competitive map is deliberately platform-tier, not product-tier.

The agentic-commerce relevance is non-trivial. An embedded infrastructure layer with the licence stack to handle KYC, custody, and on-chain settlement on behalf of a partner platform is structurally well-placed to extend the same pattern to AI-agent-controlled wallets, where the agent acts on behalf of an end user whose KYC sits with the platform. Whether Zerohash takes that posture publicly is a separate question.

Recent moves

4 March 2026. Filed an application for a national trust bank charter with the OCC, two days after Morgan Stanley filed a parallel application for Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, NA. The two filings are positioned as parallel moves in the same vertically-integrated Morgan Stanley crypto strategy: Morgan Stanley building the custody and staking layer, Zerohash filing for the federal charter under which the embedded infrastructure operates.
January 2026. Reported in talks to raise USD 250 million at a USD 1.5 billion valuation, on the back of Morgan Stanley E*TRADE partnership signals.
October 2025. Mastercard entered late-stage talks to acquire Zerohash for up to USD 2 billion. Zerohash walked away, choosing to remain independent.
September 2025. Closed a USD 104 million Series D-2 round at a USD 1 billion valuation, led by Interactive Brokers with new participation from Morgan Stanley, SoFi, Apollo-managed funds, and Jump Crypto. Notable as the first crypto-infrastructure investment for several of those institutions (FinTech Weekly coverage).
Through 2025-2026, Zerohash has been a recurring named partner on US broker-dealer crypto launches and on stablecoin-payments embedded integrations. The institutional client roster includes Interactive Brokers, Stripe, BlackRock's BUIDL Fund, Franklin Templeton, DraftKings, Kalshi, Lightspark, Tastytrade, and Republic, with the platform reportedly serving over 5 million end users across 190 countries.
Continued expansion into the stablecoin orchestration use case has tracked the broader US regulatory clarity through GENIUS Act passage in 2025 and the OCC's April 2026 final rule on non-fiduciary trust bank activities.

Why the OCC charter matters specifically

Zerohash already holds a North Carolina trust company charter (received March 2025, operational from September 2025), FinCEN money-service-business registration, and money-transmitter licences across 51 US jurisdictions. The OCC filing is a different move: a national trust bank charter consolidates federal oversight under a single licensing framework, eliminates the per-state operating overhead, and positions Zerohash for the GENIUS Act permitted-issuer pathway under the federal-non-bank route. CEO Edward Woodford has described the company as building the "AWS of on-chain infrastructure"; the OCC charter is the regulatory framework under which that positioning operates without state-by-state friction. The execution risk is the BPI legal challenge to the OCC chartering programme: if the suit proceeds and succeeds, the entire programme including Zerohash's pending application is at risk (see US OCC National Trust Bank Charter for crypto activities).

Open questions

Specific named partner platforms on the tokenised-securities settlement side beyond Securitize. Zerohash has historically named platform clients selectively in coverage; the consolidated list is not public.
Whether Zerohash has live integrations with Kinexys, Canton, or other institutional permissioned rails for settlement, or remains primarily public-chain-focused on the tokenised-asset side.
The agentic-commerce posture: whether Zerohash will explicitly position the platform for AI-agent-controlled wallets as a permitted end-user model, and the KYC and custody architecture that would imply.
Comparative volume figures against Fireblocks, BitGo, and Anchorage on the regulated US infrastructure tier. Zerohash has not historically published comparable AUC or transaction-volume disclosures.

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