Building Crypto, Tokenization, & Stablecoin Infrastructure for Big Institutions! | Edward Woodford

Edward Woodford (0:00)

In the same way that you have to program agents or program humanoids to do certain things, you can create those same controls with money. All values come in on chain, and agents are bringing in a new stakeholder in the way that value is transferred globally. There will be different modalities of transfer of money for different reasons and different instances. I think 100% stable coins and on-chain money in blockchain take a meaningful share of today's rails. But to get there, you need to abstract away technical complexity into abstract way and to get the right components for it.

Tony Edward (0:33)

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Hey folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward. And joining me today is Edward Woodford, who is the founder and CEO of ZeroHash, which is a leading infrastructure provider for crypto, stablecoin and tokenized assets. Edward, it's great to have you.

Edward Woodford (2:18)

Yeah, thank you.

Tony Edward (2:20)

Edward, I'm really excited to dive into ZeroHash and what you guys are building.

I've covered ZeroHash and the news updates over the years, but let's kick it off at your background. Where are you from? What's your professional background? How did you make your way into crypto?

Edward Woodford (2:34)

Yeah, so you've already guessed from my accent. Grew up in the UK, came to grad school, to MIT and then stayed. This is my second startup. First one was in the alternative markets and commodity space. I've always been drawn to markets where I felt that there was going to be a domino fall in our favor and at some points in this journey with on-chain finance, sometimes it's felt that the domino was going to fall back on top of us as opposed to in our favor of moving forward, but that's kind of my journey and so I founded Zerohash in 2017

It's been a great journey and I still think we're still super early in terms of what we can achieve.

Tony Edward (3:18)

Now, at your time at MIT, I remember reading over the years that MIT had a Bitcoin club and they were doing some things with crypto. Were you part of any of that?

Edward Woodford (3:29)

Yes. That's where I got exposed to Bitcoin for the first time.

I had a professor called Christian Catalini, who actually still is very much in the space, and he started a program where actually every MIT undergraduate actually received a Bitcoin as part of the experiment. But I first went deep with Christian as part of one of his classes, and I bought my first Bitcoin at the MIT bookstore with cash. That was my first foray into Bitcoin, did a project as well with a Bitcoin company, and just became fascinated with what I ultimately felt was a technology that would rewire how value was transferred. Didn't do that immediately, obviously traded, invested personally, but decided to take the leap into doing this full time from a career perspective in 2017 But yes, MIT has a very active Bitcoin community, still does. I've spoken at MIT a number of times since I've left.

Again, I think that's because fundamentally, it is a technology that of course is an asset that natively creates the decentralized economic incentive, but ultimately is that technology which MIT is obviously known for. So yeah, I owe it to Christian and a bunch of other people that lived and breathed this well before I did.