A recent flood of institutional demand for blockchain technology has helped to mint a new unicorn. Zerohash, a crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company headquartered in Chicago, announced Tuesday that it had raised $104 million at a $1 billion valuation. Interactive Brokers, a publicly traded brokerage, led the round.

In a crowded field of infrastructure companies, Zerohash has carved out a name for itself by helping financial institutions and fintechs build out their own products for stablecoins, crypto trading, and tokenization. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies backed by underlying assets like the U.S. dollar, and tokenization refers to putting financial assets into blockchain wrappers.

Other participants in the startup’s fundraise included traditional finance giants like Morgan Stanley and Apollo Global Management. The publicly traded fintech SoFi and the crypto arm of the high-frequency trading firm Jump Trading also contributed, among others.

The $1 billion valuation marks a significant jump from Zerohash’s last round in 2022, when it raised at a $340 million valuation, according to Pitchbook. The data aggregator’s estimate is “about accurate,” said Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of Zerohash, but he declined to specify his company’s valuation in its prior fundraise.

The near tripling in Zerohash’s worth signals how crypto, which contracted from 2022 to 2024, is now riding another wave of hype. And the traditional finance institutions backing the startup are evidence of how Wall Street investors, not just a ragtag group of cypherpunk libertarians, are driving the market’s recent surge.

“Crypto now is not a debated issue at this point at large institutional banks,” said Woodford.

Bridge to traditional finance

Although Woodford has been in crypto for almost a decade, he’s no cypherpunk. In 2015, he graduated from MIT with a master’s degree in finance and launched a swaps platform for emerging commodities, like industrial hemp.

He sold the business in 2017 to the brokerage Tastytrade, and, that same year, Woodford went on to build a new company. That business has cycled through a variety of names and stylizations—Seed CX, Zero #, Zero Hash, and now Zerohash—but it’s always focused on building crypto infrastructure for financial institutions.

Over eight years, Woodford has managed to ride multiple crypto booms and busts. “It’s not just that we’re a survivor,” he said. “We’ve actually thrived in that market, and actually now, I think we can accelerate that even further.”

But it’s this cycle of crypto, where every Wall Street firm appears to be piling into digital assets amid pro–crypto regulation from President Donald Trump, that seems to be tailor-made for Zerohash. “It’s not that they weren’t doing any work on this stuff already,” Woodford, referring to financial institutions. “But they just weren’t able to move into the space, and now there’s a clear path for them to be able to do so.”

While Woodford wouldn’t disclose his startup’s revenue or whether it was profitable, he did say Zerohash has increased its topline each year over the past three years, even during the Crypto Winter of 2022 through 2024.

Zerohash, which has about 200 employees, has three business verticals. It develops a white-labeled crypto brokerage that companies like Interactive Brokers can spin up to more easily let their customers buy and sell digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has APIs for tokenization, which has helped, for example, BlackRock tokenize money market funds. And it builds stablecoin networks to let customers, including Stripe, more easily send and receive the tokens.

“Zerohash has been able to grow with headwinds,” said Woodford. “Imagine what it looks like with tailwinds.”

Fast-growing crypto and stablecoin startup Zerohash raises $104 million