Analysis: How 2017 startups Securitize and Zerohash became 2025 Billion-Dollar Exits
Securitize goes public at $1.25B; Zerohash rumored to sell to Mastercard for $2B
Gm Fintech Architects —
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Summary: We reflect on the long arc of fintech and crypto innovation through the stories of Securitize and Zerohash. Founded in 2017, Securitize is now going public via a $1.25B SPAC with Cantor, after years of building institutional-grade tokenization infrastructure and securing a pivotal partnership with BlackRock. Meanwhile, Zerohash, another 2017 vintage startup, is rumored to be acquired by Mastercard for $2B, having evolved from a crypto brokerage API into an embedded payments and stablecoin network powering 50% of its volume in digital dollar flows. Both companies endured regulatory winters and shifting market narratives to reach this moment. Their success underscores that durable outcomes in fintech and crypto emerge from compounding over multiple market cycles, not quick hype cycles.
Topics: Securitize, Zerohash, Mastercard, Cantor Fitzgerald, BlackRock, OpenAI, Ethena, mZero, Plaid, Visa, Tink, Coinbase, Stripe, Consensys Codefi, Aave, Evolve Bank, Synapse, Interactive Brokers
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Long Take
Things Take Time
Securitize, a securities tokenization platform created after the ICO boom, was founded in 2017. In 2025, it is planning to go public in a $1.25B SPAC backed by Cantor.
Zerohash, an embedded crypto platform founded in 2017, is about to be acquired by MasterCard for $2B, on the heels of a $100MM+ raise from Interactive Brokers that valued it at $1B.
OpenAI, the LLM commercialization behemoth, was founded in 2015, and now plans for a $1T IPO, while trading at $500B+ on the private markets.
We are all so fritzed out from social media and financialized gambling, that we want the billion dollars in a month. And with paper valuations, that is possible.
But real things take time.
Not only do they take time, but they also require you to do deeply unpopular things when it is massively uncomfortable. However, once you do these things, one will start to notice the power of compounding and exponential returns.
You cannot get to $1B, let alone $1T, through linear growth. No amount of bureaucratic P&L forecasting is going to get you there. The only way is through surfing the expansion curve into a market over a meaningful amount of time.
It is true that we are seeing some serious acceleration for the S curve — acceleration and saturation — in AI, that is a combination of a steepening slope as we come to the Singularity, and a larger potential outcome. Many of the highly popular things of today will become unfashionable and be abandoned as a result, or reabsorbed into monopolistic borganisms and turned off.
There is no getting away from having to explore the unknown, the fog of war, and that takes time. It is also the core valiant pursuit. We reward those who go into danger and bring us back the bounty of creation.
We resent those who would steal it or take shortcuts to the top. Some things have to be earned.
The Securitize Story
Web3 oscillates between populism and institutionalism. Populism aligns with democratization, decentralization, and anarchism. Institutionalism applies innovations from populism to existing economic and financial structures.
We are currently in the stablecoin / RWA part of the cycle.
This implies that haf the time, whatever you are working on in crypto is out of favor.
Can you focus on building bridges into traditional financial infrastructure, while everyone else is making easy money in DeFi? Can you get regulatory licenses for alternative trading systems and move all your entities offshore while the government tries to sue you into bankruptcy? Can you continue to wrap equities and fixed income into tokens while everyone onchain is scared to hold them?
Securitize did this for years.