Zero Hash’s New President ‘Doubling Down’ on Crypto

Crypto platform Zero Hash has chosen a veteran of Coinbase and Meta as its new president.

Cyril Mathew, who most recently oversaw business development and partnerships at payments processor Stripe, announced his arrival at Zero Hash on the company blog Tuesday (March 28).

Mathew, who will also serve as Zero Hash’s chief operating officer, said in the blog post — titled “Why I’m doubling down on crypto” — that he remained confident in the crypto sector despite a long stretch of negative press about the industry.

“Some people have recently asked me why I’m still in a space with bad actors like FTX and 3AC,” he wrote, the last part an apparent reference to Three Arrows Capital.

“I hate what happened to end users of these platforms, but I believe these issues largely happened because of a lack of regulation and transparency.”

He added that he saw how valuable a company like Zero Hash — a crypto-as-infrastructure provider — could be in his time at Stripe, as well as at Uber, where he recalled meeting a driver who was losing 20% of the money he was sending back home to fees.

“This was when the lightbulb went off for me in imagining how crypto and blockchain technology could help increase financial access and change how value was digitally moved around the world,” Mathew wrote.

In addition to Strip and Uber, Mathew served as a regional manager for Meta (back when it was still Facebook) and worked at Coinbase during “a crypto winter,” though not the crypto winter that rocked the industry last year.

The industry remains challenged, as PYMNTS reported earlier this week. After the U.S.  Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced charges against leading crypto exchange Biannce on Monday (March 27), the value of bitcoin and ether both dropped, while the shares of several crypto-related firms fell as well.

As PYMNTS wrote last week, crypto’s path to regulatory acceptance is growing ever longer, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) warning investors that cryptocurrency offerings could be illegal because they are not registered with the regulator.

Also last week, the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a report in which an entire 35-page chapter was dedicated to explaining why use cases of blockchain-based digital assets have not lived up to their promises and how they pose various risks to consumers and the U.S. financial system alike.