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

Crypto platform Zero Hash has chosen a veteran from 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 on Tuesday (March 28).

Mathew, who will also serve as Zero Hash’s CEO, said in the blog post – titled “Why I’m Doubling Down on Crypto” – that he remained confident in the crypto sector despite a long streak of negative press about the industry.

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

“I hate what happened to the end users of these platforms, but I believe that these problems happened largely 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 during his time at Stripe, as well as at Uber, where he recalled meeting a driver who lost 20% of the money he sent home to fees.

“This is when the light bulb went off for me 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 regional manager for Meta (back when it was still Facebook) and worked at Coinbase during “a crypto winter,” but not the crypto winter that rocked the industry last year.

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

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 may 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 blockchain-based digital asset use cases have not lived up to their promises and how they pose various risks to consumers and the US financial system.