The biggest names in finance are quietly offering crypto, and many of them are not building the rails themselves. When I sat down with Rens de Groot, he had a four-word description for the company doing it for them: “the AWS of crypto.” Zerohash, where he runs European operations, sits behind the scenes the way Amazon’s cloud sits behind half the internet. You feel it everywhere and see it almost nowhere.
“If you want to put it very simple, we consider ourselves as being the AWS of crypto, digital assets and stablecoins,” de Groot told me at the Dutch Blockchain Week Summit, wearing a cap that read “stablecoin summer.” “We are behind the scenes. That’s why you don’t see us that much, but we are present everywhere, just like AWS.”
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Zerohash runs a behind-the-scenes B2B2C model it calls "the AWS of crypto," powering crypto, stablecoin and tokenization products for clients such as Morgan Stanley, Interactive Brokers and BlackRock. |
| 2The company took the hard regulatory road, spending nearly a year with the AFM to earn its MiCA license in the Netherlands rather than passporting in from a smaller jurisdiction. |
| 3Zerohash says it is the first entity to hold both a MiCA license and an EMI license under one roof, after also being authorized by De Nederlandsche Bank. |
| 4Its pitch is full abstraction of complexity: clients plug in through APIs and SDKs and never touch the crypto, the blockchains or the compliance work themselves. |
Who is actually behind the curtain
The client list is the pitch. “We serve companies like Morgan Stanley, Interactive Brokers, BlackRock, to name a few, to help them serve their end clients,” he told me. Those ties are public: Zerohash is the infrastructure partner behind Morgan Stanley E*TRADE’s crypto launch. Zerohash runs a B2B2C model across digital-asset trading, stablecoin payments and tokenization. When one of those institutions wants to offer crypto or move stablecoins, Zerohash does the part nobody wants to own.
And the timing, in his telling, is good. The market may feel like winter, but his corner is not. “For us, and the stablecoin ecosystem, it’s summer,” he told me. “We’re growing, we’re helping more companies and enterprises go live to serve their end customers.” Hence the cap.
Why take the hard regulatory road
Most crypto firms chasing Europe pick the soft option: get licensed in a smaller jurisdiction, then passport across the bloc. Zerohash refused. “Being regulated, for us, that’s our starting point,” he told me. “Then we thought, where should you be regulated? You can choose the outskirts of the EU and passport your way in, or you take the hard way and do it in a harder jurisdiction like the Netherlands, and you go on the journey together with the regulator.”
The hard way cost time. “We embarked on the journey with the AFM to acquire our MiCA license. It took slightly less than a year,” he told me. The firm has since become the first MiCA-licensed company to also secure a European EMI license. “But by doing that we learned a lot about our own organization. A top regulator forces you to look at your own internal organization, which in the end is a good thing for any company.” It is a view that echoes what Deloitte’s Sebastiaan Verdonk told me about MiCA reshaping the European crypto market.
Two licenses under one roof
Then Zerohash went further. “We’re also regulated by De Nederlandsche Bank. Recently we acquired our EMI,” he told me. “To my understanding, we are the first entity to have a MiCA license and an EMI license under the hood in one entity, and even more so in the Netherlands.” The reasoning is about who they serve. “Our clients, being tier-one financial institutions, deserve and should get top-tier regulated partners as well.”
He argues the market is already rewarding it. “Tier-one banks are placing question marks with parties that are licensed, but not licensed the way we are,” he said. “We’re seeing the fruits of it. These big banks prefer a Dutch-licensed, German-licensed or French-licensed company, as opposed to companies from the outskirts of Europe buying their licensing together and making one stack out of it.”
The product: abstracting the mess away
What Zerohash actually sells is the disappearance of complexity. “We are licensed, which means our clients don’t need to touch the crypto or the stablecoins themselves,” he explained when I asked how it actually works. “They partner into us through APIs and SDKs, and we abstract away all the complexity associated with crypto today. Which blockchain, which gas fee, which coin you don’t want to use, all sorts of difficulties. We take it away with our stack, which we build predominantly in-house.”
The full service runs all the way down to the parts regulators care about most. “Transaction monitoring, sanction screening, travel rule, of course, because we are in crypto,” he said. “We don’t want to bother our clients with it. It’s full abstraction of complexity.”
Two ways to plug in
Not every client wants the same exposure. Zerohash offers a fully disclosed model, where it onboards the ultimate end customer, and an omnibus model for the cautious. “That might be a use case for private banking or platform operators that are even more careful about client information and don’t want to share it with anyone except the regulator, of course,” he told me. “Then we can facilitate them with an omnibus.”
What it means for Europe
Zerohash’s bet is that the institutional crypto era will be won on regulatory depth, not on speed or marketing. If banks increasingly demand partners licensed in serious jurisdictions, the firms that took the slow road through Amsterdam and Frankfurt could end up with the moat. It is the same regulated-rails logic ClearBank’s Beatriz Otero described when she explained how a licensed bank can bridge traditional finance and crypto. Before I left, de Groot summed the whole company up in one line, then dared me to argue with it. “Full-service, one-stop provider,” he said. “Wherever you add that in one sentence, you put an equal sign, and then Zerohash.”
