The reported investment would position Mastercard as both an enabler of stablecoin payments and an infrastructure provider.
Mastercard is reportedly looking to invest in Zerohash after falling to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company last year.
On January 20, people familiar with the matter told CoinDesk strategic investment talks have begun and are in progress, according to two anonymous people.
Mastercard was linked with a $2bn acquisition of Zerohash in October 2025. Fortune revealed the two companies were in late stage talks but talks ultimately collapsed.
BVNK also caught Mastercard’s eye, but Coinbase were in advanced talks to potentially acquire the stablecoin company; the deal fell through in November 2025.
With reports of Mastercard’s investment in Zerohash, a spokesperson from the company told CoinDesk they are “not entertaining an acquisition by Mastercard”.
“Our team is central to our velocity, and we believe that remaining independent best positions Zerohash to continue innovating, building and delivering for our customers,” said the Zerohas spokesperson.
Zerohash growth
Zerohash is a blockchain and stablecoin infrastructure company which lends its services to financial institutions to embed on/off-ramp conversions for payments.
As part of a Series D-2 funding round, Zerohash raised $104m led by Interactive Brokers which valued the company at $1bn in October 2025.
This took total funding to $275m and stated in its press release at the time the added capital will be used to “accelerate product expansion, support talent growth, and further solidify its role in powering on-chain innovation for the world’s leading financial institutions”.
Since being founded in 2017 by Co-Founder and CEO Edward Woodford, Zerohash has embedded its infrastructure into a range of fintech services, such as Stripe, Nuvei and MoonPay.
The company has over five million users in more than 190 countries, as of October 2025, with 200 employees in offices across the world including New York, Chicago and Amsterdam.
At the time of the Series D-2 funding round, Woodford stated they intended to become the “AWS of on-chain infrastructure”.
“Crypto, stablecoins and tokenisation aren’t coming – it’s here – and zerohash is the engine behind the scenes,” said Woodford.
Zerohash is now able to expand its services across Europe after receiving an operating Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) licence from the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) to provide its infrastructure to companies across the European Economic Area (EEA).
