Tom Sosnoff, Tasty Trade & Ed Woodford, Zero Hash

This episode of The Scoop brings together two guests with deep roots in trading and market infrastructure: Tom Sosnoff, the founder of tastytrade and tastyworks and a longtime fixture of the options-trading world who previously built and sold the Thinkorswim brokerage platform, and Ed Woodford, chief executive of Zero Hash, a crypto infrastructure company that provides the technology and licensing rails allowing traditional financial firms to offer digital-asset trading and custody without building it themselves.

Recorded in April 2021, shortly after Coinbase's high-profile direct listing revealed just how lucrative retail crypto trading had become, generating close to two billion dollars in revenue for the exchange in a single quarter, the conversation explores why that kind of number sent a clear signal to traditional brokerages that crypto could no longer be ignored as a source of trading revenue.

Sosnoff and Woodford discuss the strategic rationale behind tastyworks' partnership with Zero Hash, which allowed Sosnoff's brokerage to plug in cryptocurrency trading for its customers without becoming a crypto exchange itself, relying instead on Zero Hash's back-end infrastructure for custody, settlement, and regulatory compliance. Woodford explains Zero Hash's broader business model of serving as connective tissue for banks, brokerages, and fintech apps that want to offer crypto access, describing the demand he was seeing from traditional finance players eager to meet client demand quickly rather than spend years building proprietary crypto systems.

Sosnoff, drawing on decades of experience building trading platforms for retail options and equities traders, offers his perspective on what crypto-curious retail investors actually want from their brokerage relationship, namely a single account where they can move seamlessly between traditional securities and digital assets rather than juggling separate platforms.

The two discuss the competitive pressure this trend was putting on incumbent exchanges and the broader race among fintech companies to become genuine one-stop shops for a new generation of investors comfortable holding both stocks and crypto side by side, a shift both guests agree was accelerating far faster than most of Wall Street had anticipated.