Hany Rashwan’s long road to one less click

For about 90 minutes in April 2013, a tweet could be a shop. Hany Rashwan’s startup, Ribbon, had introduced a way to complete a purchase inside Twitter. Then Twitter stopped the integration. In the career of a young payments founder, this was a remarkably efficient demonstration of who owned the premises.

The idea was easy to understand. Someone saw something they wanted. A seller wanted to sell it. Sending the buyer off to another website introduced an opportunity for the whole arrangement to collapse. Ribbon tried to keep the transaction close to the moment of interest. Twitter, evidently, had other arrangements.

Years later, Rashwan would help build a business around a related inconvenience. People wanted to invest in crypto, but the route involved unfamiliar exchanges, wallets and private keys. With Ophelia Snyder, he co-founded 21Shares, bringing crypto exposure into products traded through conventional financial accounts. The distance between a tweet and a Swiss exchange listing is considerable. The customer problem has a family resemblance.

The checkout that lasted a morning

In 2012, Ribbon’s pitch was that selling across online platforms could become easier. A merchant could share a short link through a social network, a website or an email. Instead of constructing an entire shop around the sale, the seller could take the payment where an audience already existed.

Rashwan focused on the point where a buyer was redirected somewhere else, or asked to create yet another account. “That’s the point at which people leave,” he said. It is an unglamorous observation with commercial consequences. The customer who wanted the product five seconds ago could suddenly remember something else to do.

“That’s the point at which people leave.”

Hany Rashwan on the extra steps in online checkout, 2012

Ribbon’s Twitter experiment made that ambition unusually visible. It also exposed the dependence built into it. Removing a step for a customer required working inside a platform controlled by someone else. A good interface could not settle that relationship on its own. The episode gives his later career an interesting opening scene: before the exchange-traded products, there was a buy button and a closed door.

A computer, then an audience

Rashwan was born in Cairo and grew up in Alexandria. His introduction to computing came through his grandfather, who gave him a computer and taught him programming. As a teenager, he built gaming websites. He had encountered the possibility of making something online and attracting an audience before finance became his business.

His education crossed disciplines as well as countries. He attended Ohio State before transferring to Columbia, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history. The degree is a pleasing detail in a career usually described through technology. Financial products have histories too, even when their underlying assets are young enough to have internet slang for names.

He also built Kolena, an online forum for civic ideas during Egypt’s 2011 revolution. Its purpose was different from the payments companies that followed. Still, the early projects show a programmer putting software in front of people with something they wanted to do: play, contribute an idea, make a purchase.

After Ribbon came Payout, founded in late 2014. It supplied payment and compliance infrastructure to online lenders. The work moved behind the scenes, away from the conspicuous buy button. By the time of his January 2017 Forbes profile, Payout had moved more than $50 million in loans over the preceding year. Rashwan appeared on that year’s 30 Under 30 list in enterprise technology.

Two mothers, one unfamiliar asset

The family version of the 21Shares origin is more memorable than a market-sizing exercise. Rashwan and Snyder had relatives, including their mothers, interested in crypto but uncomfortable with the available ways to buy and hold it. They started looking for a product those relatives could use. Building it themselves proved considerably more involved.

“Turns out it was pretty damn difficult,” Rashwan later recalled. He also remembered losing a flash drive containing some early bitcoin. A founder designing an alternative to managing crypto directly had, at least, encountered the practical inconvenience firsthand.

21Shares dates its founding to July 2018. That November, HODL, a basket of crypto assets, reached the SIX Swiss Exchange. The venue mattered. Here was a way to put exposure to unfamiliar digital assets into an established securities-market format. Buyers could approach the product through financial relationships they already understood.

Snyder belongs at the center of this account. Rashwan’s career is often presented as a succession of ventures under one name, but 21Shares was a shared undertaking. Turning the family problem into a listed product required a founding partnership, a jurisdiction and a working business around the investment idea. An origin story involving two mothers also requires two founders.

The machinery behind HODL

The name HODL brought a little crypto culture onto an exchange. The operating model involved less wordplay. 21Shares needed to issue and run products that connected securities markets with crypto assets. Its proprietary platform, Onyx, supported that work, including the operation of products for third parties.

The company’s product history records a Bitcoin ETP in February 2019 and a staking ETP later that year. Listings expanded to other European exchanges. The basket at the beginning became a range of ways to express interest in the asset class. Each additional product made the practical business larger than the first question of whether someone wanted bitcoin.

For the end customer, the interface could remain familiar. Behind it sat technology, product administration and relationships with financial institutions. Simplicity had to be produced somewhere. This is the connection to Ribbon that makes Rashwan’s route coherent: the visible transaction gets shorter because someone has taken responsibility for the longer process behind it.

Building through a falling market

In September 2022, 21.co announced a $25 million round led by Marshall Wace, at a valuation of up to $2 billion. The announcement introduced 21.co as the parent of businesses including 21Shares and token provider Amun. Other investors included Collab+Currency, Quiet Ventures, ETFS Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

The timing gave the number some bite. Crypto markets had fallen. The group nevertheless reported more than $650 million in net new assets between September 2021 and September 2022. The distinction mattered: the market value of existing holdings could fall while customers continued to bring money into products.

Rashwan’s public response to the downturn was operational. In a February 2023 interview, he said the business had been profitable for most of its existence, although profitability had weakened from the final quarter of 2022. He emphasized Switzerland’s regulatory environment and spoke positively about developing rules elsewhere. The enthusiasm came with attention to the institutions surrounding the technology.

Later that year, he described a future in which investors might hold the same kinds of assets through different forms, including funds, ETFs and digital tokens. He did not expect ETFs to disappear overnight. That is a more patient outlook than a prediction that every existing financial structure will promptly become an antique.

A company learns to outlive its opening act

The next change was a change of jobs. In December 2024, 21.co announced a separation of its asset-management and technology businesses. Russell Barlow would become 21Shares CEO on January 6, 2025. The founders were to become co-chairs, while directing their executive attention toward 21.co Technologies following a transition.

A subsequent issuer notice recorded Rashwan and Snyder’s resignations as directors of 21Shares AG, effective March 1, 2025. Those developments are part of the biography. The founder at the origin of a company and the executive running it at a later date need not have the same job.

On October 22, 2025, FalconX announced an agreement to acquire 21Shares. At September’s end, the issuer had more than $11 billion in assets across 55 listed products. The deal brought its investment-product business together with an institutional crypto brokerage’s infrastructure. The announcement gave the founders a moment to look back at the business they had built.

Completion followed on November 20. 21Shares would remain independently managed under FalconX, with Barlow continuing as CEO. The acquisition put a date on a new chapter while preserving an operating business. The product range had become something other people could keep running and developing.

Still working on the entrance

Rashwan’s published interests extend beyond listed products. In a January 2025 essay, he discussed stablecoins, tokenized assets and decentralized lending as routes toward wider use of crypto. He also argued for standards and safeguards. His account of adoption included the practical conditions needed for people to trust the system they were being invited to use.

That brings the story back to an ordinary person trying to complete a transaction. An online seller, a lender and an investor need different products. Each can be defeated by an awkward route to the thing they came for. Across Rashwan’s ventures, that route has repeatedly become the work.

The tweet-sized shop lasted a morning. The question behind it has occupied him for years.