On a summer afternoon in Chicago, Mark Daly took the last chair on a small stage beneath a large picture of the Willis Tower. To his left sat a stablecoin issuer, an investor, and a payments founder. Before them sat the sort of audience that financial revolutions eventually acquire: people with notebooks, implementation questions, and very little patience for manifestos.
The occasion was Chicago Stablecoin Day. Its geography was apt. Chicago has always known that finance is partly theatre and mostly plumbing. A price flashes; behind it wait clearing, collateral, risk checks, settlement, and a stack of rules tall enough to block the view. Daly’s career has unfolded in that backstage territory. As Chief Business Officer of zerohash, he works where a digital dollar stops being a talking point and becomes a payout, a funded account, or an asset that has to arrive intact at 2 a.m.
Before the blockchain, a balance sheet
Daly’s route into crypto began with conventional finance. He completed a master’s degree in Asset Management at University College Cork in 2015, then worked at Advantage Futures in Chicago as a European sales and research analyst. He also earned the Series 3 qualification, the American credential associated with futures and commodities business. The order matters. He learned the old rails before trying to sell the new ones.
In finance, novelty arrives wearing inherited clothes. A stablecoin may live on a blockchain, but an institution still asks familiar questions: Who holds the assets? Where is the liquidity? How does settlement work? Which entity is regulated? What appears in the report? Who answers when something goes wrong? Daly’s education and early work placed him on the practical side of those questions. Crypto would later add a new vocabulary, but not abolish the obligations underneath it.
Master’s degree in Asset Management at University College Cork.
European sales and research at Advantage Futures, followed by a Series 3 qualification.
Business development, VP and SVP of Growth, then global revenue and partnerships.
Chief Business Officer, leading commercialization across stablecoins, tokenization, staking, and digital assets.
A title history that tells the story
The neatest account of Daly’s years at zerohash is hiding in his succession of titles. He has been Head of Business Development, Vice President of Growth, Senior Vice President of Growth, Global Head of Revenue and Partnerships, and now Chief Business Officer. This is more than corporate archaeology. Each title marks a wider circle around the same problem: how to connect an ambitious technical system to institutions that prize reliability over romance.
Zerohash describes Daly as a member of its founding team and an architect of its global ecosystem partnerships. The company began in Chicago in 2017 and developed into infrastructure that sits behind the digital-asset products of other brands. By September 2025, a $104 million financing round had taken total disclosed funding to roughly $275 million and valued the company at $1 billion. Daly’s remit grew with the company: not merely finding customers, but turning custody, liquidity, compliance, and settlement into a commercial whole.
“The key thing that you’re doing is you’re enabling your users to interact with what we are seeing as the future of finance.”Mark Daly, 2022
His public language has rarely depended on utopia. In a 2022 interview about neobanks, Daly reduced the attraction of crypto products to three blunt outcomes: engagement, new revenue lines, and new users. He said that providers launching crypto were seeing between 20 and 30 percent of customers begin buying and selling, an industry-wide observation rather than a zerohash statistic. Users who held crypto checked their apps more often. Banks noticed money leaving for exchanges. Exchanges, meanwhile, began reaching toward cards, lending, and other bank-like services. The border was getting crowded.
He also argued that a buy-and-sell button would not be sufficient. Customers would expect an entrance to staking, rewards, decentralized finance, and other digital products, served through a simple interface. This was an unusually sober way to describe a flamboyant market. The opportunity was exciting; the implementation sounded like work.
When crypto stopped being the product
The largest change in Daly’s pitch is the quiet demotion of crypto itself. Earlier consumer products made the asset the attraction: tap here, buy bitcoin. The newer work makes the rail useful even when a customer never admires it. A business wants to fund an account instantly. A platform wants to pay a contractor across a border. A brokerage wants settlement to keep pace with an always-open market. Stablecoins can be one leg of those journeys without becoming the entire show.
This is why Daly repeatedly returns to abstraction. Zerohash offers one integration while managing activity across assets, chains, wallets, and regulated entities. When the company added support for Robinhood Chain and USDG in August 2026, it said its system spanned more than 100 assets and more than 35 chains. The boast was not really about the size of the catalogue. It was about sparing each client from maintaining 35 separate headaches.
At Chicago Stablecoin Day, the company paired that infrastructure story with its own 2025 usage figures: customers actively transacting in stablecoins grew 146 percent year over year; transaction count rose 208 percent; stablecoin volume climbed 690 percent. Metrics can be vain little creatures, particularly in crypto, but these describe repetition rather than mere registration. People came back and moved money again. For an operator, recurrence is more interesting than applause.
The awkward hour after midnight
Daly’s 2026 appearance at Paris Blockchain Week was titled “The 24/7 Shift.” The phrase catches the operational dilemma better than any coin logo. Traditional finance contains clocks everywhere: cutoffs, batches, business days, market hours. A blockchain does not go home for the weekend. Connecting the two is less like replacing a road than joining a motorway to a canal and promising the cargo will not notice.
Onstage with Marat Faritov of Moody’s Ratings, Daly focused on the seams: compliance, liquidity, customer experience, and the coexistence of legacy and new rails. Institutions were no longer simply exploring, he later wrote; banks, brokerages, and fintechs were building. The questions had become specific because production is specific. An idea can be elegant. A payment needs an address, a control framework, a balance, and an answer when the recipient is in another jurisdiction.
That same logic appeared in zerohash’s August 2026 collaboration with Visa Direct. Eligible clients gained the ability to prefund accounts and make payouts in stablecoins. Visa Direct reaches more than 18 billion endpoints across cards, accounts, and wallets in over 195 countries and territories. Daly’s own gloss was almost defiantly practical: onchain money is most useful when it appears in rails businesses already use. The future, in this telling, does not demand a costume change.
The operator’s ambition
There is an old temptation in technology to confuse visibility with importance. The app gets the screenshot; the infrastructure gets a diagram. Daly has built his career in the diagram. He talks about interoperability, institutional workflows, and the regulatory wrapper with the ease of someone who knows the plumbing only becomes fascinating when it fails.
His recent remarks widen the map again. When zerohash supported Wyoming’s Frontier Stable Token, he observed that onchain money was no longer issued under a single model: companies, banks, and now a U.S. state could all create it. Different issuers and networks increase choice, but they also multiply the integrations an institution might have to manage. Daly’s answer remains consistent: absorb the complexity once, then offer access through a common layer.
It is possible to hear grand ambition in that proposition. It is also possible to hear a salesman who knows that institutions rarely purchase grandeur. They purchase uptime, coverage, controls, and a plausible path through the next committee meeting. Daly’s distinction is that he can hold both registers at once. He speaks of technology “rewiring how value moves globally,” then immediately returns to assets, chains, and a seamless integration.
Back in the fourth chair in Chicago, the setting provided a tidy summary of his career. The skyline on the screen belonged to a city built on trade, rails, and financial contracts. The panel belonged to a newer system of dollars that can travel through software at any hour. Daly sat between those worlds, not insisting that one destroy the other, but explaining how they might be connected.
That is the less cinematic work of a financial transition. Someone has to translate possibility into procurement, novelty into controls, and a restless network into something a cautious institution can trust. When it succeeds, the transaction looks simple. Money moves. The customer gets on with the day. And the plumbing, having done its job, disappears.