on platformco-founder and CEO J.P. Richardson opened up by talking about the company’s derailment on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2024, when Exodus flew 130 employees, friends and family to Manhattan only to learn the night before regulators pulled its listing.
He described the reversal as an “eleventh-hour” rule change that left a room of supporters stunned and forced the company to revert to its own status despite following the rules of the game, he said.
This incident ended months after the US elections, when the movie Exodus happened Finally listed On the US Stock Exchange in January with the same team, ticker and business, but under new management that is more open to digital asset companies.
Richardson framed that saga as proof that Exodus can absorb political and regulatory shocks while adhering to one principle: Money belongs in user control.
Exodus, founded in 2015 in Omaha, has built a Self-detaining wallet It stores keys on user devices and routes swaps through multiple liquidity providers, allowing access to Bitcoin and other assets without holding customer funds in company accounts.
Fix “pub test” and app extension
The CEO argued that cryptocurrencies still fail ordinary users in basic ease of use. He recounted his early experience helping a friend download four different wallets and writing a 12-word seed phrase on a cocktail napkin, a ritual he said still defines many products a decade later. Richardson called this the “pub test”: If a friend at the pub couldn’t safely create a wallet without resorting to tissue paper, the industry had missed the mark.
He extended this criticism to include blockchain tribalism, insisting that consumers do not care whether payments settle on Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, or Base as long as the experiment is successful.
To illustrate this point concretely, he asked the audience to pull out their phones and count the number of apps they use to get money. A typical screen displays a banking app, peer-to-peer payment apps, a brokerage account, and often a separate cryptocurrency wallet, he said.
He described this fragmentation as a structural problem that causes consumers to manipulate service providers who do not share their interests.
Exodus wants to replace this group with a “single app” that holds digital assets, connects to card networks, and routes payments while keeping users in self-custodial custody.
Own rails: Monavate, Baanx and Exodus Pay
The central reveal at the summit was closing From the acquisitions of Monavate and Baanx in the UK, a move that takes Exodus from “renting rails to owning them,” as Richardson puts it.
Monavate and Baanx provide the regulated infrastructure for card issuance, acquisition and processing in the UK and EU, including BIN sponsorship, Visa and MasterCard membership and fraud systems that already support cryptocurrency brands such as Ledger and MetaMask.
Exit previously agreed to this acquires Its parent, W3C Corp, in a roughly $175 million deal aimed at building an on-chain payments stack; The company later imposed a $70 million secured loan on that UK receivership group to protect its position.
Thanks to these assets, Exodus gains the ability to issue and process cards directly rather than operating as software based on third-party pipelines.
The combined platform now supports six layers of activity, from the core wallet and swap engine to stablecoin issuance, card programs and banking issues, giving Exodus “owner economics” at every step of the transaction, CFO James Jernitzky said.
On stage, he showed the example of a £100 purchase, explaining that while Exodus retained a portion of the economy as a client of Monavate and Baanx, it now captured a larger share through interchange, processing fees and interest on the float.
Both Richardson and Gernitsky explained that Exodus is trying to grow beyond a trading-focused model after its peak year in 2025, when it generated $121.6 million in revenue and $11 million in adjusted EBITDA on a base of roughly 1.5 million to 1.6 million monthly active users.
In early 2026, the limits of this reliance on cryptocurrencies are coming into sharper focus: Preliminary Q1 results show revenue falling to $22.7 million from $36.0 million a year earlier, a net loss of $36.4 million on digital assets, and a 22% decline in exchange volume QoQ to $1.18 billion, even as monthly active users were held at 1.5 million and funded users fell to 1.4 million.
Gernitzky described the close relationship between trading revenues and… Bitcoin price Like a ceiling the company needs to break.
Exodus Pay, now live in all 50 states, It is the clearest expression of that strategy. Built into the core wallet, it allows users to spend USD-backed stablecoins, Bitcoin and other assets anywhere Visa or Apple Pay works, keeping the keys in self-custodial custody and turning every payment into income for exchange, processing and float.
Later at the summit, in a side chat, Richardson pitched that stack as infrastructure not only for today’s users but also for AI agents who would execute autonomous payments across the same rails.
