On stage, co-founder and CEO JP Richardson opened 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 that regulators had pulled its IPO.
He described the reversal as an “11th hour” rule change that left a room of supporters stunned and forced the company back into private status despite following the playbook in his telling.
That episode ended months later after the US election, when Exodus finally listed on the NYSE American in January with the same team, ticker and business, but under a new administration that is more open to companies with digital assets.
Richardson framed that saga as proof that Exodus can absorb political and regulatory shocks while sticking to a simple principle: money is under user control.
Founded in 2015 in Omaha, Exodus built a self-storage wallet that stores keys on user devices and routes swaps across multiple liquidity providers, providing access to Bitcoin and other assets without ever holding customer funds in company accounts.
Fixes the “pub test” and app sprawl
The CEO claimed that crypto still fails normal users in terms of basic usability. He recounted an early experience helping a friend download four different wallets and write 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 in a bar can’t safely create a wallet without resorting to napkins, the industry has missed the mark.
He extended the criticism to include blockchains, insisting that consumers don’t care whether payments are settled on Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum or Base, as long as the experience works.
To make the point concrete, he asked the audience to pull out their phones and count how many apps they use for money. The typical screen, he said, shows a banking app, person-to-person payment apps, a brokerage account and often a separate crypto wallet.
He presented this fragmentation as a structural problem that causes consumers to juggle with providers who do not share their interests.
Exodus wants to replace this cluster with “one app” that houses digital assets, connects to card networks and routes payments while keeping users in self-custody.
Owner rails: Monavate, Baanx and Exodus Pay
A key revelation at the summit was the closing of the Monavate and Baanx UK acquisitions, a move that moves Exodus from “renting the rails to owning them,” in Richardson’s phrase.
Monavate and Baanx provide UK and EU regulated card issuing, acquisition and processing infrastructure, including BIN sponsorship, Visa and MasterCard membership and fraud systems that already support crypto tokens such as Ledger and MetaMask.
Exodus previously agreed to acquire their parent company, W3C Corp, in a roughly $175 million deal aimed at building a payments stack on the chain; the company later enforced a secured loan of $70 million against this group in the UK receivership to protect its position.
With these assets, Exodus gains the ability to issue and process cards directly instead of operating as an application running on third-party rails.
CFO James Gernetzke said the combined platform now supports six layers of activity, from the core wallet and swap engine to stablecoin issuance, card programs and bank rails, giving Exodus “economy of ownership” at every step of a transaction.
On stage he walked through a £100 purchase example and explained that where Exodus once kept a fraction of the economy as a customer of Monavate and Baanx, it now takes a larger share through exchange, processing fees and interest on float.
Richardson and Gernetzke both made it clear that Exodus is trying to grow beyond a commerce-centric model after a peak year in 2025, when it generated $121.6 million in revenue and $11 million in adjusted EBITDA on a base of about 1.5 to 1.6 million monthly active users.
In early 2026, the limits of this reliance on crypto-cycles came into sharper focus: Preliminary first-quarter results show revenue falling to $22.7 million from $36.0 million the year before, a net loss of $36.4 million on digital assets, and a 22% quarter-over-quarter drop in active users of $15 billion to an even $1-18 billion. million and financed users rose to 1.4 million.
Gernetzke described the close correlation between trading revenue and Bitcoin’s price as a ceiling the company must break.
Exodus Pay, now resident in all 50 states, is the clearest expression of this strategy. Embedded in the core wallet, it allows users to use USD-backed stablecoins, Bitcoin and other assets anywhere Visa or Apple Pay works, while keeping the keys in self-custody, turning each box into exchange, processing and float income.
Later at the summit at a brand chat, Richardson cast that stack as infrastructure, not just for today’s users, but for AI agents that will make autonomous payments across the same rails.