On stage, co-founder and CEO JP Richardson began talking about the company’s derailment on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2024. Exodus flew 130 employees, friends and family to Manhattan, only to learn the night before that regulators had pulled the company from going public.
He explained that the reversal was an “11th hour” rule change that, he said, stunned the crowd of supporters and forced the company to go private again, despite following his strategy.
The episode ended with Exodus finally listing on the NYSE American in January with the same team, ticker and business, months after the US presidential election, but with a more open stance towards digital asset companies under the new administration.
Richardson framed this story as evidence that Exodus can absorb political and regulatory shocks while adhering to a single principle: money is in the control of users.
Founded in Omaha in 2015, Exodus built a self-custodial wallet that stores keys on users’ devices and routes swaps across multiple liquidity providers, giving customers access to Bitcoin and other assets without holding their funds in corporate accounts.
Fix “public testing” and app sprawl
The CEO argued that virtual currencies still do not satisfy general users in terms of basic usability. He shared an early experience in which he helped a friend download four different wallets and write a 12-word seed phrase on a cocktail napkin. This ritual still defines too many products a decade later, he said. Mr. Richardson called this the “pub test.” If your friend at the bar can’t safely provide his wallet without resorting to a napkin, the industry is missing the point.
He extended that criticism to chain tribalism, arguing that consumers don’t care whether their payments are settled in Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, or Base, as long as the experience works.
To make his point concrete, he asked the audience to take out their phones and count the number of apps they use for money. He said a typical screen would show a banking app, a person-to-person payment app, a brokerage account, and often another crypto wallet.
He pointed to this fragmentation as a structural problem where consumers juggle with providers who don’t share their interests.
Exodus wants to replace that cluster with “one app” that holds digital assets, connects to card networks, and routes payments while keeping users in self-control.
Owning rails: Monavate, Baanx, Exodus Pay
A central revelation at the summit was the completed acquisition of Monavate and Baanx UK, a move that moves Exodus from “renting to owning railways,” in Richardson’s words.
Monavate and Baanx provide UK and EU regulated card issuance, acquisition and processing infrastructure, including BIN sponsorship, Visa and MasterCard membership, and fraud systems that already support crypto brands such as Ledger and MetaMask.
Exodus previously agreed to acquire parent company W3C Corp in a roughly $175 million deal aimed at building an on-chain payments stack. The company then took out a $70 million secured loan to a group of British trustees to protect its position.
These assets allow Exodus to issue and process cards directly, rather than acting as a third-party rail-riding program.
CFO James Gernetzke said the integrated platform now supports six layers of activity, from the core wallet and swap engine to stablecoin issuance, card programs and banking rails, providing Exodus with “owner economics” at each stage of the transaction.
On stage, he explained the example of a £100 purchase and explained that while Exodus once retained some of the economics as a customer of Monavate and Burnx, it now captures a larger share through exchange fees, commissions and variable interest rates.
Richardson and Garnetzke revealed that Exodus is looking to grow beyond its trading-focused model after a peak year in 2025 when it generated $121.6 million in revenue and $11 million in adjusted EBITDA based on approximately 1.5 million to 1.6 million monthly active users.
In early 2026, the limits of reliance on the cryptocurrency cycle became clearer. Preliminary results for the first quarter show revenue decreased to $22.7 million from $36 million a year ago, net loss in digital assets was $36.4 million, and currency trading volume decreased 22% quarter-on-quarter to $1.18 billion, despite monthly active users remaining at 1.5 million and funding users decreasing to 1.4. Million.
Garnetzke explained that the close correlation between trading revenue and Bitcoin price is an upper bound that the company needs to break.
Exodus Pay, now rolled out in all 50 states, is the clearest expression of that strategy. Built into the core wallet, users can use USD-backed stablecoins, Bitcoin, and other assets anywhere Visa or Apple Pay is accepted, while self-storing the keys and turning every checkout into exchange, processing, and floating income.
In a fireside chat late at the summit, Richardson cast that stack as an infrastructure for today’s users as well as AI agents running autonomous payments on the same rails.
