Pa stageCo-founded and CEO JP Richardson opened and talked about the derailment of the company at 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 the authorities had pulled its lists.
He described the change as an “11th hour” legal change that left the fan base stunned and forced the company to return to the private sector despite, in its own words, following the playbook.
The story ended a few months after the US election, when Exodus last mentioned on the NYSE American in January with the same group, ticker, and business, but under a new management open to digital companies.
Richardson frames the story as proof that the book of Exodus can subvert politics and control while maintaining a single principle: money is controlled by users.
Exodus, founded in 2015 in Omaha, built a the purser which holds the keys to the tools and processes are exchanged with many providers, providing access to Bitcoin and other assets without having the customer’s money in the company’s account.
Fixing “pub test” and app sprawl
The CEO also said that crypto still fails ordinary users in terms of usability. He recounted the experience of helping his friend unload four different bags and writing 12 seed words on a napkin, a ritual he said still means a lot ten years later. Richardson called this the “pub test”: if a friend in a bar can’t set up a bag without using napkins, the company has missed the mark.
He also added criticism of the blockchain, insisting that consumers don’t care if payments are settled on Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, or Base as long as the transaction works.
To illustrate this point, he asked the audience to take out their phones and count the number of apps that use money. A typical screen, he said, shows a banking app, person-to-person payment apps, a lending account, and often a separate crypto wallet.
He presented this fragmentation as a structural problem that leaves consumers in conflict with suppliers who do not share their interests.
Exodus aims to replace that group with a “single app” that includes a digital economy, connected to card networks, and payment systems and stores only for users.
Having rails: Monavate, Baanx and Exodus Pay
The centerpiece of the meeting was to close the Monavate and Baanx UK acquisitions, a move that transforms Exodus from “borrowing rail to owning,” in Richardson’s words.
Monavate and Baanx provide a controlled card, access, and processing infrastructure in the UK and EU, including BIN support, Visa and MasterCard membership, and fraud systems that already support crypto transactions such as Ledger and MetaMask.
Exodus agreed earlier find their parent, W3C Corp, in a $175 million deal designed to create on-chain payments; the company later enforced a secured debt of $70 million against the UK receivership group to protect their position.
With the product, Ekisodo gets the ability to issue and process cards directly instead of acting as a third-party rail-based app.
CFO James Gernetzke said the integrated platform now supports six areas of work, from the core wallet and exchange engine to stablecoin issuance, card applications, and rail banking, providing Exodus “Economics own” at every step of the business.
On stage, he went through a £100 purchase model, explaining that while Exodus kept a small part of the economy as a client of Monavate and Baanx, now they are taking a large part through exchanges, processing fees, and interest on the float.
Richardson and Gernetzke both pointed out that Exodus is trying to continue the commercial model after the peak year in 2025, when it made $121.6 million in revenue and $11 million in adjusted EBITDA on the basis of about 1.5 to 1.6 million users per month.
At the beginning of the year 2026, the limits of the dependence of the crypto cycle became very clear: the preliminary results of the first quarter show that the income has fallen to $ 22.7 million from $ 36.0 million a year ago, a loss of $ 36.4 million in the digital economy, and a 22% quarter-over-quarter -over-quarter decrease in users of $ 1.1 million every month. and paid users dropped to 1.4 million.
Gernetzke described the strong relationship between trade finance and The price of Bitcoin as the roof of the company must be broken.
Exodus Pay, now live in all 50 states, is a clear statement of that method. Integrated into a central wallet, it allows users to use fixed USD-backed currencies, Bitcoin, and other assets wherever Visa or Apple Pay works, while keeping the keys private and turning each transaction into an exchange, settlement, and floating currency.
Later at the Summit in a fireside chat, Richardson pitched the stack as a foundation not only for today’s users but also for AI assistants who will provide independent funding on the same track.
