Imagine a world of payments with immediate settlement, no chargebacks and no middlemen. Hard to picture, as the payments industry seems to bury its inefficiencies with layers and layers of ‘solutions’ which only create more issues later down the line.
But Xeno, a blockchain company based in Putney, has cut through the noise and created the world’s first blockchain-native rail. Xeno allows users to spend stablecoins like fiat, and for businesses to instantly accept stablecoin payments – with no middlemen.
This ability to pay with stablecoins directly from your wallet has never been done before. But Tom and his team have cracked it. Instant settlement, no chargebacks, and true peer-to-peer payments.
“I always enjoyed building”, Tom said when I asked him what motivated him. Sitting in a cafe next to his PassEntry office in Putney, he bought me a large smoothie, and we sat in a booth.
We met prior to this interview. The first ever thing Tom said to me was simply ‘I work in crypto’ at Home House, and he was introduced as ‘the blockchain guy’ by Phoebe. With an unassuming demeanour against a regal backdrop full of zealous founders, I assumed that Tom was still searching for what he wanted to do.
When I asked him later about what he actually did, he explained that he had built a payment solution which allowed businesses to accept crypto payments without changing their systems, and for users to make instant cross-border payments directly with stablecoins, without intermediaries. Reading and writing about payments myself, I didn’t pretend to understand how it worked, but I knew the gravity of what he had created.
A lifelong coder and 13-time hackathon winner, Tom has been coding since before secondary school. By the time he reached university, he was flying around the world winning every hackathon he could – Singapore, Hong Kong, San Francisco – winning a $15,000 prize for one.
One of these hackathons became the genesis of Xeno.
Born in Market Harborough, a small market town near Leicester, Tom studied software engineering at Cardiff.
“I’m not so good at the hardware – I could never build a PC. But I can code”.
His coding skills began at school with a very relatable problem.
“Every game site was blocked, but you could play Scratch games.”
Scratch was the original no-code builder, before Lovable and Base44 took the limelight. Tom’s Scratch skills evolved into Python, and then into coding websites.
“I enjoyed creating what I like. Coding is simply: ‘I want to make something’. ‘Ok – go do it!’”
After university, Tom worked as a software engineer for Gousto, where he gained the industry experience needed, but missed the creative flair in coding.
“I figured out how to code at scale, but didn’t have as much freedom”.
Hackathons were a way to gain that freedom. For those who are unaware, hackathons are simple. Contestants are given a problem statement, and the task is to build something in a set time, often around two days, to fix this problem.
Winning 13 times didn’t seem to faze Tom, nor the cash prizes. But it was the opportunity to build something new each time that seemed to thrill him.
A previous success was a loyalty card connected to a blockchain address. When you tap, you can earn NFTs. Tom built this with PassEntry, which ultimately turned Universal Studios into a client that bought the technology outright.
During his hackathons, Tom came across a big question in the blockchain space: how do you make a peer-to-peer blockchain payment? At the time, it was not possible. Nobody had ever solved the problem.
The obvious question here is – why has no one tried this before? Crypto has been a mainstream conversation since 2017. But no such solution exists.
“It seemed too good to be true”, he said. “PSPs could look into it, but you want it to work across all of them. And realistically, it needs to be open-loop.”
Some weaker imitations exist, such as MetaMask and Kast, where you can effectively ‘pay’ with crypto; however, payments are simply on-ramped and off-ramped. In simple terms, this means that your crypto is converted into fiat (dollars/pounds), transferred, and then fiat is converted back into crypto. Not only is this expensive and wildly inefficient, but it really solves no issues at all. The customer is hit by 2%, and the merchant pays 3-3.5%, making these methods simply another layer on the existing chaos.
In the wider payments world, merchants often pay extra fees to get their card payments settled the next day, instead of waiting (for example) 2 to 5 working days. Businesses are often forced into this, as the 2% hit is still better than a dip in cash flow.
However, with Xeno, the payment is entirely peer-to-peer. This also means that the transaction is settled within 1-2 seconds, and there is a fixed gas price (1-2 cents). From 1-2 days to 1-2 seconds, and a fee of only a few cents, the switch is a no-brainer.
Xeno is shaking up an industry that doesn’t want to change. The fees that titans like Visa and Mastercard charge are a bedrock of the industry.
Why change an industry when your card fees generate billions of dollars a year?
Xeno will work phone to phone, skip the acquirer entirely, and piece by piece, remove everyone.
“I couldn’t care too much for money,” Tom said when I asked him about how lucrative a technology like this could be. “I meet people at hackathons who are rich, but do it anyway – just for the love of the game. This is what I would do.”
Tom’s real mission is to see impact from what has been built and to take a project from start to finish.
“Seeing someone out in the wild pay with Xeno – that’s the ultimate goal.”
Rebuilding the financial system with Xeno, regardless of the money, seems to be Tom’s goal, based simply on an irritation at how inefficient it is.
According to Tom, the hardest challenge that Xeno is facing is the distribution and the change in customer behaviour, not the technology itself.
The merchant side seeks to benefit, and the PSPs could implement a software push overnight. But it’s the customers that need to unlearn certain behaviours. Stablecoins and crypto still have a reputation for being risky. Fundamentally, crypto is also not used like money.
“In day-to-day life, unfortunately, you can’t pay your bills with crypto,” Tom added.
The volatility of crypto also puts it in the category of investing (or even gambling in riskier assets), but Xeno hopes to bridge the gap. As payments develop, they will be smooth and instant, and the underlying technology will be irrelevant.
“Further down the line, we shouldn’t even know it’s crypto.”
Tom is one of three co-founders of Xeno.
One is Clive Tsungu, a close friend from university and another talented software engineer at TUI – helping Tom beat many of the 13 hackathons.
Another is Harry Koppel, a managing director of 18 years at Barclays and advisor at Crusoe, with deep industry experience, helping steer Xeno in the higher circles of finance.
Xeno has come around at the right time. Crypto, and particularly stablecoins, have piqued the interest of institutions. BlackRock has recently become the third-largest holder of bitcoin, according to a report from Arkham. With the GENIUS Act passed on May 21, 2025, stablecoins are now regulated and approved by the government. Notable industry names such as JPMorgan, Klarna, and PayPal all have stablecoins now, and Stripe acquired a stablecoin company in February 2025.
The most exciting change in the next five years will be banks being removed from the process entirely. In less developed countries, this is a far clearer vision, where banks can bottleneck growth, and bank fees restrict payments. Xeno represents a change in wind direction, where the goal is about stripping back to the basics.
Xeno has now launched in EEA with a license from Apple and is looking into starting a brand new stablecoin in Iceland.
Stablecoins represent the freedom of movement, speed, and true P2P payments, where one user can pay another, anywhere in the world, with no restrictions.
“We want to be the new architecture. We want to be the next Visa.”
Xeno is about building something new for the world, and it won’t be long before you see it out in the wild.
