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Kevin Zhang

Co-founder, PayTrie

Fintech

Kevin Zhang co-founded PayTrie, the Calgary company that runs a regulated on- and off-ramp between Canadian dollars and stablecoins such as USDC and CADC. A University of Waterloo engineering graduate, he worked on TD Bank's blockchain team and at ConsenSys before PayTrie, and now leads Loon, the spinout that issues CADC.

Kevin hasn’t spoken on a TechTO, TechVancouver or TechWaterloo stage. This profile is here because Kevin co-founded PayTrie, which appears in 1 talk in the archive.

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Quick answers

Did Kevin Zhang co-found PayTrie?

Yes. The episode page for "S2 E4 - Kevin Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Paytrie", published on the Jeremy Black | Replatforming Finance YouTube channel on August 14, 2025, opens its description with "Kevin Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Paytrie, the issuers of CADC." Fintech Observer's Paytrie profile, dated June 1, 2026, gives the company's founding as "2019 (launched January 2020) by Kevin Zhang and Henry Chan, both University of Waterloo engineering alumni."

Is this the same Kevin Zhang as the American NFT and crypto investor?

No. The PayTrie co-founder is a Canadian blockchain engineer, not a US NFT fund investor who shares the name. The Curious Learners episode page for "Kevin Zhang | FX in Decentralized Finance", released September 15, 2022, describes him as the co-founder of stablecoin exchange protocol DFX Finance and says that "Following his time at Consensys, he went on to build Paytrie, which is a stablecoin exchange based in Canada." That ConsenSys-then-PayTrie sequence matches the PayTrie co-founder and not the US investor.

What is Kevin Zhang doing now?

He runs Loon, the Calgary company that took over the CADC Canadian-dollar stablecoin from PayTrie. A release carried by PR Newswire on October 27, 2025 announcing Loon's $3 million pre-seed round identifies him as CEO of Loon and quotes him saying "Canada is at a crossroads. We can either remain dependent on foreign financial infrastructure or build our own sovereign rails for the digital era." Fintech Observer wrote on June 1, 2026 that "Zhang stepped down from Paytrie in late 2025 to lead Loon full-time." PayTrie's own team page could not confirm or contradict this: paytrie.com/team is a JavaScript application that returns no team names to a direct fetch, checked September 22, 2026.

What did he do before PayTrie?

Fintech Observer's June 1, 2026 profile describes him as "a senior blockchain architect at ConsenSys and the first technical hire on TD Bank's blockchain team" before PayTrie. The Curious Learners episode page of September 15, 2022 also credits him as a co-founder of DFX Finance, a decentralised exchange protocol built for stablecoins.

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Maintained by TechTO · facts sourced and dated · last reviewed Sep 22, 2026