Zac Townsend thinks finance people get too caught up in names, terminology and products. At the end of the day, financial markets serve simple aims. People need to transact, they need to save, they need to plan. Financial services companies have layered complexity on to these goals, creating an entire industry around understanding them.

Townsend believes that when it comes to finance there are really only two use cases: Now and Meanwhile. Financial services for "Now" include things like payments or international remittances. The "Meanwhile" is the purview of savers, life insurance companies and asset managers who seek to use, and to some degree ensure, the availability and usefulness of capital in the future.

His company, Meanwhile, is the world's first life insurance company that both collects premiums and issues payouts denominated in bitcoin and crypto-native stablecoins. Even as digital assets have charted their intellectual journey to institutional adoption, critics have said that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are problems searching for a solution. Townsend's Meanwhile took an opposite approach, starting with an established financial solution, life insurance, and leverages the core features of an asset bitcoin to make the solution better and more robust.

The long road to Bermuda

Townsend's path to founding an insurance company began with hardship. Growing up in a working-class family where his father worked at the post office, financial difficulties during high school sparked his interest in finance. At Brown University, he moved from public policy to economics to applied math, winning a finance prize despite having no ambitions to work on Wall Street. His focus was on policy implications but when he graduated in 2008, the financial crisis revoked his job offer at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The detour proved formative. After consulting work, he became head of innovation in Newark under Mayor Cory Booker, managing a financial inclusion portfolio. Then he joined Stripe as employee number 37. In 2013, he co-founded Standard Treasury, a banking-as-a-service pioneer that was ahead of its time. The company sold to Silicon Valley Bank in 2015, but its engineering team would go on to spawn Treasury Prime, Bond, and other fintech infrastructure companies.

It was during this period that Townsend had his insurance epiphany. While contemplating what to do with a bank balance sheet, he realized something fundamental: the best bank in the world is an insurance company. All U.S. mortgages eventually end up owned by life insurers. Private credit funds are backed by life insurance companies. Unlike banks, which face duration mismatches between short-term deposits and long-term loans, life insurers collect premiums today for obligations that might not come due for decades.

But in 2015, he could not figure out how to break into the market. Technology advantages matter when you are large and turning a 15 percent return on equity into a 20 percent return. When you are small and unrated, excellent technology does not compensate for lack of trust.

The product-market wedge

Years later, sitting down in January 2022 to think about building companies for the Bitcoin economy, Townsend and his co-founder Max Gasner made a list of every institution a functioning economy needs: a stock exchange, a payments company, a bank. Life insurance was not initially on the list. Then Townsend woke up in the middle of the night with the realization: there should be a crypto life insurance company.

The insight was counterintuitive. Life insurance is conservative, long-term, boring. Bitcoin is volatile and associated with speculation. But the combination solved Townsend's decade-old problem of how to enter the market. Legacy insurers cannot add Bitcoin to their products due to significant implications for their regulatory capital. This created a massive opening for a new entrant. Nobody wants to trust a brand-new, under-capitalized life insurance company for a run-of-the-mill dollar product. But a product no one else can offer changes the calculation entirely.

The company pursued full regulatory licensing rather than taking shortcuts. Meanwhile became the first company to receive a full commercial license for innovative life insurance from the Bermuda Monetary Authority. They built their application, policy administration, underwriting, and compliance systems from scratch. Today, the company operates a fully functioning life insurance company with an independent board, chief risk officer, and chief compliance officer, all within the requirements of the Insurance Code of Bermuda.

The location matters. Bermuda has positioned itself as the upstanding, rigorous offshore regulator, equivalent to European Solvency II standards and respected by the U.S. National Association of Insurance Commissioners. But it offers slightly more flexibility in how companies calculate liabilities and manage assets. This creates regulatory capital advantages that are particularly valuable for a Bitcoin-denominated balance sheet.

The patient capital problem

Developed financial markets require more than payment rails and exchanges. They need patient capital, the kind that can wait years or decades for returns. Long-duration assets like mortgages, infrastructure projects, and private credit require long-duration liabilities to fund them efficiently. This is why life insurers own the majority of American mortgages and why private equity firms have spent the last decade acquiring insurance companies to access their permanent capital bases.

The insight applies to any maturing asset class. As Bitcoin and digital assets move from speculative trading to broader financial adoption, they face a structural gap. The ecosystem has built robust spot markets, derivatives, and custody solutions. What it lacks is the institutional foundation for long-term capital formation. Pension funds, endowments, and insurance companies hold trillions in assets precisely because their liabilities extend across decades. Without similar structures in digital assets, the market remains fundamentally incomplete.

Meanwhile represents early infrastructure for this missing layer. By building a regulated life insurer with Bitcoin-denominated liabilities, the company creates a natural buyer for long-duration Bitcoin-linked assets. The whole life policies it writes today generate premiums that must be invested for twenty, thirty, or forty years. This is patient capital by design, not by choice. As the company scales and introduces stablecoin products, it will create similar dynamics for dollar-denominated digital assets, potentially becoming one of the largest institutional holders of on-chain real-world assets.

The implications extend beyond a single company. If digital assets are to function as a parallel financial system rather than merely as speculative vehicles, they need the full architecture of traditional finance: not just trading infrastructure but savings vehicles, retirement products, and institutional balance sheets with genuinely long time horizons. Meanwhile is building one piece of that architecture. The company's existence suggests that the digital asset ecosystem has matured enough to support the same financial institutions that took centuries to develop in traditional markets.

Innovation in a legacy market

The life insurance industry has well-documented problems: decades of technical debt, high expense ratios, bad user experiences, inability to serve small customers profitably, and principal-agent conflicts between what customers need and what agents are incentivized to sell. The global market represents roughly three percent of world GDP, or $3.67 trillion in gross written premiums. But building a better insurer requires distribution at scale, and achieving distribution at scale requires either massive capital or a unique product nobody else can offer.

Townsend's insight was that the unique product could be the entry point rather than the end goal. Once established with policyholders and proven systems, the platform can expand to conventional products with conventional distribution. The vertically integrated approach, owning everything from agent tooling to the reinsurance balance sheet, should allow the company to operate with an order of magnitude fewer people than traditional insurers while capturing more value from each policy.

The market for helping people save for the future and protect their families is large, growing, and global. Townsend is building the insurance company for the Meanwhile.