Latest news with #NickPhilpott
The Star
11-07-2025
- Business
- The Star
Bitcoin soars, altcoins fade in US$300bil cryptocurrency shakeout
Representations of cryptocurrency Bitcoin are seen in this illustration taken November 25, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo NEW YORK: On the face of it, 2025 looks like a banner year for crypto: bitcoin hitting a record, an industry-boosting US president whose family is venturing headlong into the sector, and key legislation widely expected to be passed by Congress. But look beyond the bullish headlines and the rally in bitcoin, and a vastly different landscape comes into view. Most of the so-called altcoins once touted as competitors to the original cryptoasset are nursing steep declines, with more than US$300bil of market value wiped out so far this year. The sea of red points to a wider malaise that's forcing parts of the industry to confront existential questions. Crypto was imagined by early enthusiasts as a universe where a host of coins competed for investor money, offering a diverse set of use cases. But as bitcoin reigns supreme, that's giving way to predictions that large swathes of the sector will become a digital wasteland. 'I think they're just going to die, frankly,' Nick Philpott, co-founder of trading platform Zodia Markets, said of altcoins. 'They'll just wither away. Technically, a lot of this stuff will just sit there and gather dust in perpetuity.' Bitcoin's share of the total market value of cryptoassets has climbed by nine percentage points this year to 64%, the highest since January 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. Back then, cryptocurrencies were a largely unregulated space, crypto lending was roaring with few safeguards and nonfungible tokens were just starting to take off. In sharp contrast, altcoins – the catch-all term for all digital assets outside of bitcoin and stablecoins – are faltering. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets, which more than doubled in the aftermath of Donald Trump's Nov 5 election victory, has since given up all those gains and is down around 50% in 2025. With bitcoin soaking up the bulk of capital flows from investors in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), other parts of the market are increasingly left behind. Even ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, remains about 50% below its all-time high after a modest rebound fuelled by inflows to spot ETFs investing in the token. 'Historically, bitcoin's moved and then that's passed down into altcoins,' said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. 'We've not really seen that yet this cycle.' Crypto is no stranger to mass extinction events. The 2022 market crash, punctuated by the implosions of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange, led to the demise of hundreds of projects. Thousands of coins still exist on their blockchains, with little or no activity – relegated to the status of 'ghost chains' in crypto parlance. What's different this time is that crypto is becoming a more regulated, institutionally-driven marketplace, and that stablecoins appear to be the only tokens with a real shot at achieving means-of-payment status, due to the fact that they eliminate volatility. In the past year alone, the market value of stablecoins has swelled by US$47bil, and some of the world's largest banks are entering the field. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Inc is studying a potential stablecoin. That's putting pressure on altcoin projects to find ways to shore up their status and appeal to a wider base of investors. — Bloomberg
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Bitcoin Soars, Altcoins Fade in $300 Billion Crypto Shakeout
(Bloomberg) -- On the face of it, 2025 looks like a banner year for crypto: Bitcoin hitting a record, an industry-boosting US president whose family is venturing headlong into the sector, and key legislation widely expected to be passed by Congress. Philadelphia Transit System Votes to Cut Service by 45%, Hike Fares Squeezed by Crowds, the Roads of Central Park Are Being Reimagined Sao Paulo Pushes Out Favela Residents, Drug Users to Revive Its City Center Sprawl Is Still Not the Answer Mapping the Architectural History of New York's Chinatown But look beyond the bullish headlines and the rally in Bitcoin, and a vastly different landscape comes into view. Most of the so-called altcoins once touted as competitors to the original cryptoasset are nursing steep declines, with more than $300 billion of market value wiped out so far this year. The sea of red points to a wider malaise that's forcing parts of the industry to confront existential questions. Crypto was imagined by early enthusiasts as a universe where a host of coins competed for investor money, offering a diverse set of use cases. But as Bitcoin reigns supreme, that's giving way to predictions that large swathes of the sector will become a digital wasteland. 'I think they're just going to die, frankly,' Nick Philpott, co-founder of trading platform Zodia Markets, said of altcoins. 'They'll just wither away. Technically, a lot of this stuff will just sit there and gather dust in perpetuity.' Bitcoin's share of the total market value of cryptoassets has climbed by nine percentage points this year to 64%, the highest since January 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. Back then, cryptocurrencies were a largely unregulated space, crypto lending was roaring with few safeguards and nonfungible tokens were just starting to take off. In sharp contrast, altcoins — the catch-all term for all digital assets outside of Bitcoin and stablecoins — are faltering. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets, which more than doubled in the aftermath of Donald Trump's Nov. 5 election victory, has since given up all those gains and is down around 50% in 2025. With Bitcoin soaking up the bulk of capital flows from investors in exchange-traded funds, other parts of the market are increasingly left behind. Even Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, remains about 50% below its all-time high after a modest rebound fueled by inflows to spot ETFs investing in the token. 'Historically, Bitcoin's moved and then that's passed down into altcoins,' said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. 'We've not really seen that yet this cycle.' Crypto is no stranger to mass extinction events. The 2022 market crash, punctuated by the implosions of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange, led to the demise of hundreds of projects. Thousands of coins still exist on their blockchains, with little or no activity — relegated to the status of 'ghost chains' in crypto parlance. What's different this time is that crypto is becoming a more regulated, institutionally-driven marketplace, and that stablecoins appear to be the only tokens with a real shot at achieving means-of-payment status, due to the fact that they eliminate volatility. In the past year alone, the market value of stablecoins has swelled by $47 billion, and some of the world's largest banks are entering the field. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Inc. is studying a potential stablecoin. That's putting pressure on altcoin projects to find ways to shore up their status and appeal to a wider base of investors. 'I've talked to a couple of projects that have been thinking about merging foundations, putting it up for governance, saying, 'Hey, we can now be governed under this other authority' — that authority being another altcoin community,' said Kanyi Maqubela, managing partner at venture capital firm Kindred Ventures. The shifting tides are also reflected in corporate behavior. Modeled on Michael Saylor's Strategy, a new breed of Bitcoin accumulators has emerged. In April, a special-purpose acquisition company affiliated with Cantor Fitzgerald LP partnered with Tether Holdings SA and SoftBank to launch Twenty One Capital Inc., seeded with nearly $4 billion in Bitcoin. The Trump family, which is also getting involved in Bitcoin mining, has raised $2.3 billion via Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. to create a Bitcoin treasury. While similar vehicles have been set up recently to accumulate smaller tokens like Ether, Solana and BNB, they are much smaller. Glimmers of Hope Not all altcoins are floundering. Tokens like Maker and Hyperliquid that are linked to thriving decentralized-finance protocols have notched big gains this year. 'There's certainly a subset of the market doing incredibly well — generally companies with real businesses, real revenues, and those revenues are being used to buy back tokens,' said Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer of digital asset investment firm Arca. There's also the prospect of more favorable regulations. The potential for US Securities and Exchange Commission approval of ETFs backed by coins like Solana are stirring hopes of wider adoption. Another possible catalyst is the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, informally referred to as crypto's market structure bill. The CLARITY Act aims to provide a comprehensive regulatory framework, including delineating responsibilities between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the SEC. 'The Clarity Act has the potential to do for altcoins what ETFs did for Bitcoin and Ethereum: provide the regulatory legitimacy that unlocks real institutional capital,' said Ira Auerbach, a senior executive at Offchain Labs. Yet according to Maqubela, the issue ultimately boils down to utility. He compares Bitcoin to gold and Ether to copper — the former has a capped final supply and the latter's blockchain underpins much of crypto's functionality — and says most altcoins are stuck in a sort of twilight zone, underpinned by big promises and not much else. 'I think a lot of them are going to whittle down to zero because they were driven by speculation without that mimetic value like Bitcoin, and they tried to be utilitarian without achieving any real scale,' he said. 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Straits Times
30-06-2025
- Business
- Straits Times
Altcoins, once seen as rivals to Bitcoin, suffer $382 billion crypto wipeout
Most of the so-called altcoins – the catch-all term for all digital assets outside of Bitcoin and stablecoins - are nursing steep declines. PHOTO: REUTERS New York – On the face of it, 2025 looks like a banner year for crypto: Bitcoin hitting a record, an industry-boosting US president whose family is venturing headlong into the sector, and key legislation widely expected to be passed by the US Congress. But look beyond the bullish headlines and the rally in Bitcoin, and a vastly different landscape comes into view. Most of the so-called altcoins – the catch-all term for all digital assets outside of Bitcoin and stablecoins - once touted as competitors to the original cryptoasset are nursing steep declines, with more than US$300 billion (S$382.9 billion) of market value wiped out so far in 2025. The sea of red points to a wider malaise that's forcing parts of the industry to confront existential questions. Crypto was imagined by early enthusiasts as a universe where a host of coins competed for investor money, offering a diverse set of use cases. But as Bitcoin reigns supreme, that's giving way to predictions that large swathes of the sector will become a digital wasteland. 'I think they're just going to die, frankly,' Nick Philpott, co-founder of trading platform Zodia Markets, said of altcoins. 'They'll just wither away. Technically, a lot of this stuff will just sit there and gather dust in perpetuity.' Bitcoin's share of the total market value of cryptoassets has climbed by nine percentage points this year to 64 per cent, the highest since January 2021, according to CoinMarketCap. Back then, cryptocurrencies were a largely unregulated space, crypto lending was roaring with few safeguards and nonfungible tokens were just starting to take off. In sharp contrast, altcoins are faltering. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets, which more than doubled in the aftermath of Donald Trump's Nov 5 election victory, has since given up all those gains and is down around 50 per cent in 2025. With Bitcoin soaking up the bulk of capital flows from investors in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), other parts of the market are increasingly left behind. Even Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, remains about 50 per cent below its all-time high after a modest rebound fueled by inflows to spot ETFs investing in the token. 'Historically, Bitcoin's moved and then that's passed down into altcoins,' said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. 'We've not really seen that yet this cycle.' Crypto is no stranger to mass extinction events. The 2022 market crash, punctuated by the implosions of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange, led to the demise of hundreds of projects. Thousands of coins still exist on their blockchains, with little or no activity – relegated to the status of 'ghost chains' in crypto parlance. What's different this time is that crypto is becoming a more regulated, institutionally-driven marketplace, and that stablecoins appear to be the only tokens with a real shot at achieving means-of-payment status, due to the fact that they eliminate volatility. In the past year alone, the market value of stablecoins has swelled by US$47 billion, and some of the world's largest banks are entering the field. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that is studying a potential stablecoin. That's putting pressure on altcoin projects to find ways to shore up their status and appeal to a wider base of investors. 'I've talked to a couple of projects that have been thinking about merging foundations, putting it up for governance, saying, 'Hey, we can now be governed under this other authority' – that authority being another altcoin community,' said Kanyi Maqubela, managing partner at venture capital firm Kindred Ventures. The shifting tides are also reflected in corporate behaviour. Modeled on Michael Saylor's Strategy, a new breed of Bitcoin accumulators has emerged. In April, a special-purpose acquisition company affiliated with Cantor Fitzgerald partnered with Tether Holdings and SoftBank to launch Twenty One Capital, seeded with nearly US$4 billion in Bitcoin. The Trump family, which is also getting involved in Bitcoin mining, has raised US$2.3 billion via Trump Media & Technology Group to create a Bitcoin treasury. While similar vehicles have been set up recently to accumulate smaller tokens like Ether, Solana and BNB, they are much smaller. Glimmers of hope Not all altcoins are floundering. Tokens like Maker and Hyperliquid that are linked to thriving decentralized-finance protocols have notched big gains this year. 'There's certainly a subset of the market doing incredibly well – generally companies with real businesses, real revenues, and those revenues are being used to buy back tokens,' said Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer of digital asset investment firm Arca. There's also the prospect of more favourable regulations. The potential for US Securities and Exchange Commission approval of ETFs backed by coins like Solana are stirring hopes of wider adoption. Another possible catalyst is the Digital Asset Market Clarity (Clarity) Act, informally referred to as crypto's market structure bill. The Clarity Act aims to provide a comprehensive regulatory framework, including delineating responsibilities between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the SEC. 'The Clarity Act has the potential to do for altcoins what ETFs did for Bitcoin and Ethereum: provide the regulatory legitimacy that unlocks real institutional capital,' said Ira Auerbach, a senior executive at Offchain Labs. Yet according to Kindred Venture's Mr Maqubela, the issue ultimately boils down to utility. He compares Bitcoin to gold and Ether to copper – the former has a capped final supply and the latter's blockchain underpins much of crypto's functionality – and says most altcoins are stuck in a sort of twilight zone, underpinned by big promises and not much else. 'I think a lot of them are going to whittle down to zero because they were driven by speculation without that mimetic value like Bitcoin, and they tried to be utilitarian without achieving any real scale,' he said. BLOOMBERG Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Forbes
08-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Inside Yolk's $4.7M Plan To Fix Your Sad Desk Lunch
Yolk, rebranded In the business of fast food, few London brands have grown as deliberately—or as effectively—as Yolk. Since starting life as a scrappy pop-up in 2014, the sandwich and coffee outfit has raised £3.6 million [$4.7 million] The blueprint is ambitious—more than 100 sites, including international growth—but the philosophy hasn't changed. 'We're ambitious, but we're quality-first,' says founder Nick Philpott. With no central kitchen, no vacuum packs, and a still-hands-on approach to prep, Yolk's steady climb feels like an antidote to the bloated, overextended rollouts that came before it. Add a newly launched coffee subscription, a punchy rebrand, and a team culture that runs deep, and the message is clear: Yolk is building something serious. They're just having fun while doing it. Philpott didn't set out to build a sandwich empire. He was working in strategy consulting — 'lots of spreadsheets and PowerPoint'—but couldn't stop thinking about the disappointing state of London's grab-and-go scene. 'Working long hours at my corporate desk, I couldn't believe the lack of flavour and excitement in grab-and-go food,' he recalls. 'On the weekends I was eating amazing meals at seated restaurants, but the convenient stuff was so pre-packaged and joyless. I felt like I was wasting precious meals. There was a gap for flavour-led, restaurant-quality food that was still quick and affordable. That was the mission.' Food had always been a passion—'just as a greedy consumer and home cook'—and when the idea for Yolk took root, it stuck. But before locking in its central locations, Philpott took a crash course by setting Yolk up as a street food pop-up, and it turned out to be a decision that shaped how the business operates to this day. 'The first lesson was simplicity: we had to serve big surges of demand from tiny spaces, which forced us to design recipes and processes that were tight, efficient and resilient,' Philpott says. 'We also learned the importance of brand. Other traders were telling their stories better than us—our visual identity was a bit of a mess at the time—and lastly, people love great sandwiches! The first time we served our Steak Béarnaise, everything changed. It just clicked.' Yolk's first major leap came with its 2017 rebrand—a sleek black-and-gold look that finally gave the business the polish to match its product. 'It had a high-end visual presence that we'd been missing—and it gave us confidence to believe in the business,' Philpott says. 'It helped bridge the gap from scrappy street food stall to bricks-and-mortar credibility. It helped us raise our first investment, secure our first lease, and win over thousands of new customers.' But the rebrands haven't stopped there. This month's opening in Holborn signals the start of what Philpott calls 'Yolk 2.0'—complete with a full brand overhaul that hits all touchpoints: signage, menus, wall art, packaging, even the kitchen layout. 'The old brand had served us well, but we'd outgrown it,' he explains. 'It had started to feel a bit too polished and safe—it didn't reflect the personality, flavour or energy of what we'd become.' Yolk's brand-new branding Customer research helped validate the need for change. 'The big insight was that people loved the food, but didn't fully understand what Yolk was all about. Some thought we were somehow corporate, which was mad to us. Others didn't realise the food was made fresh in-house. That gave us the nudge to be much clearer, bolder and more joyful in how we communicate.' The tagline? Good Bites Only. 'It's a promise and a mindset,' says Philpott. 'Every bite should deliver joy and flavour—no filler. But it's also how we approach everything: food, design, hiring, culture. If it's not thoughtful, high quality, and made with purpose, it doesn't make the cut.' One of Yolk's key operational choices has remained surprisingly traditional: no central kitchen. Everything is prepped fresh on-site. 'Firstly and most importantly, we think food just tastes better when it's made fresh, from scratch, in-house,' says Philpott. 'Secondly, it's cultural—we want our teams to feel connected to what they're making. That's hard to do if you're just opening vac-packed bags from a central kitchen. And thirdly, it works for us commercially: we have teams on-site throughout the day, and using quieter periods for prep makes sense.' The store itself also plays a key role in how customers engage with the brand—especially now, as Holborn will be the company's first full Yolk 2.0 site. The kitchen is more open, the branding is more expressive, and they've pushed operational flow to new heights. Still, for Philpott, it's not just about function, but about hospitality. 'I think what's so nice about hospitality is that it's tangible—it's a physical product and you experience it in a sensory way. People get to feel what Yolk is about: the busy kitchen, the smell of bacon cooking, the sound of milk steaming.' A selection of Yolk's freshly-made sandwiches Yolk's latest £650,000 [$862,000] raise, completed in late 2024, was a big coup—funding Holborn's build-out, expanding the team, and giving the brand room to grow without compromise, but Philpott hasn't approached it recklessly. 'We've seen so many brands overextend themselves with crazy rollouts,' he says. 'We now feel confident opening 5–6 locations a year, but that's only possible because of the foundations we've built.' There's a larger raise underway now, designed to support long-term scale, with plans for around 50 UK locations and early international activity on the horizon. 'We're also thinking about how to tailor the format for different settings—neighbourhood high streets, transport hubs—while staying true to our quality and identity.' And while some brands have shifted their focus to delivery, Yolk is still betting on bricks and mortar. 'Delivery is growing and we're glad to be on those platforms, but we never want to become a ghost brand. We believe in real spaces that can become a part of people's everyday.' For Philpott, growth only works if the standards hold — not just in the food, but in the people behind it. 'My role has changed massively and I'm still learning every day,' he says. 'In the early days I wore a lot of hats, and some fitted better than others. Now we have a brilliant team—people who are much better at their jobs than I ever was—and my role is to support them, while keeping an eye on the big picture and pushing us forward.' And while he may be thinking big-picture day to day, Philpott admits he'll always have one eye on the sandwich board. 'The Steak Béarnaise is my desert island sandwich,' he says. 'We haven't changed it since we first served it from our pop-up gazebo, and I think it still holds up. One I'd love to crack is a fried chicken sandwich—spicy, crunchy, moreish. We don't have deep-fat fryers, though, so we'd need to get creative. Air fryers maybe…' Call it scaling. Call it strategy. At Yolk, it's still just good bites only.
