Zaheer Ebtikar, one of three co-founders of crypto hedge fund Split Capital, has wound down the fund's outside investor operations and joined stablecoin-focused blockchain Plasma as Chief Strategy Officer, according to reporting by Fortune and The Block published April 7. The closure ends roughly 20 months of external capital management and is being framed as a strategic exit rather than a performance failure. "Virtually every investor made money," Ebtikar said of the fund's wind-down. Ebtikar and his co-founders, Michael Churchouse and Nai Boonkongkird, previously worked together at LedgerPrime, a crypto trading firm acquired by FTX in 2021 and subsequently swept into FTX's bankruptcy, before relaunching independently as Split Capital under CFTC registration.

Split Capital launched in January 2024 with backing from notable names including UTXO Management, Novi Loren, and Dan Matuszewski, a co-founder of trading firm CMS Holdings. The fund was built around a "long-biased" thesis: buy liquid tokens trading at discounts while the market recovers, then exit as venture capital money filters through to public markets. That thesis worked well enough in 2024, when the fund returned roughly 100% net. By 2025, returns had compressed to around 20% net, and Ebtikar concluded the window was closing for good. The fund managed eight figures in assets at the time of the wind-down. Investors got their money back in full in fall 2025, with nearly all of them turning a profit. The fund itself will continue operating using only the founders' own capital going forward.

"The entire hedge fund industry in crypto is kind of down and out," Ebtikar told Fortune. He pointed to what he described as over $100 billion in cumulative venture funding flowing into crypto over six years, leaving few genuinely undervalued tokens for funds to exploit. That figure reflects his own characterisation of the full funding cycle and should be read as such. The verifiable 2025 number is $49.75 billion in crypto venture investment, up 433% from 2024, though the number of deals actually fell by about 60%, with capital concentrating into fewer, larger projects. The data suggests the easy pickings are gone. Broader industry results support his assessment: Brevan Howard's BH Digital fund, one of the largest institutional crypto hedge funds globally, lost 29.5% in 2025, its worst year since the fund's 2021 launch. Across the sector, the average crypto hedge fund lost around 23% that year.

A key structural factor is the rise of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. BlackRock's IBIT product now holds roughly $70 billion in assets, representing about 59% of all spot Bitcoin ETF holdings in the US. Fidelity has also entered the market directly, and together these products have handed traditional institutional investors a low-cost, accessible path into crypto without needing a specialist fund to manage the exposure.

Plasma is where Ebtikar is directing his attention next. The project is a Layer 1 blockchain (a base-level network that processes and settles transactions) built on Bitcoin's infrastructure, with EVM compatibility, meaning developers can deploy Ethereum-based applications natively. Its central offering is gasless stablecoin transfers, meaning users sending USDT or USDC pay no transaction fees. Plasma raised a $3.5 million seed round in October 2024 led by Bitfinex, followed by a $24 million Series A in February 2025 led by Framework Ventures. It then raised $373 million in a token sale in July 2025, oversubscribed seven times its $50 million target, at a $500 million valuation. Its XPL token launched on Binance and OKX in September 2025 at roughly $1.54, with a market cap between $2.4 billion and $2.8 billion. Total value locked on the network reached $5.3 billion by January 2026. Backers include Framework Ventures, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Bitfinex, and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. Ebtikar had been advising Plasma before taking the CSO title and describes himself as a "public evangelizer" for the network's payment and settlement utility. Paul Faecks, Plasma's CEO and co-founder, has described Plasma One, the project's stablecoin-native consumer neobank, as designed specifically for markets where access to dollars is constrained, targeting users in Africa and South Asia and competing directly with services like Revolut and SoFi.

The regional implications of this shift are significant. Africa currently leads the world in stablecoin ownership rates, with 79% of crypto-active users holding stablecoins, compared to 60% in other emerging markets and 45% in high-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa processed more than $200 billion in on-chain transactions between mid-2024 and mid-2025, with stablecoins accounting for 43% of that volume. Nigeria, Africa's largest crypto market, recorded approximately $22 billion in on-chain transactions in 2023 to 2024 and ranks among Tether's most significant geographies globally. Traditional remittance corridors into the region still charge fees averaging 7.9% on a $200 transfer, nearly double the global average. Stablecoin transfers cost fractions of a cent. South Asia recorded 80% growth in crypto adoption in 2025, with India topping the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, driven largely by payments and remittance use cases.

Ebtikar's pivot serves as a data point for regional fund managers running similar liquid-token strategies. His argument is not that the market is down but that the structural advantage is gone, and that the next investable layer is infrastructure enabling actual economic activity: payments, settlement, and dollar-access tools for underserved populations. One near-term market event worth watching is the scheduled unlock of one billion XPL tokens, representing 10% of total supply, set for July 28, 2026 in the US market. Monthly ecosystem token emissions of approximately 106 million XPL are already in effect under a three-year release schedule, offering fuller context for the token's supply dynamics ahead of that unlock.