Plasma Appoints Crypto Veteran Zaheer Ebtikar as CSO Ahead of Stablecoin Neobank Launch
Zaheer Ebtikar joins the Bitcoin-anchored stablecoin chain as it targets underbanked markets across Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia with a consumer banking app due this year.
Plasma, a Layer 1 blockchain built exclusively for stablecoin transactions, named Zaheer Ebtikar as its Chief Strategy Officer in April 2026. Ebtikar comes to the role after winding down Split Capital, his crypto hedge fund, which returned capital to investors after just over two years of operation. The appointment extends a relationship that predates the formal hire: "I was always helping out, making big decisions as an advisor for a long time," Ebtikar has said.
His mandate at Plasma covers go-to-market strategy, senior partnerships, investor relations, and product development as the project prepares to launch its consumer neobank product, Plasma One.
Ebtikar spent roughly nine years in senior positions across LedgerPrime, Deribit, and Immutable Capital before founding Split Capital in January 2024. The fund posted approximately 100% returns in 2024 and around 20% in 2025, managing eight-figure assets under management, with institutional backers including Novi Loren and UTXO Management. Despite that track record, he concluded the traditional crypto fund model no longer offers the edge it once did. His reasoning centers on the entry of institutional ETF products from firms like BlackRock and Fidelity, which have eroded the informational and access advantages that specialist funds previously held. "The entire hedge fund industry in crypto is kind of down and out," he told Fortune in an interview published April 7.
He described his new public-facing role as a deliberate shift, calling himself a "public evangelizer" for blockchain utility. His conviction about stablecoins specifically is direct: "Stablecoins aren't a niche, they're becoming the backbone of how people actually move money."
CEO Paul Faecks founded Plasma to address persistent problems in stablecoin infrastructure: high transaction fees, slow settlement times, and centralization risks on general-purpose blockchains. The protocol uses PlasmaBFT, a consensus mechanism derived from HotStuff that achieves sub-second transaction finality. It runs an EVM-compatible execution layer built on Reth (meaning developers familiar with Ethereum can build on it without rewriting their code) and operates as a Bitcoin sidechain, with security anchored to the Bitcoin network.
Verified users send USDT with no transaction fees, a design choice built into the protocol rather than offered as a temporary promotion. Plasma raised $24 million across a seed round and Series A co-led by Framework Ventures and Bitfinex/USD₮0.
Notable backers include Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and Bitfinex, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, trader Cobie, and institutional firms including Nomura, DRW/Cumberland, Bybit, Flow Traders, 6th Man Ventures, and IMC.
As of April 22, Plasma's bridged total value locked sits at $5.32 billion according to DefiLlama, with a stablecoin market cap on the chain of $1.39 billion. USDT accounts for 75.7% of that stablecoin supply. Seven-day decentralized exchange volume reached $196 million, up 551% from the prior week, though the cause of that spike has not been confirmed.
The native token, $XPL, trades at $0.14 with a market cap of $336 million and a fully diluted valuation of $1.42 billion.
The timing matters because stablecoins have moved well past niche status. Total stablecoin transaction volume reached $33 trillion in 2025, a 72% year-over-year increase that, according to Plasma's own data, put the asset class ahead of Visa's $16.7 trillion in annual throughput. Global stablecoin supply now exceeds $305 billion. Cross-border transactions account for $5.7 trillion of that volume annually, according to figures from Plasma and CoinLaw, a figure that points directly at the remittance corridors Plasma One is designed to serve.
Plasma One, scheduled for a 2026 launch, is described as a stablecoin-native neobank targeting markets where dollar access is constrained. The product offers zero-fee USDT transfers within the Plasma network, a 10% yield on stablecoin balances (the compounding period and whether the figure represents APY or APR have not been publicly detailed by Plasma), 4% cashback on card spending, and coverage across 150 countries.
Virtual cards can be issued within minutes, and the app replaces traditional seed phrases (a long string of words used to secure a crypto wallet) with hardware-backed keys and biometric security. A partnership with Rain, a firm holding direct membership in Visa's payment network, bridges on-chain balances to standard merchant payment networks globally.
The emerging market framing is not incidental. Africa leads global stablecoin adoption by key measures: 79% of crypto-active users on the continent hold stablecoins, compared to around 60% in other emerging markets and roughly 45% in high-income markets, according to a 2026 BVNK report.
Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value in the twelve months to June 2025, up 52% year-over-year. Nigeria alone accounted for $92.1 billion of that total, nearly triple the figure recorded by the second-ranked country, South Africa. Nigeria's crypto market has also seen significant regulatory change: the Central Bank of Nigeria reversed its ban on banks working with licensed crypto providers in 2025, opening a path for regulated digital asset services in the country.
In South Asia, crypto adoption volume grew 80% from January through July 2025, with India ranking first globally in overall crypto adoption according to the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. India's regulatory environment remains in flux: the country has no comprehensive crypto law and imposes a 30% flat tax on capital gains alongside a 1% tax deducted at source on transactions.
Pakistan passed its Virtual Assets Act 2026 in February, creating a national regulator, the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), and launching a sandbox that specifically covers stablecoin development, remittance infrastructure, and on/off-ramp services. Kenya signed the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill into law in October 2025, establishing a legal framework for digital asset businesses in one of East Africa's most active crypto markets.
Plasma One's gasless model and seed-phrase-free onboarding directly address the friction points that have limited stablecoin uptake among non-technical users in all three regions. Whether the product's 10% yield proves sustainable at scale, and how regulators in Nigeria, India, and Kenya respond to a stablecoin neobank entering their markets from outside their jurisdictions, will determine how much of that addressable demand Plasma can actually reach.