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  • "EU is river bitcoin loginalmost a victim of its own success," Says Zodia Markets Co-founder
  • Cash is "Slow, Unpredictable and Expensive"
  • Use Cases of Stablecoins "Boggles the Mind"
  •  Standard Chartered has Seen the Digitization of Payments
  • "I'm not convinced that CBDCs have a cross-border application"

Nick Philpott, Co-founder of Zodia Markets – a digital asset trading business that has a strong backing from traditional financial giants like the British Bank, Standard Chartered Bank – has a controversial take on the need of regulatory clarity. Speaking during the Nordic Blockchain Association on 17 June 2025 he said that most regulations just synthesize down to don’t lie, don’t cheat, and don’t steal.

“Saying that you need to wait for the regulator to say ‘yes, you can do this or that” means you’ll have no innovation at all,” insisted Philpott. 

Talking about stablecoins specifically he said, “Stablecoins are definitionally cross-border.” However, expressing concerns about Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), he said, “One of my biggest concerns around MiCA is that there are definitely traces of protectionism in there, trying to put the walls up, trying to promote the adoption of Euro stablecoins. I get it. But the problem is if you put walls up in a world that is globalizing, that has a tool, that is definitionally global, then you’re going to cut yourselves off from quite a lot of those opportunities.”

“The way I think about things like USDC or Tether particularly, is that they’re Eurodollars. We’ve had Eurodollars since the 1950s. Tether is issued by an El Salvadorian company. It’s not issued out of the US. So it is international by design.”

“EU is almost a victim of its own success,” Says Zodia Markets Co-founder

“If you come from an institutional background that we do, actually there’s quite a lot of regulations that you can just draw from to run a business pretty well. You don’t necessarily need to wait for the regulators to actually write a licensing framework. We’re a UK-based company, still not regulated. Regulators haven’t written the regulations yet.”

Talking about payments in the EU, he said it actually work pretty well. “SEPA is good, Target 2 is good, instant payments is pretty good. Banks are okay.”

But, according to him the EU is a victim of its own success. “To illustrate,” he said “Zodia Markets, our number one currency in terms of stablecoin volumes is the US dollar stablecoins. Number two is Turkish Lira. We do more volume in the one Turkish Lira stablecoin than we do in all the Euro stablecoins combined by a factor of 100. Because settling Turkish Lira is not that easy. Getting a Turkish Lira bank account offshore – it’s not that easy. But you can hold Turkish Lira stablecoins pretty much anywhere you want to go.”

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