Argo Blockchain

Whatever Happened to Argo Blockchain?

There was a time when crypto miners were treated like picks-and-shovels for a new gold rush.

Argo Blockchain was one of the most visible UK examples.

It had the right buzzwords:

Bitcoin exposure

North American mining

ESG-friendly energy narratives

A London listing that made it feel “real”

For a while, that was enough.

Then the cycle turned

---

This wasn’t a sudden collapse. It was gravity.

Argo didn’t disappear overnight. It ran out of margin.

Crypto mining looks simple from the outside:

> price up → profit

price down → pain

But in reality, it’s a leveraged industrial business:

huge upfront capex

energy costs you don’t fully control

rewards that halve

capital markets that shut exactly when you need them

When money was cheap, expansion was rewarded.

When money tightened, balance sheets mattered again.

---

The quiet endgame

By 2025, the outcome was familiar to anyone who’s watched enough cycles:

restructuring to avoid insolvency

debt swapped for equity

creditors taking control

existing shareholders heavily diluted

delisting from the London market

The company still exists.

The equity story does not.

That distinction matters.

---

Why this keeps happening in crypto equities

Crypto itself didn’t die.

But crypto-linked public equities suffered from something worse:

They were:

capital intensive

operationally fragile

priced for growth

funded by optimism

When sentiment turned, there was nowhere to hide.

Owning Bitcoin is one thing.

Owning a miner with debt, energy exposure, and dilution risk is another.

---

The broader lesson (and it’s not anti-crypto)

This isn’t about saying “crypto is over”.

It’s about understanding where value accrues in different phases of a cycle.

Public markets:

want visibility

want margins

want discipline

Early-stage crypto infrastructure:

burns cash

needs scale

depends on cheap capital

Those two don’t coexist well once the music stops.

---

Where I’m at now

Crypto is out of favour again.

That’s usually when interesting things start forming — quietly.

But excitement isn’t required. Patience is.

Watching matters more than acting. Balance sheets matter more than narratives. And sometimes the best decision is simply:

> not to own the thing that looks like a proxy.

---

Final thought

Argo Blockchain didn’t fail because Bitcoin failed.

It failed because:

> cycles eventually price reality, not potential.

That’s not a crypto lesson. That’s a markets lesson.

And they keep repeating until you stop needing reminders.

De Lar Rue, taken private

De La Rue looked cheap.

It wasn’t. It was exhausted.

The share price collapsed for years.

Public investors fled.

Then, at rock-bottom prices, De La Rue was taken private.

Cue the irony:

A company that literally prints money… only became investable once the public market gave up.

This wasn’t a turnaround story for shareholders.

It was a transfer of ownership.

Public markets needed:

growth

clarity

optimism

Private equity just needed:

assets

contracts

patience

control

Same company.

Different time horizon.

Different outcome.

There’s a lesson here that goes beyond this one name:

> Cheap doesn’t mean undervalued.

Sometimes it means the upside now belongs to someone else.

Most people lose money chasing recovery stories.

Asset buyers wait for capitulation, then buy what’s left — quietly.

And yes…

Buying a banknote printer at the bottom is about as on-the-nose as capitalism gets.

Chegg

 Chegg: When a Subscription Moat Met Free AI

Chegg was a US-based online education company that built its business around paid academic support — textbook rentals, homework help, step-by-step solutions, and tutoring for university students. Founded in 2005 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013, Chegg became a staple of the US student ecosystem during the 2010s.

At its peak in 2021, Chegg was valued at over $14 billion, powered by subscription growth, pandemic-era remote learning, and the belief that education support was a durable, high-margin recurring revenue business. Investors saw a classic SaaS-style model: sticky users, predictable cash flow, and pricing power.

They were wrong.

Why the Money Was Lost

Chegg didn’t fail slowly — it was disrupted almost overnight.

Generative AI made its core product obsolete. Tools like ChatGPT offered instant, free explanations across almost every subject Chegg monetised.

The value proposition collapsed. Why pay monthly for answers when AI could explain concepts conversationally, repeatedly, and at zero cost?

Students churned fast. Chegg’s subscribers were young, price-sensitive, and highly adaptive. Loyalty evaporated.

Brand and content moats proved illusory. Years of curated solutions were no defence against probabilistic, on-demand AI reasoning.

Pricing power vanished. Chegg couldn’t raise prices, and discounts only accelerated margin erosion.

Growth assumptions broke instantly. What looked like a linear decline was actually a structural demand cliff.

Crucially, this was not a recession story, nor a cost-inflation story. It was technological substitution — the most brutal kind. The product didn’t get worse; it simply became unnecessary.

The Market Reaction

From its 2021 highs, Chegg’s share price fell by over 95%, wiping out billions in market value. Revenues stagnated, guidance was repeatedly cut, and the company was forced into layoffs, restructuring, and strategic retreats. The stock chart didn’t show panic — it showed a long, grinding realisation that the business model no longer had a future moat.

Chegg still exists, but as a shadow of its former self — a reminder that even profitable, subscription-based platforms can be rendered fragile when the underlying problem they solve disappears.

The Lesson

Chegg wasn’t destroyed by poor management, excessive debt, or macroeconomic weakness. It was destroyed by abundance.

When answers became free, instant, and conversational, the idea of paying for them collapsed. In that moment, Chegg joined a growing list of companies that didn’t just lose customers — they lost relevance.

This wasn’t a bad quarter.

It was the end of an era.

The Revel Collective, in administration

Revolution Bars → The Revel Collective: From AIM Darling to Administration

The Revel Collective, formerly known as Revolution Bars Group, was a UK-based operator of late-night bars and casual dining venues, best known for the Revolution and Revolución de Cuba brands. Founded in the late 1990s and floated on London’s AIM market in 2016, the group expanded to around 65–70 sites nationwide at its peak, selling a scalable, cocktail-led nightlife concept to public-market investors.

In October 2024, the company rebranded to The Revel Collective plc, signalling a strategic reset. But the problems were not cosmetic — they were structural.

Why the Money Was Lost

The decline was driven by a slow but relentless collapse in unit economics:

People simply go out less. Post-Covid habits shifted permanently toward home-based socialising, streaming, and cheaper experiences. Late-night venues never recovered mid-week footfall.

Cost-of-living pressure squeezed discretionary spending. Cocktails became an occasional luxury, not a routine purchase.

Rents and business rates remained fixed while revenues became volatile — a fatal mismatch in hospitality.

Energy costs surged, hitting bars disproportionately due to refrigeration, lighting, and extended opening hours.

Labour costs rose sharply, both from wage inflation and staff shortages.

Debt servicing became punitive as interest rates normalised, removing the financial oxygen that had sustained the model.

What investors slowly realised was that this was not a cyclical dip but a permanent reset in consumer behaviour. A business designed for high-volume, high-frequency nightlife was now operating in a lower-traffic, lower-spend world — with no ability to shrink its fixed cost base fast enough.

By January 2026, after years of falling revenues, repeated refinancing, and shareholder dilution, the board filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators. Trading in the shares was suspended, effectively locking in a near-total destruction of shareholder value.

What began as a £200m-plus AIM growth story ended as another case study in how leverage, fixed costs, and changing habits can quietly turn a listed brand into a stranded asset — long before the doors finally close.