Stateful

Pantera Capital
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On Stateful, we go deep into blockchain venture capital: investing in DeFi, digital asset treasuries, Solana, and the frontier of Web3 infrastructure. Each episode unpacks Pantera’s new investments, explores the dynamics of asymmetric returns, and provides insights into the projects and protocols shaping the next generation of finance. Whether you’re a founder, investor, or simply blockchain-curious, Stateful brings you behind the curtain with the team that’s been first to nearly every milestone in the space. Pantera Capital was the first U.S. institutional asset manager exclusively focused on blockchain technology, launching the first U.S. crypto fund when bitcoin traded at $65. Since 2013, Pantera has pioneered venture equity, early-stage tokens, and liquid digital asset strategies—backing more than 100 blockchain companies and 110 token projects globally.

  1. 7h ago

    Why AI Agents Need Infrastructure Before Intelligence with Orthogonal

    Mason Nystrom sits down with Christian Pickett and Bera Sogut, co-founders of Orthogonal, to explore why the agent economy needs infrastructure before it needs more intelligence, and how Orthogonal is building the missing layer that lets AI agents discover, call, and pay for services on their own. The problem: an agent can decide what to do but cannot do it. Using a new service requires another integration, another API key, another contract, and another bill, each set up by a human. Orthogonal connects dozens of verified providers through one API an agent can access autonomously, paying per call in cents rather than per seat or subscription. Key Topics: - The missing layer: agents can reason and decide but cannot act autonomously because every new service requires a human to set up accounts, manage API keys, and handle billing across multiple providers - Why micropayments finally make sense in an agentic world: agents follow policies, track spend automatically, and can transact at sub-cent levels that humans never would, collapsing the per-seat subscription model - The agentic payments standards war: X402, MPP, Nano Payments, ACP, and UCP are all competing, and Orthogonal is taking a protocol-agnostic stance, supporting all of them so providers get discovered regardless of which wins - The human internet vs the agent internet: agents will not browse websites, compare pricing pages, or fill out forms. A parallel agent-native internet with its own discovery layer, GEO over SEO, is forming right now - Full autonomy is not the end state: human preferences need to be baked into every long-horizon task, and the agent that lives with you proactively, monitoring your calendar and deals and acting before you ask, is the next frontier

    Why AI Agents Need Infrastructure Before Intelligence with Orthogonal

  2. Jul 15

    The State of U.S. Blockchain Regulation with Hyperliquid Policy Center

    Mason Nystrom sits down with Jake Chervinsky, CEO of the Hyperliquid Policy Center and former chief policy officer at the Blockchain Association, to break down the three policy battles that will define crypto's next era: perps, prediction markets, and the CLARITY Act. Hyperliquid is the most exciting thing built in crypto. Perps are a better derivative than futures, options, or swaps. Prediction markets are a better product than sportsbooks. And yet Americans can't access any of it. That is the problem Jake is in Washington to fix. Key Topics: Why Jake joined the Hyperliquid Policy Center: perps are a better product than anything traditional finance has built, they settle instantly on a public blockchain, and Americans can't access themThe path to regulated onchain perps in the US: the CFTC's crawl-walk-run approach, why perps are futures not swaps, and what equity perps require from both the CFTC and SEC working togetherCME vs the CFTC: why the Chicago Mercantile Exchange sued to block perps from trading on registered exchanges, why Jake thinks the CFTC has both the stronger legal and policy argument, and why CME is competing in court instead of in the marketPrediction markets vs Vegas: why the CFTC has jurisdiction over event contracts as swaps, why 50-state regulation is unworkable, and why Vegas is lobbying hard to protect its sportsbook model from a better productThe CLARITY Act: 90-95% of the details are sorted, the two remaining sticking points are ethics provisions around Trump's crypto activity and developer protections for DeFi builders, and the do-or-die timeline before August recessTokens vs equity: equity is for off-chain value, tokens are for onchain value, and the magic of crypto is building products where all the value is fully onchain00:00 Why Jake Joined the Hyperliquid Policy Center 04:57 The Path to Regulated On-Chain Perps in the US 17:03 CME Sues the CFTC to Block Perp Trading 21:02 Prediction Markets vs Vegas: The CFTC Battle 26:29 The CLARITY Act: Status, Sticking Points, and the August Deadline  The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

    The State of U.S. Blockchain Regulation with Hyperliquid Policy Center

  3. Jul 7

    TurboFlow is Building the Trading Platform Asia Has Been Missing

    Mason Nystrom sits down with Tony He, founder and CEO of TurboFlow, to explore why Asia has been underserved by existing perp DEXs and prediction markets, and how TurboFlow is building a new type of trading experience purpose-built for the Eastern retail trader. Hyperliquid and Polymarket dominate in the West. But in Asia, there is no equivalent. Asian traders operate in communities, expect customer support, prefer familiar centralized exchange UX, and trade completely different assets. TurboFlow is building the platform that bridges those two worlds. Key Topics: Why Asia has no Hyperliquid or Polymarket: cultural differences in trading behavior, community-driven trading, preference for CEX-style UX, and completely different asset interests like e-sports and cricket Why prediction markets are winning with retail: click yes or no on anything you have an opinion on, no knowledge of crypto or margin trading required, lower barrier than perps, higher conversion and retention Building a trading platform that lasts: safety, liquidity, asset differentiation, customer service, and intuitive UX are all table stakes. You need a minimum viable level of all of them. Lessons from co-founding Amber Group: bear markets are for building, retail and institutional are completely different businesses, and focus on process over outcomes TurboFlow's 18-month roadmap: dominate Asian prediction markets, expand from crypto-only to 50 assets including commodities, RWAs, and FX, and win short-term binary outcome products 00:00 Why Asia Has No Hyperliquid or Polymarket 01:56 The Perps Market Today: $9 Trillion, Only 200K Daily Traders 06:07 Why Prediction Markets Beat Perps for Retail 11:18 What Actually Matters When Building a Trading Platform 14:45 Lessons from Co-Founding Amber Group 18:46 Quick Fire: Bear Market Timing, 18-Month Roadmap, The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

    TurboFlow is Building the Trading Platform Asia Has Been Missing

  4. Jun 24

    MoneyGram Is Bringing Stablecoins to 60 Million Users with M0

    Mason Nystrom sits down with Anthony Soohoo (MoneyGram) and Luca Prosperi (M0) to explore the future of money creation and movement, why stablecoins are not the product but the foundation, and how MoneyGram's 60 million customers are about to get access to financial services they have never had before. Having a stablecoin is not the differentiator. What you need to do is build kickass products and services on top of it. That is what unlocks adoption. MoneyGram and M0 are building those products together with MGUSD, a stablecoin purpose-built for MoneyGram's global network of 60 million active customers. Key Topics: - Why MoneyGram built its own stablecoin MGUSD instead of integrating USDC or USDT: control over economics, features, and the ability to verticalize like Apple did with its chips - M0's infrastructure play: building the smart contract layer that powers, connects, and enables hundreds of different tokenized dollar platforms, from MoneyGram to PayPal and Visa - Just having a stablecoin is not the differentiator: distribution wins, and why the App Store analogy explains why stablecoin adoption is really about what you build on top - The moats that survive AI and stablecoins: distribution at scale, regulatory relationships, trust, and the personal connections that no AI can replicate Stablecoin supply forecast: $500B by 2027, $1 trillion by 2030, and why the real inflection point is large-scale platforms like MoneyGram integrating stablecoins into their payment infrastructure, migrating their entire network onto stablecoins The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

    MoneyGram Is Bringing Stablecoins to 60 Million Users with M0

  5. Jun 4

    Tokenization Is the Next ETF with WisdomTree

    Franklin Bi (Pantera Capital) sits down with Jeremy Schwartz, Global CIO, and Maredith Hannon, Head of Business Development for Digital Assets at WisdomTree, to explore why tokenization is doing to ETFs what ETFs did to mutual funds, and how WisdomTree is building the infrastructure to make that happen. WisdomTree has been at the frontier of every major wrapper evolution in asset management. From alternatively-weighted indexes to ETFs, and now to tokenized real world assets on eight public chains. With over $700M in AUM growing 6x year over year, their tokenized money market fund WTGXX is already being used for corporate treasury sweeps, cross-border payroll, and stablecoin reserve management. Key Topics: The ETF analogy: tokenization is to ETFs what ETFs were to mutual funds, democratizing access from brokerage accounts to smartphones, and WisdomTree has been building for this moment for yearsWhy public chains over permissioned chains: permissioning belongs at the token level, not the chain level, and the real users are already on public chainsWTGXX in practice: $700M AUM growing 6x year over year, used for corporate treasury sweeps via StableC, cross-border vendor payments, and payroll via Toku and Plume with block-by-block yield accrualThe product roadmap: from money markets and treasuries to equity betas, derivatives, and option income strategies, and why WisdomTree rebalanced 3,000 model portfolios with JP Morgan and Apollo using smart contractsRookie mistake and pleasant surprise: trust matters more in crypto than anyone expects, and Europe led the US on crypto ETPs by five years

    Tokenization Is the Next ETF with WisdomTree

  6. Jun 1

    Why Blockchain VC's are Betting On Korea

    Franklin Bi and Jonathan Gieg (Pantera Capital) sit down with Steve Kim and Heechang Kang from Four Pillars Research to discuss why Korea is one of the most important and most misunderstood crypto markets in the world, and why Pantera just led their Series A. Korea has the highest ChatGPT and Claude subscription rate per capita in the world. Kakao Pay just joined the X402 Foundation. Korean pension funds are considering Bitcoin as a portfolio diversification asset. And a new STO legislation passed in January is expected to become a major bridge between crypto and traditional finance. The institutional wave is coming. Key Topics: - Why the West misunderstands Korea: trading volumes overwhelm the narrative, but Korea is actually the world's most aggressive early adopter of new technology, from 5G and open banking to ChatGPT and Claude Code - Agentic commerce in Korea: Kakao and Toss are already building payment rails for the agent era, KakaoPay joined X402, and pay-as-you-go AI payments are on the verge of exploding the same way subscriptions did - The Terra shadow and the builder economy: Terra's collapse devastated Korea's crypto builder culture, but institutional adoption from firms like Mirae  Asset is slowly rebuilding credibility and drawing developers back in - Four Pillars' APAC expansion: from Korea to Japan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia via the Asia Stablecoin Alliance, and why blockchain is the distribution rail that lets Korean fintech companies like Toss finally compete globally 00:00 Pantera Invests in Four Pillars from Seoul 01:00 Why the West Misreads Korea 04:30 AI Adoption and Agentic Commerce in Korea  8:30 Korean Crypto Regulation Before and After 12:10 STO Legislation and the Institutional Wave  16:20 Top Crypto Verticals in the Korean Market  32:00 What Western Companies Should Know Before Coming to Korea  36:40 The Terra Collapse and the Builder Economy  The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

    Why Blockchain VC's are Betting On Korea

  7. May 28

    How World ID Is Redefining Internet Identity

    Mason Nystrom sits down with three leaders from Tools for Humanity and World ID to explore how proof of human is redefining identity on the internet in the age of AI agents. We are moving from a majority of humans with a few bots to a majority of bots with a few humans. That is not necessarily bad. But it makes knowing who the real humans are more important than ever. World ID is the identity layer built to answer that question at scale, privately, and without collecting your data. Key Topics: - Why proof of human is the foundational layer the agentic internet needs: from public discourse manipulation and catfishing to deepfake wire fraud, the cost of not knowing who is human is rising fast - World ID as a credential stack: Orb verification as the gold standard, Selfie Check as the entry point, and school, work, and national IDs layered on top, all privacy-preserving and held on your own device - Agent delegation and human continuity: how World ID lets your agent book flights, make purchases, and act on your behalf while keeping a verified human accountable for every action via Agent Kit - Why blocking all bots is the wrong answer: how World ID enables good agents to access platforms frictionlessly while bad actors are penalized, and why this unlocks the next wave of consumer agentic use cases - World ID vs Face ID: why uniqueness is the missing piece, how one person with 1,000 phones can fool Face ID but not World ID, and why anonymous verification protects users and partners alike 01:00 Tiago Sada on Proof of Human in the Agent Age 05:40 Scaling to 40 Million Verified Humans 07:07 What Tiago Is Most Excited About Next 08:50 Andy Wang on World as the Identity Layer 10:00 Good Bots vs Bad Bots: Why Blocking All Traffic Is Wrong 13:02 Restaurant Reservations, Scalpers, and Proof of Human 17:00 Tawanda Mahere on What Partners Are Looking For 22:08 The Consumer Value of World ID 23:15 Agent Kit and Human-in-the-Loop Commerce 25:21 World ID vs Face ID: Why Uniqueness Changes Everything 29:00 Orb On Demand and How to Get Verified Today The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

    How World ID Is Redefining Internet Identity

  8. May 21

    How Tinder Uses World ID to Fight AI Catfishing & Bots

    Mason Nystrom sits down with Mark Kantor, Chief Product Officer at Tinder, to discuss how Tinder is partnering with World to bring proof of human verification to 190 countries and combat AI catfishing. The problem: the rise of bots and synthetic content is making it harder and harder to tell who is real online.  On a platform built entirely on human to human connection, that is an existential challenge. Tinder's answer is World ID, already live in Japan and now expanding to the US. Key Topics: Tinder's World ID integration: how a pilot in Japan cut age verification from 30 minutes to under 2 minutes, and seconds for already-verified usersNo more catfishing: how World ID moves toward ensuring the person behind a profile matches their photosOrders of magnitude improvement: why the 30-minute to 2-minute reduction was far beyond what the team expectedExpanding to 190 countries: Tinder announcing the US rollout and what global scale looks like for World IDProof of human plus uniqueness: why Tinder needs to know not just that you are human, but that you only have one accountThe line Tinder will not cross: AI doing everything for a user and replacing the human connection entirelyThe long-term vision: World building out capabilities so fewer tools are needed to check more boxesThe views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

    How Tinder Uses World ID to Fight AI Catfishing & Bots
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About

On Stateful, we go deep into blockchain venture capital: investing in DeFi, digital asset treasuries, Solana, and the frontier of Web3 infrastructure. Each episode unpacks Pantera’s new investments, explores the dynamics of asymmetric returns, and provides insights into the projects and protocols shaping the next generation of finance. Whether you’re a founder, investor, or simply blockchain-curious, Stateful brings you behind the curtain with the team that’s been first to nearly every milestone in the space. Pantera Capital was the first U.S. institutional asset manager exclusively focused on blockchain technology, launching the first U.S. crypto fund when bitcoin traded at $65. Since 2013, Pantera has pioneered venture equity, early-stage tokens, and liquid digital asset strategies—backing more than 100 blockchain companies and 110 token projects globally.

Information

  • Creator
    Pantera Capital
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Stateful
  • Show Website
    Stateful