Stateful

Pantera Capital
  • 5.0 (1)
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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. 10h ago

    Why Encryption Hasn't Broken in the Age of AI with Kraken and Ledger

    Nothing was decrypted. A lot was exploited. That gap is the entire story of Black October, and it is the subject of this conversation. Host Stuti Pandey, partner at Pantera Capital, sits down with two leading figures in security and encryption.  Michael Benich is Director of Security at Payward, the company behind Kraken, where his team defends over $40 billion and 6 million accounts, and he has assisted the US Secret Service in clawing back hundreds of millions from attackers.  Charles Guillemet is CTO of Ledger, where devices holding half a trillion in assets have never been compromised even though every hacker on the planet can hold one in their hands. Both of them have early access to frontier models through Project Glasswing and Trusted Access for Cyber, and both describe the same thing: finding a serious vulnerability has gone from months of highly skilled work to a single prompt.  Charles's internal red team found more vulnerabilities with AI this year than in the previous eight combined. They get into what actually broke in the PHP and Binance incidents, why guardrails may be creating the next generation of unethical hackers, whether AI is coming for cryptography itself, and what it will take to move $2 trillion onto new signatures. Key Topics: What actually broke at Binance, and why social engineering through a fake job interview beat every technical controlThe PHP vulnerability that was found by prompting a model to search for a nasty bug and not stop until it found one, then exploited by millions of agents 45 minutes after the patch shippedWhy Black October was not a loud news cycle: the check is coming due for legacy architectures that survived on obscurityHow attackers get around guardrails: obliteration, open-weight models with no refusals, and a research field dedicated to the bypassWhy limiting access to frontier models will not work: nuclear non-proliferation has no analogue when the uranium is in every countryOpenAI's 700 math papers in a single day: research revolution or slop drop, and why there was no cryptography paper in itPost-quantum cryptography explained, plus harvest now decrypt later and why you are already late if you have not migrated

    Why Encryption Hasn't Broken in the Age of AI with Kraken and Ledger

  2. 4d ago

    Proving You’re Human on an Internet Run by Agents with World

    Alex Blania, co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, the company building for World, joins Cosmo Jiang with a prediction: within the next three months it will be completely impossible to spot that you are talking to a deepfake, and completely impossible for any software-only solution to catch it. Alex started building proof of human in 2019, before ChatGPT, when the idea sounded like science fiction. Seven years later, video models have hit 60 frames per second, more than half of Cloudflare's traffic is agents, and his own chief economist fooled him with a deepfake in a one-on-one. He walks through how World ID actually works, why Zoom and the big banks are suddenly moving fast, what agents need in order to be trusted on the internet, and why the demand for intelligence may be infinite even if compute markets correct along the way. Key Topics: Alex's prediction that within three months, and certainly within six, no software-only solution will be able to detect a deepfakeWhy he left a theoretical physics PhD at Caltech after Sam Altman sent him a two-pager, and why he almost said noThe two capabilities converging right now: long-horizon agentic models and video models that just reached real-time 60 frames per secondThe moment his chief economist showed up to their one-on-one as a deepfake of a colleague, and fooled him for 15 minutesInside World ID: the Orb, multi-spectral and infrared imaging, a biometric package held on your own phone, and zero-knowledge proofs of uniquenessHow the Zoom integration works as a three-way match between the live video stream, the Orb-verified image, and a phone re-authenticationWhy more than 50% of Cloudflare's traffic is now agents, and why websites are locking the gates to themDelegated proof of human: why an agent that can prove it acts on behalf of a real person will soon be able to do far more than one that cannotWhy today's AI is less than 1% of what is coming: two gigawatts a week of new compute and another 100x in algorithmic efficiencyThe 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.

    Proving You’re Human on an Internet Run by Agents with World

  3. Oct 19

    Why Tokenization Doesn't Guarantee Liquidity with Fission

    Franklin Bi sits down with Jon Shaffer, CEO of Fission, and Steve Bendit, Chief Revenue Officer, to discuss Pantera leading their Series A and why private markets, not public equities, are the real tokenization opportunity. Private markets represent roughly $18 trillion in assets, yet much of the industry still relies on manual processes, from subscription agreements to ownership transfers. Even the world’s largest asset managers operate within these traditional systems. Tokenization is a step forward, but putting a fund onchain doesn’t automatically create liquidity or expand distribution. Real liquidity requires more than technology. It requires capital, infrastructure, and someone willing to underwrite the risk. Key Topics: The core insight: tokenization does not create liquidity and it does not create distribution. On-chain distribution is a function of liquidity, and liquidity has to be instantiated by a third party willing to underwrite the risk.Why private markets instead of public equities: US public markets are already among the most efficient in the world, so blockchain mainly solves distribution there. Alternatives are not even digitized, let alone tokenized.Pricing duration risk, not NAV: Fission does not reprice the underlying basket. It prices the risk of holding the asset through the next redemption window to give investors an early exit, which looks more like receivables financing than prop trading.Why this is a credit-based liquidity market: the framing keeps asset managers' marks intact and brings NAV lenders and receivables financiers into the liquidity pool alongside traditional market makers.Why private markets need their own venue: different valuation methodologies, different settlement and cross-chain infrastructure, different exchange rules, and a different breed of liquidity provider than single-name equitiesBreaking the yield ceiling: the market is boxed in at 6% to 7% because that is the highest you can get with baked-in liquidity. The goal is double-digit returns with daily liquidity on 30 to 90 day products.Liquidity as a feature of the token, not a bolt-on: how early exits, collateralization, and levered vaults change what on-chain allocators are willing to hold, and why it removes the need for asset managers to carry their own liquidity sleevesThe institutional inflection: Apollo and Securitize with ACRED, BlackRock and Ondo with curated portfolios, ARK opening the door to tokenized venture, and Hamilton Lane filing to tokenize 40 Act funds directlyWhere AI fits: pricing engines for duration risk and gating probability, AI portfolio construction for fund-of-funds baskets, and eventually agentic rebalancing that keeps a portfolio inside its own risk limitsThe hot take: the CLARITY Act failing in Congress may be the best thing that could have happened to tokenization, because SEC rulemaking is what actually moves the needle

    Why Tokenization Doesn't Guarantee Liquidity with Fission

  4. Sep 24

    Giving the World Access to US Stocks with Robinhood Chain and Alchemy

    Franklin Bi sits down with Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of Alchemy, and Johann Kerbrat, who leads Crypto and International at Robinhood, to explore how tokenized assets, stablecoins, and agentic commerce are converging on Robinhood Chain. The chain is two months old. It already accounts for 40% of all new developers on Alchemy and 78% of new app traffic, and in API calls it runs at roughly a quarter the volume of Google search. Meanwhile, most of the world still cannot buy a US stock. Key Topics: Why Robinhood built its own chain instead of using an existing one: low latency, low cost, high throughput, L2 interoperability, and deep integration across 27 million funded accountsThe scale nobody expected: the number one most used chain on Alchemy within two weeks of launch, 190 tokenized US stocks and ETFs, and $170M in stock token TVLThe WhatsApp effect: if you live in the US with a brokerage account, the problem is invisible. Take India, a billion people who effectively cannot buy US stocks.Composability surprises: memecoin and stock token pairs, hooks into stock tokens, Robin Earn paying around 7% on stables through Morpho, and Lido points via Robin WalletAgentic commerce as the third mega trend: Alchemy made its entire product autonomously accessible to agents, no CAPTCHAs and no humans, and grew 20% in two weeksAgentic cards and verifiable intent: how the Dave the Minion agent picking the Empire State Building as its billing address led to a card product with spend controls, plus Agent Pay on the merchant sideRobinhood's agentic trading launch: roughly 100,000 accounts created in about a month, with an MCP spanning stocks, options, and cryptoRegulatory reality: the SEC innovation exemption is a good start but only runs five years, which is not a long enough roadmap for institutions to commitDeveloper activity is roughly 37x the 2021 peak on Alchemy and has more than doubled in the last 13 months, which is a leading indicator for everything downstream

    Giving the World Access to US Stocks with Robinhood Chain and Alchemy

  5. Sep 16

    Latest on the CLARITY Act: Here's What's Next for Digital Asset Regulation

    The CLARITY Act did not advance in the Senate. Prediction markets now put 2026 passage in the single digits. Mason Nystrom sits down with Katrina Paglia, Chief Legal Officer at Pantera Capital, to break down what the path forward looks like for digital asset regulation in the US. Key Topics: - Why CLARITY failed: the conflicts of interest provisions around what federal employees can hold and invest in became the sticking point, not the bank and exchange yield fight that was already compromised months ago - The three scenarios from here: restart negotiations before midterms, wait for the next Congress, or let the agencies fill the gap. Only one of those is realistic right now. - Reg CA explained: two capital raising exemptions at $5M and $75M, disclosure requirements built for tokenomics and governance rather than IPO-style filings, and a self-certification off-ramp into commodity status - Why the SEC and CFTC collaboration matters more than people realize, and what institutions should take from it as they move into tokenized assets beyond treasuries and money markets - What Katrina is watching next: prediction market regulation, split decisions in the Ninth and Third Circuits, and a case that may be headed to the Supreme Court 01:44 Why the Ethics Provisions Killed the Bill 03:37 How the SEC and CFTC Are Filling the Gap 04:16 Reg CA: The Capital Raising Unlock for Early-Stage Projects 07:21 What This Means for Tokenization and Institutional Adoption 08:58 The Pendulum Risk of Agency-Led Rulemaking 10:18 Will a Future CLARITY Act Pass? 11:14 Prediction Markets: The Next Regulatory Battle to Watch 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.

    Latest on the CLARITY Act: Here's What's Next for Digital Asset Regulation

  6. Aug 11

    Why AI Builders Need to Own Their Compute with B3

    Franklin Bi sits down with Daryl Xu and Viktoriya Hying, co-founders of B3, and Yorke Rhodes (NYU) to announce the launch of B3IQ and explore why owning your own compute is becoming essential for anyone running open source AI. Open source models are catching up fast, but the hardware to run them is gatekept. Frontier labs have locked up hyperscaler capacity years in advance. Researchers get their accounts banned for studying human trafficking. Startups get put in line for last-generation chips. B3IQ is a rent-to-own platform that lets anyone own NVIDIA hardware, run private AI on it, and monetize idle capacity so the machine pays for itself. Key Topics: Why the long tail is locked out: frontier labs reserve hyperscaler capacity two to five years in advance, leaving researchers, startups, and prosumers with no place in line or only older-generation hardwareThe content filter problem: NYU students researching evacuations in war zones and human trafficking get flagged and account-banned by closed models, and running open weights locally is the only workable pathThe iPhone moment for compute: B3IQ's rent-to-own model drops the upfront cost of a 400K H200 cluster to roughly 120K, with ownership in about two years, hosted and managed in a secure Oregon facilityOwning beats renting on the math: two years of renting an eight-GPU H200 node costs roughly the same as buying it outright, and idle capacity can be matched with offtake so the machine pays for itselfOpen source is closing the gap: Kimi K3 matches frontier performance on some agentic coding tasks, but running it takes two H200 nodes, which is exactly why hardware access is the bottleneck, not model quality 01:23 From Coinbase to Gaming to AI: The B3 Journey 05:28 The Research Wall: Content Filters and Token Limits at NYU 11:02 The Hyperscaler Long Tail Problem 16:16 The Economics: Why Frontier Labs Locked In Their Model Gains 18:19 Rent-to-Own: How the B3IQ Financing Model Works 20:10 The iPhone Moment for Compute 29:27 Why Own the Box When Neo Clouds Exist? 40:24 The Five-Year Vision: A 50-Megawatt Facility and Price Transparency 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.

    Why AI Builders Need to Own Their Compute with B3

  7. Jul 29

    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

  8. 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
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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
    26
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Stateful
  • Show Website
    Stateful

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