I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining Pantera for research and investments at this crucial moment in blockchain’s development – a moment where grassroots innovation gets turbocharged by institutional adoption.

 

Over the past decade, Dan Morehead, Paul Veradittakit and Pantera’s venture team has played a foundational and consistent role in supporting the primitives for a new on-chain economy. From Coinbase to Alchemy, from Circle to Ondo, from Arbitrum to Morpho, Pantera has consistently backed winners across the crypto landscape.

 

Looking ahead, I see the current market shaped by one-third bottom-up innovation and two-thirds top-down distribution. The meteoric rise of Hyperliquid, pump.fun, Polymarket showcase the revolutionary power of grassroots innovations, while increased regulatory clarity has allowed broader integration of blockchains with both TradFi (ETFs, stablecoins, RWAs) and broader tech trends (FinTechs, AI, robotics). This convergence between protocol innovation and institutional adoption excites me as blockchains revolutionize the financial world.

 

I discovered crypto as a Stanford freshman in the spring of 2022. As a double major in Computer Science and Philosophy, I was enthralled by NFTs, DAOs, and the idea of a new creator economy. But just six months later, crypto entered a deep winter, just as ChatGPT started dominating the headlines. As all my classmates pivoted towards AI, I doubled down on crypto, believing the philosophical principles of blockchains – trustlessness, permanence, and voluntariness – were worth fighting for. During the bear market, I rebuilt the Stanford Blockchain Club and grew membership from less than 5 students to 150+ as President. Meanwhile, I dug deeper into DAOs, served as a Uniswap DAO delegate, and researched on-chain governance mechanisms like contestable auctions, quadratic voting, and RetroPGF.

 

As a researcher, I drew upon my interdisciplinary background to work across Stanford’s Law and Engineering schools, teaching “CS 352B/LAW 1078: Blockchain Governance” with Prof. David Mazieres and Prof. Jeff Strnad. I also worked with Prof. Ari Juels’ group at IC3 to publish peer-reviewed academic papers on DAOs and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for USENIX and IEEE S&P, and my CS capstone was designing a multi-user TEE wallet with Prof. Dan Boneh.

 

This academic background allowed me to understand the crucial role that research breakthroughs play in catalyzing innovation in the blockchain industry. As an investor at Pantera, my “north star” is to help researchers, students, and bold innovators with the wildest ideas – whether it’s in bottom-up mechanism innovations like futarchy-based governance, novel perps platforms, and AI-managed DeFi vaults; whether it’s the acceleration of frontier technologies like TEEs, ZKPs, MPC, FHE; whether it’s driving institutional adoption through stablecoin rails and real world assets.

 

I joined Pantera for its founder-friendly history, star-studded team, and time-proven conviction in the blockchain frontier, and I hope that you too will join me on this journey to “bring blockchains everywhere.”

 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jay@panteracapital.com.