Stateful

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 custom...

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 product...

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...

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 pensio...

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 laye...

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 chal...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Gareth Davies, Chief Product Officer at Okta, to explore how identity is becoming the most critical primitive in the agentic economy and why Okta's partnership with World ID is the foundation that makes trusted agent commerce possible. Without a trust layer that binds agents to verified humans, commerce breaks down, fraud proliferates, and the full potential of th...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel, to explore how Vercel is evolving from the front-end cloud into agentic infrastructure, and why their partnership with World ID is giving humans a way to be first-class citizens of the internet again. The insight: proof of human is not just bot protection. It inverts the entire model. Instead of asking whether something is...

Sam Altman (World/OpenAI) joins Cosmo Jiang (Pantera Capital) to discuss why proof of human is the necessary complement to powerful AI.  Then Mason Nystrom turns the mic on Cosmo to break down the investment case for World. The problem: we are rapidly entering a world of infinite AI-generated content and infinite AI identities.  In that world, knowing what is truly human becomes one of the most va...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Cuy Sheffield (Visa Crypto) and Jay Yu (Pantera Capital) to explore the future of agentic payments at the intersection of AI, crypto, and cards. Stablecoin supply grew 40% in 2025. Adjusted transaction volume grew 90%. X402 and the Machine Payment Protocol are live. Visa CLI is in beta. Agentic commerce is no longer a concept. It is happening right now. Key Topics: Sta...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Prabhakar Reddy, founder and CEO of OpenFX, one of Pantera's most recent portfolio companies, to explore why cross-border FX is still broken and how OpenFX is rebuilding money movement from the ground up. The problem: $4 trillion is trapped in transit at any given moment due to pre-funding, SWIFT delays, and opaque FX spreads. OpenFX bypasses this entirely using s...

Franklin Bi (Pantera Capital) sits down with Sandy Kaul (Franklin Templeton) and Ian De Bode (Ondo Finance) to explore why tokenization is no longer a back-office experiment and how it is quietly rewiring global capital markets. The partnership: Franklin Templeton and Ondo Finance have joined forces to tokenize Franklin ETFs and bring US capital markets to hundreds of millions of people globally w...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Jacob Fortinsky (Novig) to explore why sports betting is broken, how prediction markets are replacing the casino model, and why the $2T global sports market is ripe for disruption. Website: https://novig.com/ Careers: https://novig.com/careers Novig X: https://x.com/Novig The problem: sports books take ~10% of every bet, ban profitable users, and offer no price competi...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Austin Adams (Doppler Protocol) to explore why token launches are broken, how traditional IPOs died, and what onchain capital markets can fix. The problem: 20% of all token launches in 2025 traded below their issue price. Traditional IPOs now happen at terminal valuations—OpenAI and SpaceX go public where they used to peak. Amazon IPO'd under $1B and went up 1000x...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Sam Lehman (Pantera Capital) and Rishin Sharma (Solana Foundation) to explore the convergence of AI and crypto—where $211B in AI funding meets blockchain innovation. AI attracted $211 billion in VC funding in 2025 while crypto AI got just 1-3%. But the intersection is heating up.  Key Topics: • Text-to-trade: AI replacing traditional crypto UX ("talk to your phone...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Mike Kremer (Tulip King, CounterpartyTV) and Brian Breslow (No Limit Holdings) to break down Bitcoin's 2025 underperformance vs gold and what's next for crypto.2025 Reality Check: Bitcoin went negative while gold rallied 60%. De-dollarization happened—but nations chose gold over Bitcoin. Why? Bitcoin's $2T market cap wasn't ready to absorb central b...

Mason Nystrom sits down with Hootie Rashidifard (Hash3) and Alana Levin (Variant) to break down 2025's winners and losers—plus bold predictions for 2026. 2025 Winners: Stablecoins ($30M→$1T volume), prediction markets, Robinhood, Stripe, Base 2025 Losers: Gaming (down 96%), MetaMask, Biden-era SEC, restaking, DePIN 2026 Predictions:  • Crypto gets hard again (capital constrained, mission-driv...

Welcome to Stateful, the Pantera Podcast. In our inaugural episode, host Mason Nystrom sits down with two of crypto's most experienced investors: Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital with 11 years investing in the space, and Franklin Bi, General Partner who founded JP Morgan's blockchain team before joining Pantera seven years ago. What We Cover: The venture landscape h...