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A
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
B
All right, everybody, welcome back to another action packed, high caliber episode here of the Crypto 101 podcast. I'm your co host, Bryce, as always, joined by my buddy across country. Staying dry, I hope, during. Well, I guess hurricane season's passing, but. Brendan, how are you doing, my man?
C
It is passing. Staying dry over here, staying warm. I'll tell you what, I've talked to a lot of people. We're entering into chili season. We're staying warm, but, man, you know, here for another exciting podcast, Bryce. I mean, we've had some bangers here recently. I don't want to like pat our own back too much overhype ourselves, but shout out to super producer TiVo for, for bringing all these guests in here because this is another one that we're really excited for. Definitely a name that I think a lot of the listeners have heard of and. Yeah, man, just another good interview.
B
Absolutely. Now, speaking of winter, I'm. I'm curious. We're going to be talking to our guest today, Cosmo Zhang, who's the general partner or one of the general partners of Pantera Capital. We're going to be talking about if this is crypto winter or have we been in crypto winter that might thaw into spring. You know, tough questions, but we're going to dive into it.
D
But.
B
But first, Cosmo, we'd love to welcome you to the Crypto One on One podcast. How are you doing today?
D
Hey, great, man. Really nice to meet you guys. Bryce, Brendan, excited to be here.
B
Sweet. No, it's, it's been a, it's been a volatile ride in the crypto market, but nothing really out of the ordinary. Like the way I think about it. Like, you know, you've had 20 drawdowns of 30% or more over the course of the past handful of years. Seven, eight years. So this is just kind of par for the course. But, you know, before we dive into a little bit about your background and what Pantera is up to, how are you, how are you thinking about this, this crypto correction that we're in? Again, recording this end of November. Markets have had a lot of volatility.
D
I think it's really, it was always really important to put things in context. And Bryce, you said the exact right stat, which is that bitcoin eth, Solana, These have all seen 30% plus pullbacks multiple times during any uptrend. And so this is within the realm of reasonable Volatility when it comes to this asset class, the reality is that you don't get the.
When we first launched our first bitcoin fund in 2013. Since then, bitcoin is cagred or grown at a compound annual growth rate of over around 80%. You don't get that 80% annualized return if you don't also have similarly large pullbacks. And so yeah, we believe the long term trend is intact. Which is the super long term vision of crypto is going to go from tens of millions of users to billions over time. And if that's true, then, you know, if there are big, if there's a lot of upside, there's also going to be, you know, large magnitude downside too. And we think this is just one of those, those wiggles that along the way.
B
Yeah, it's funny, we, we always have a saying here that risk and reward are two sides of the same coin.
A
Right?
B
Or the same crypto token. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So you have to have the high returns but also endure the volatility. And volatility is a gift to the faithful as kind of is a saying here in, in crypto that Michael Sailor's really embodied. And you know, Michael Sailor invented the, the Digital Asset treasury company. So we want to kind of get your thoughts as well here later in the episode on Digital Asset Treasuries, just so the audience kind of knows what to expect. You know, Pantera was instrumental in one of the latest Solana digital asset treasuries or DATs, called the Solana Company. But before we dive into all that, let's just get acquainted with who you are. How'd you become a partner at Pantera? And what gets you excited about crypto? Why'd you kind of, you know, go all in on this industry?
D
So I'm really a tech investor by trading. You know, I'd say I had a very tradfi a a very tratified career coming into this. I graduated from Harvard where I studied math and then a first job out of school was banking at Evercore and then in private equity after that, covering all sorts of companies, consumer financials, distressed and then. But I decided I really love the idea of taking a lot of shots and making a lot of, making a lot of investments early in my career, you know, making a lot of mistakes to learn from there early in my career. And so I switched from private equity to the public markets and spent most of my career.
In a long, short equity hedge fund called Hitchwood. Hitchwood was a multi billion dollar single manager hedge fund where I rose to lead all of our coverage across consumer and Internet investing. So think everything from your retailers like Dick's or Sporting goods or Costco to the large media and Internet companies like Facebook, Google, Spotify, et cetera. And, and so it's really cool to have that lens on the world. And as I was going through that, you know, the reality was crypto was never really relevant for my day job for, for a very long time until, you know, entering 2020, 2020 2021, when all of a sudden everyone in my coverage universe started talking about crypto, you know, whether that was LVMH talking about their NFT and LVMH or Nike talking about launching nft.
Universal Music talking about a digital, a digital metaverse band, whether it was Spotify talking about tokenizing royalties. And all of a sudden it became incumbent upon me if my job was to try to be the best analyst on the street on these names to learn about crypto really deeply. And as I did, I came to discover that, wow, there's so many real businesses now being built, there's this rich universe of tokens that represent real economic value and there's a real opportunity now to apply that fundamental investing skill set into the token markets. And so I'd always wanted to launch my own fund. I always thought I'd be in equities. And then I realized that if I think about where I want to spend my time.
The hardest part about being an investor is optimizing for return on time. And when I, when I think about that, it's really, I really think about it three ways. It's like one, where is there the high secular growth? Two, where is there the most misunderstanding? And three, where is there the least amount of competition? And it just so clearly crypto across all three. And so I decided to leave equities and go all in on digital assets, ended up launching my own fund and then soon thereafter was realized that there's a real opportunity to accelerate my growth as well as others, and decided to merge my practice with the Pantera's and took over our public markets investing practice here a few years ago.
A
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B
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B
I, I, I love that. And it's such a, a cool journey and you know so many people come into the crypto world from so many different backgrounds and that's a, that's a really cool, a cool story. And yeah, I mean, you know, you ran your own fund. You know, what is, you know, the focus now of your work at Pantera? Is it still in, you know, public blockchain equities? Is it in the liquid tokens market? How do you kind of think about what your practice is today?
D
So give an overview of Pantera. Pantera does everything across the crypto ecosystem. We were fortunate to be fortunate, you know, for forward looking, to be the first institutional fund investing in blockchain since 2013. And so over time that means we've built out a large practice really with a core and early stage venture.
But also in the digital token market. So liquid tokens. And today we invest at our venture fund as well as our liquid token fund. I think because we also have a lot of people, including myself, with particular equity expertise, we have a very strong view on how all this is going to play out in both the equity and the token world. And so.
Earlier this year that ended up happening to end up in us being the first ones to really start this huge boom in DATs in digital asset treasuries. I started earlier this year and so we have some specific strategies around digital asset treasuries. We have specific strategies around liquid tokens as well as venture and I oversee know investment strategy broadly, but especially everything that's later stage growth oriented and public markets.
C
Yeah, I mean this whole time in crypto has been interesting here lately because the market's heading down, people are feeling the pain and what we hate to see is that a lot of people experience one bear market and it wipes them out or it's enough to get them to capitulate and say I'm done. I think the unique thing here is that Pantera has weathered four bear markets already right we're now seeing the Fear and greed index hitting a 10, which is historically a really, really low point, generally around the time of either being extremely oversold or near a bottom. You also have the weekly RSI hitting its lowest point since 2022, which is the relative strength index, its lowest point since almost December of 2022. And for people who don't know, that was right around the time that the market bottomed after the whole ftx, Terra Luna, Alameda, that whole crash that we had after the last bull market. And so we're, we're at an interesting point now, but I'm just curious, like, how are you thinking about the market as it stands right now and potentially just as it moves forward?
B
And also to add to that, just like, how did we get here? Like in a little, you know, how did we get here and where are we going?
D
Yeah, totally. Why don't we start with the how did we get here? Because it's always helpful context, maybe even if you'll indulge me, going back a little bit, because I think it's so important to put everything in the context of, in a larger context. If you go back to 2021, that was a time of such excitement, right? That was the boom of Defi summer. That was the start of all this incredible wave of DEFI innovation. And, and we just saw a lot of users and capital coming into the space. Ultimately, as is the case with any early stage tech, there's large boom and bust and we saw that excitement turn into speculative excess, right? So we turn the page 2022 and all of a sudden we see all that bursting of that bubble and you know, a lot of things coming down, not just in crypto, to be, to be clear across all asset classes, just as the bubble burst on everything. But you know, I heard crypto particularly in particular and especially uncovered a lot of fraud and a lot of the excesses had to be washed away. And so when we turned to 2023, the story became, well, all of a sudden all these headwinds started buffeting the industry. Whether that was users feeling like they had been lied to or lost or cheated. And so they left the industry and they stopped using blockchains as much. Whether it was capital providers who had lost money and felt like they had to stop out and reassess, whether it was regulators who.
Candidly had probably under policed the industry, feeling like they had to over police in reaction to that. And so that resulted in this very severe bear market. As we turn the page though, to 2024 things started to lighten up. Some of those headwinds started to become tailwinds, ultimately culminating in this massive. A few things. One was the launch of the ETFs. The Bitcoin ETFs ended up drawing in a ton of capital. The, you know, the regulatory and political shift that happened with the new presidential administration that came in was very substantial. And then coming to 2025, it's now all, all those headwinds that really were holding the industry back all of a sudden are huge tailwinds. Right from the user perspective, users felt like, wow, there's really interesting things to do again in crypto. So they're coming back capital providers realizing that these, the ETFs have really opened up the ability to access crypto. It's made it a lot easier and safer in their perspective. And they're starting to allocate in very meaningful way. And then regulators and the political establishment realizes that now it's so important to be pro industry because there's like, there's no benefit to being anti tech. And so everyone's very aligned and being pro industry across both Democrats and Republicans. It's, it's like not a partisan thing at all. And so I'm really excited when we think about it from a, from a long term perspective that, that the, that we're in a very bullish environment and that there's so many, because there's so many headwinds that are no tailwinds now. 2025 has ended up playing out like a little bit more volatile, right? The, the after we saw, we saw the mar. The general, the broader markets really pull back very hard earlier this year on macro concerns around tariffs and shutdown and that pulled down everything, not just crypto, but crypto was impacted.
And then we saw a little bit of bump throughout the summer, which is really nice. Just as things really bottomed out in April after everyone got really, really bearish and then we started to see all this good positive news flow and really momentum driven by digital asset Treasuries, which Pantera helped help jumpstart. And now we're starting to see that pull back a little bit, right? A lot of the, A lot of the buying pressure that's come from the digital asset Treasuries has, has dissipated. And to, to a small extent it's turned into like a minor amount of selling. Not at any amount of selling that impacts the market, but impacts sentiment. And then we've seen that a lot of the, you know, some of the, the macro conditions have started to get choppy again, whether that's people worried about the Fed pulling back on on rate cuts and not being a little bit more hawkish, whether that's the government shutdown, potentially lowering spending and a lot of consumer data points showing that consumers are feeling a little stretched. And so we're just in a weird point where there's a lot of concern about the economy. The AI boom is starting to show some signs of cracking and so overall risk assets are pulling back. At the same time in crypto, the digital asset treasures are pulling back. And so that's where we're getting this little bit of a sentiment pullback right now. As I look forward, I really try to keep a few frameworks in mind. One is like what's my long term view, what's my medium term view? It's my short term view. I'd say on a long term basis I'm incredibly bullish for all the reasons we just talked about. On a medium time frame, there's so many things to look forward to like market structure, legislation that's likely to come out in the next few months, the continued launch of new ETFs and all the marketing that's going to help drive that and just all this innovation that's going to come out of, that's coming, going to come out and all the interaction with Defi that that's already happening on stable coins and tokenization and so all that's going to continue to push the for the space forward on a medium term basis, on a shorter time frame. You know, we don't really operate on a short time frame. We view ourselves as long term investors. But I would say that all signs point to on a very, very local basis. Exactly what Brendan pointed out, which is that fear and greed index at an all time low, you know, RSI at oversold. It just feels like here we're set up probably for a technical bounce. I don't know how long a bounce that is. I don't know if that means we pull back again in a few weeks from now. But certainly if I were someone who is trying to allocate capital, it feels like now is a great time to be putting some of that capital work over the next month or two. Because on a medium and long term basis, man, there's so many good things going on.
C
Yeah, I think it's hard to look at the fundamentals and not be excited about the future. You said regulatory changes, you said new ETFs, you said just everything else that is going on and when you look Back at this. I think the important thing to understand is that there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with crypto. There wasn't a corruption, there wasn't a hack, it wasn't like blockchain failed us. And what we thought we had last month and what we saw was the largest liquidation event ever, ever. And that happened. And that was basically entirely due to a centralized party's issue and how they handled their exchanges and their services and their deleveraging systems and all of that. And you know, now people are kind of looking back to what you kind of just referenced and we are at an area where you would imagine some sort of bounce happens, right? You know, maybe it's today, maybe it's next week, you know, but we're saying as we zoom out again, I think it's, it's hard to be bearish about the long term, but that kind of begs the question, like if we do get a bounce, is it going to be a moment where the bottom's in or is it going to be a dead cat bounce followed by more continuation to the downside? And it seems like there's kind of two parties here. There are the people who really believe that there's a lot of long term value and then there's the other side that's saying, but wait, we're kind of in that four year cycle. We just had that large liquidation event. We saw what happened last time during some of these large liquidation events and it made us go into a bear market for, you know, a year, a year plus. And we saw kind of over a year of selling. And that's where we went from, you know, 2021 to almost 2023 with this decline. And I see people trying to argue that again now personally, and I want to loop you in on this, but do we need a one year plus bear market to recover and do we have to kind of follow that, having that having structure like we have seen in the past?
D
I have a few thoughts there. One is that I don't believe the four year cycle is like a real thing. I think it probably used to be in 2012 and 2016, but just over time the amount of supply reduction from Bitcoin really doesn't matter relative to everything else that's going on in the market. And the reality is if you go, and this is because I'm more of a student of the traditional markets and not crypto for a very long time, but I just, I. When I first entered the industry and everyone talked about the four year cycle, I just thought, huh, that's funny. Like, I know that the traditional markets have had a four year cycle recently but like, and it just so happens that and it's coincident with the bitcoin having for you know, for some strange reason. But like truly every time that there's been a having there's been a major macroeconomic event that's driven that, right? 2012 we had, we had the, we had eurozone debt crisis, 2016 we had Brexit 2020, we had Covid 2020. And it's every election year that is true.
B
It's every elect like U.S. election year.
D
Right, right, that's true too. Right. And so like, I don't know if it's like maybe there is some like some astrological power to this that for some reason like our, the human mythology is such that our life follows four year patterns. But you know, barring that like weird, seemingly like too coincidental a fact pattern, like I think the reality is it just happens to follow the broader macro cycle. And like if macro happens to follow a four year cycle forever, like first of all that'd be crazy. But like, who knows, maybe that's possible. But like if that is the case then I expect crypto too as well. But if it doesn't like it does feel like we're in a period where things look relatively healthy on an underlying macro basis. And so it doesn't seem like, you know, crypto for any reason needs to diverge from that. And so I don't think we need to go through this, you know, massive one year bear cycle or something. Some people would argue like if you look at everything excluding bitcoin, we've been, we've been in a bear market all year for everything X Bitcoin, right? Other assets have not performed very well. And so if you really want to make that argument, arguably things haven't been, that haven't been hunky dory for some time and we're already going through the digestion of that and maybe the October 10th event was the, you know, the final punctuation.
C
And it's funny that you say that because we just had Matt Hogan from bitwise on and he said the same thing. In fact, we've had a couple of guests now that have said this. They said, guys, I don't think, I don't think it's a matter of us going into a bear market. It's likely been the fact that we've been in a bear market and that this isn't anything new for kind of all the reasons that you just said and that we're probably a lot closer to the back half of this. And I think myself and Bryce and again a lot of the guests that we've had on here recently, we would also agree with the, the idea behind the four year having and that it's probably not as influential as it used to be. And I don't think that it holds as much weight and significance as a lot of people think that it does. At least not anymore. Especially Bryce. I mean you've pulled up this statistic before and when you look at the amount of bitcoin being bought up by like treasuries and DATs and how much being is being mined comparing compared to, to like what the having is, like, it just doesn't really have as much weight as it used to. Right?
B
Yeah, I think there's only like 20 million bitcoin mine, $20 million worth of bitcoin mined every day and like it trades $100 billion a day. And there's you know, all these new cohorts that are entering the space, like sovereign wealth funds. And you know, everybody just, you know, taking, you know, like, like Harvard's endowment, right? Like a percentage or two of their, you know, public, you know, it's like the largest position now in their, in their endowment. I'm not sure what's on the other side of that if it's like hedged with other things, but I thought it was, it was really interesting. But, but let's kind of zoom in here on, on the DAT stuff because the Salana company, I, I believe is something that you played a big part in. So what is the Salana company? And can you give us a high level like what DATs are? Digital asset treasuries are in general, definitely.
D
So if we rewind the clock, you know, the, the OG digital asset treasury was MicroStrategy. Right? MicroStrategy. Michael Saylor decided that he would launch a, he would transition a software company into a bitcoin accumulation vehicle and that he believed the best way to maximize shareholder value over time was to acquire as much bitcoin as he could.
He really wrote the playbook for how you can continue to acquire Bitcoin in a per share accretive way and did and effectively executed basically from 2020 onwards. So it's been coming on five years now.
The second one to really do this with Metaplan in Japan, they realized, wow, that really worked in the U.S. what if you could apply it to the Japanese market? And that also went on to see extraordinary returns. Since they started in 2024. And as an investor I always thought, well, it's kind of weird that MicroStrategy trades at 2 times nav for er, premium to nav for such a long time. But the reality is it has.
As an investor it's important just to look at these market anomalies and try to really understand what's going on. And we came to the conclusion that there's a lot of really interesting.
Financial engineering going on with MicroStrategy that causes this phenomenon to persist. That a lot of the reasons that people thought MicroStrategy would die didn't end up killing it like the launch of the ETFs.
And then we just realized that wow, it'd be really cool to have one of these bitcoin treasury companies but instead launch it with a different asset like Solana. And so.
We ended up making what was then a very non consensus bet to back anchor Invest in the first. At the time we were calling the MicroStrategy copycats because I hadn't invented the word digital asset treasury yet or that yet. But like when we were calling the MicroStrategy copycats, we ended up funding Defi Dev Corp. Which was the first non bitcoin treasury company to be launched in the us. This was back in early April. At the time I thought wow, this is going to be a super non consensus like once in a lifetime thing like this is going to be the only one we ever do. But then lo and behold, the next week Tether Softbank Cantor called me up and say, hey, we actually been thinking about launching a bitcoin competitor to this. I thought, oh well, I can see that makes sense. Like I can see why there could be two bitcoin ones, maybe there could be two bitcoin ones, maybe there could be one or two ETH ones and one or two Solana ones over time. And so we ended up becoming the largest investor in in that, that one as well. It's called 21 capital now led by Jack Mallers. But at the time I also thought, wow, like this is pretty crazy to get two like in a row. I think I thought it'd be two and done. There'd be no more digital assets. But then we say here, seven months later, there's been over 100 of these launched in the U.S. tens of billion dollars of capital raised. And so I'm really humbled and humbled excited that we were part of the origins of kicking this whole thing off with the recognition that Microstalia really was the pioneer of this, but we really added the fire that ultimately jump started this huge boom this year. And so as a result, my team and myself were usually a first call for any guys thinking about launching a digital asset Treasury. And so we've been at the forefront of evaluating how these work when they don't work, the mistakes that have been made. We backed all the largest ones like bitmind with Tom Lee, the ETH digital asset treasury and we just realized that, wow, we've built all this knowledge about what works, what doesn't work. We're really the pioneer in thinking about how to think about DATs overall. I mean we invented the word and.
And that we had created so much success for ETH with bitmine. But our first love is really Solana and Defi Devcourt by the way has done well, but it hasn't reached the incredible scale that something like bitmine has. And so we just thought, it dawned on me that we really should take on the burden of responsibility to launch our own Solana digital asset treasury because we have all this knowledge and expertise and because we really want Solana to succeed, succeed in a similar way. And so that's ultimately why it culminated in us launching Solana company Ticker hsdt because we just think there's a real opportunity to have a scaled high performing Solana digital asset treasury and we think we have the skill set to help do that.
B
I love it and central to this discussion because it really has been one of the most polarizing things I've seen in crypto. We've seen a lot of trash talk, which is normal for crypto but we've seen a lot of people get rich. So is it, there's an element of jealousy, there's an element of man, I wish I thought of that. And so, and you know, you're, you're at the tip of the spear with this. And so I really wanted to get your thoughts on you know, MSCI talking about we're going to not allow which is like, you know, really large index, not like the S and P but kind of like S and P and they're basically, you know, saying and keeping it open for discussion. And I know, you know, you won't be providing legal advice or anything like that. These are just discussion points. But, but I want to get your thoughts on what they're doing because they're what they're alleged, you know, they're alleging that all these digital asset treasury companies are funds and that they're not really operating companies, which is pretty provably false because these they do have, you know, operating companies and stuff. And they're saying, you know, we're, we're opening up for comment. We, we think we should delist all of these DATs from any index that we have. And I, I just kind of want to get your thought on like what's really going on here. And also that dropped on October 10th. You know, JP Morgan was kind of talking about this on October 10th, which was also the day of the big liquidation. Just as a side note.
D
So it is interesting that this index discussion is around. I think if we go to the core of it, index inclusion is not what causes DATs to be successful. And so like whether or not MSCI and S and P and NASDAQ eventually, whether or not they decide to include MicroStrategy and other DATs into their index or not, like it's, it's mildly helpful if they do. But like that's not at all what, what will create success. And so I think there's a lot of like, there's much hullabaloo about nothing.
In this space about whether index inclusion helpful, but like not at all the thesis and not all what we were underwriting when we invested in debts. That said, I think the core of it is that there's a misunderstanding of what these businesses really are. And you know, it took me some time to come around to this too. But when I think about what these are, these actually look a lot like financial services companies or banks, if you will. If you think about what a bank is, a bank is actually a pile of cash, right? They're a pile of dollars. And then they go out and try to generate yield on those dollars. Banks are valued on what's called book value per share or the number of dollars per share that they have on their balance sheet. And they go out and try to grow their book value per share either by a combination of their operating business, which is originating loans, or by participating in financial engineering which is issuing debt, issuing preferreds and all these other things. And so if you're, and you know, high performing banks like a JP Morgan, they trade at two times book value because they earn a high yield or a high return of capital or high growth rate on their book value per share. Whereas less well performing banks, you know, take your random XYZ regional bank, they trade below 1 times book value because they don't grow their book value very fast. If you translate that to a debt, a debt is exactly that, except replace dollars with your token, right? In the case of Solana company, replace it with Solana. Our job is to grow Solana per share. You know, it's not dollars per share, but it's Solana per share. And we can do that through a combination of our operating, operating operations, which are trying to generate yield on our Solana through staking or defi, as well as through financial engineering, which is through issuing a variety of instruments into the market. And, and so from that perspective, actually, these business models have existed for, since the dawn of time. Really, these business models are just banks. They just happen to be crypto, crypto denominated. And so I think there's a little bit of a, of a mindset shift that needs to happen from people who are seeing this for the first time. I myself was the most, was very skeptical about this for a long time until I really, really did the work and dug in. But once I came to that analogy, I was like, wow, these actually, this actually makes a lot of sense now. That's not to say I think there's a lot of, you know, scariness and FUD around DATs, because the reality is a lot of them will be uninteresting outcomes. You know, if you, if you were to invest in a basket of startups or a basket of banks, most of them will be not very interesting investments, right? Most of them, Many of them may even lose money, but a few of them will be really great investments. And, and so I think when people look at that, they look at the vast majority of them, you know, kind of being not super interesting or trading down.
I just put everything in context and realize that for any set of new businesses, for any industry, most of the things are not very interesting. But there are one or two major winners that can go on and compound and be generational, you know, generational returners for your portfolio. And so that's how I think DATs are playing out. And people are right now focusing too much on everything else and not the big winners that might emerge from this.
B
Yeah, no, it's, it's totally right. And yeah, lot, lot of questions kind of still, you know, surrounding, you know, I, I think, you know, all, all these DATs and you know, just in terms of share price, it seemed like they, on the announcement they just shot up because people got really speculative and then share price normalizes, but, you know, the story's still being written. I think like you said, people just need to get their minds around it. And like, if you look back, like, you know, I bring this, you know, example up in the past with like Facebook or Netflix, like back in the early Days people were like, we don't know how to value these things. These are new, you know, equities in a sense that we just, we don't understand attention or clicks and like how that's gonna, you know, turn into advertising. But the, the visionaries did right and like, you know, it just takes people, you know, betting on themselves and going through adversity. And I think that's what the DAP model is right now. It's just the market's trying to come to agreement on how to value them and we, we'll certainly see. And yeah, I'm super optimistic and really, really excited about what you guys are working on. But I want to touch on like you, you've mentioned this theme of like being pretty, pretty optimistic on Solana in particular. And I just kind of wanted you to riff for, for, for a couple minutes on just why you chose Solana as opposed to Ethereum or any of the other L1s that are out there. I do know you said you, you were involved with the bit. Mine immers Ethereum. So I take it you guys aren't like super short Ethereum and bearish on it. But you know, what kind of gave you that, that confidence to, to support Solana so strongly.
D
So a couple things there. One is that we do believe we will live in a multi chain world in the future. I, I feel strongly that there are multiple blockchains that have reached enough scale to have meaningful adoption and network effects, right? There's bitcoin, there's Ethereum, there's Solana, all the Ethereum L2s and the EVM ecosystem. And so I do think that, you know, no matter what, even if there are more chains, at the very least there will be at least a three chain world in the future. And that, you know, for you and me, our everyday consumers, we may not realize that there's multiple chains because our, our user interfaces, all the fintech apps that we use may end up abstracting that all the way. But the reality is under the hood there are different chains for different use cases. And then the second thing I say is if you go back in history and I always try to like bring in the historical context and you think about how blockchains developed. The first blockchain that really took off in a major way was Bitcoin in 2009. Blockchain technology though, or the concept of blockchains has been around for many decades, but the first blockchain that really took off in a digitally native way with scale was Bitcoin. And it really wasn't a response to hey, we would love a non sovereign store of value, some way to transfer value back and forth in a censorship resistant way with instant settlement and low cost. And the reality is that worked out great, right? People started to really love it, it gained a lot of traction. But fast forward a few years to 2013, people thought, well, we really love that Bitcoin thing, but what if instead of just transferring value back and forth, what if we could do more than that? What if we could program more complex transactions? What if we could have all sorts of programs run on blockchain and settle like that? And that's why Ethereum was born. Ethereum was really born in response to we really love that Bitcoin thing, but let's do more.
Now Bitcoin Ethereum succeeded in doing more. And you fast forward a few years as more app developers actually started building on Ethereum, Ethereum started to get, you know, Ethereum itself also isn't the newest technology and started getting slow and started getting congested. It has this congestion pricing mechanism. And so all of a sudden people thought, well we really love that Ethereum thing and we'll continue building on it, but what if we could do that except better, right? And really Solana and a generation of L1s was launched in response to that in 2020, which was like we really love that Ethereum thing, but let's do it better. And so when I think about what Solana is today, like Solana was the one that ultimately broke out and really scaled from that generation of high performance L1. And so today they're only really, those three chains have massively scaled and. And if I were to think about them each in isolation and why Solana could be a relative winner amongst them, it's that I always go back to basic principles and I try to use a lot of case studies from my prior life as an investor. Just this pattern recognition I've built over time. And one of the biggest stocks of my early career was Amazon. Amazon did something really simple which is disrupted retail and it did it by following this very basic thing. Jeff Bezos used to always say that there's this holy trifecta of consumer wants that will never change. They are that consumers will want cheaper, they want faster and they'll want more accessibility no matter what. You can count on those three things always being true. And it was really on the back of keeping that simple vision that caused Amazon to gain so much share and be a massive winner in retail. And when I think about what Solana is like, wow, that's exactly the vision. It's faster, it's, you know, it settles, it's 400 milliseconds per block, it settles transactions and it has finality in under a second. You know, it's, it's cheaper, it's, it costs less than a fraction of a penny per transaction versus, you know, many dollars in traditional, traditional finance Rails or, you know, or many dollars in the Ethereum world. And then it's more accessible certainly than our traditional finance Rails because it's, anyone in the world with a smartphone and an Internet connection can access Solana and have a Solana wallet. You can't say that about a bank account. And for all those reasons like, wow, Solana is faster, cheaper, more accessible. And that's why the technology can work and can scale. Now there's a lot of technologies that are really great but don't succeed. And so the question becomes, how's that actually playing out in the fundamentals? And when we look at the fundamentals, Solana has been amazing over the last few years. If you look at total growth in crypto transactions, if you look at total growth in crypto developers, in the number of applications being built, Solana has been the largest share gainer across all of those for any fundamental metric that matters. And ultimately that's translating to real profitability, right? Solana as a chain generated over $2 billion of annualized free cash flow in the first half of this year. I don't think people realize that all this incredible growth, market share gains and fundamental activity on Solana is translating into real hard cash. And, and that's really important. Like, if you're a fundamental investor that's trying to find high quality businesses, it's like you want to find that product market fit, you want to find real, real profitability. And that's what Solana is proving out. And so that's why we're just so excited to be invested in Solana. Yes, we still love Bitcoin. Yes, we still love Etherium. But like you look at bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin's 1500x since we first launched our Bitcoin fund. It's like, as much as we love Bitcoin, it's not going to 1500x again. I mean, never say never, but something crazy would have to have happened to our world for that to happen. But Solana is still early in its journey. And so we think Solana has massive, massive upside ahead of it. And that's why we're so excited.
F
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B
Yeah, no, hey, that's, that's some alpha. And yeah, full disclosure, you know, I've got, you know, exposure to, to all these assets that we're talking about. And you know, Matt Hogan also did mention he, he's like Solana is in the sweet spot for bitwise as well. He said, because it's, I think he said 1 25th the size market cap of bitcoin. But the amount of flows that it's taking into its ETFs are like, you know, if you scale it like are actually greater proportional to what bitcoin's taken into the ETFs relative to its market cap size. So yeah, I think there's a really bright future for, for Solana as well. But I wanted to round out our DAT discussion here with just a couple questions on staking and lending and, and just how do you kind of like think about these different mechanisms to generate yield? Are you doing them like everything everywhere all at once? Do you guys, you know, how do you select between hey, we're going to lend here, I mean, because again, it does sound a little bit like, you know, a hedge fund. And I know you used to run hedge funds, but how do you think about yield generating opportunities?
D
So I think this is where Solana company can really stand out because Pantera, where I, you know, I'm a general partner and also a director at Solana Co. But Pantera is the asset manager for Solana Co. And we're applying everything that we've learned about Solana, all the relationships, all the research we have, all the DEFI activity we currently participate in, we're using those to really help accelerate what Solana Co. Is doing. And we run an actively managed hedge fund strategy in liquid tokens and we want that knowledge to be used. And so Solana Company though is going to be slightly different in that it's very focused. If the goal is to maximize value per share for US Investors, we really care about Solana company really cares about doing things in a, in a risk adjust, in a safe, risk adjusted way to maximize yield. And so, you know, across defi that means we're going to be very sensitive to smart contract risk, to underwriting risk, to credit risk, to potential, you know, KYC AML considerations that a US Company would have. And we're taking all those to account. But assuming that we get comfortable with all those risk factors, we do want to be aggressive about maximizing yield and finding really interesting opportunities. I think there's a lot in Solana Defi. When you look at protocols like Kamino, like Drift, like Jupiter, there's a lot of interesting ways to deploy capital and generate high double digit rates of return. That's well above what you can get with just pure staking. And so we're going to take it a step at a time, but we're really interested in exploring all those as long as we can satisfy all those risk conditions.
B
Awesome. And then the last question around dats is around the net asset value multiple the M nav, the premium to nav, they've got it set a couple ways. What is the right premium to nav that some of these DATs should, you know, logically command? I've seen some as high as 20x and I've seen some that have now gone down to well below one.
What are kind of the factors driving that and where does your sort of bounds lay?
D
So the most important thing about investing in any asset class is really think about.
What the projected growth is going to look like for this asset. And so when you think about what a DAT is, its goal is to maximize tokens per share. And so if you believe a DAT can grow its tokens per share over time, then it probably deserves to trade at a premium. Because if I'm going to have, if I buy, you know, a dad today that owns one Solana per share, but I think a few years from now it's going to own 2 Solana per share, I'm probably going to pay more than one for that.
The and so that's why things in theory should trade can trade above 1 times nav. When you think about it though, a lot of these debts, they are businesses and so they have costs too. And so the starting point is really if you have, if you just go buy an ETF, you'll always have 1 times NAV -25 basis point expense ratio that you're paying bitwise or Fidelity or whoever else every year. And so it's 1 minus 25 basis points a year. If you look at a debt, they're much higher expenses because it's a public company. And so it's one, your starting point is probably closer to something like 0.9. That's like the status quo. If a debt forever fails to generate any growth, then it probably only deserves to trade at 0.9 or something below that. And many DATs candidly will not be successful in growing their tokens per share. And that's why they should trade at a minor discount. Now there are a lot of DATs that will perform very well and those that are, are the guys that know how to use the capital markets effectively. They know how to generate yield effectively. And you know, if you're, if you're doing something like staking, staking in Solana right now is around a 7% annualized yield. And so you're willing to pay something for 7% annualized yield. Right. You know your tokens for sure to grow at least that much every year. And you know, people, different people will put different multiples on it. But let's say that 0.9 with staking gets you to something like 1.1 or 1.2. And then if someone with really strong financial year and capability, the ability to tap capital markets in a special way or perhaps to do accretive M and A can grow your tokens per share even faster than that. Maybe you can justify something closer to 1 1/2 or 2x or even 2x plus. I think when we get to something like 10x 5x 10x we're starting to get like a little crazy. And that's mean speculative type Action. And we get like below 0.8, it's starting to look like probably too cheap because there's going to be consolidation and there's always the ability for management teams to do buybacks and return capital. And so it feels like the range to me is something in that like point A to 2X plus range is where most of these should trade over time with. With candidly the very majority of them trading right around Nav, or maybe a little above Nav, a little below Nav, but one or two really all star winners trading well above that.
C
Yeah, yeah. It's been interesting because there has been a lot of thought about like, how do we price these things properly? They blew up onto the scene and they just had this fantastic run and then they were overpriced and then now it kind of feels like they're underpriced. And I think that they're just going through like, that's in general, I think are just going through a maturity process of people getting used to these things. And you're right, it's balancing out. And I think that that's all like a pretty reasonable area for it.
B
And then in typical crypto fashion, they're just speed running market movements, you know, just like living a full crash cycle, like in a month's time.
C
Yeah.
B
Which is always.
C
Yeah, it's always fascinating and people always forget that. But crypto does move at like a thousand miles hour and the stuff that would take like years or a decade in the like normal markets or what it took the normal markets to go through in the past. Crypto, you're right, Bryce just speed runs it. And we see these, these really, really quick, and I think these quick cycles create volatility, but transitioning us to kind of just the, the current state of the market. I mean, there's so many different things going on. If you look at like the macro backdrop, you have Fed policy interest rates, inflation liquidity cycles, you have all of these things that are shaping the, the demand for a lot of these cryptos that we look at, like especially the large caps. So my, my question for you is like, how do you think all of these things that I mentioned, like Fed policy, interest rates, inflation, liquidity cycles, how do you think that that's shaping demand for assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum or even Solana?
D
I do think that the broader macro conditions are really constructive. Right. Right now I think in the near term we're seeing a lot of choppiness because there's a lot of concern around whether inflation's still running hot, whether unemployment is coming up a little too fast, and whether the Fed is going to react in the correct way to help manage that. But as I think about going forward, it's like the Fed is on its way to continue to cut rates. Whether or not it happens in December, it'll certainly happen sometime next year. And it probably cut rates multiple times. That's good for risk asset prices, which Bitcoin, Solana and ETH are, as we think about liquidity, conditions are getting a lot better. You know, the. The reality is the government shutdown really hindered liquidity a lot, but we're going to see that come back. And for instance, it's not just the U.S. which is engaged, going to engage in stimulus, but countries all around the world, China, Europe, Japan, Korea, all these places are engaging in stimulus measures. And so global liquidity is really increasing. And then so global liquidity is increasing, rates are coming down. And I do think the underlying economy is so strong because of all the innovation that's happening in blockchain, in AI, that's all going to drive a major productivity boom. And so I think, broadly speaking, these are all really positive things that are going on for our asset class.
C
Well, speaking of AI, I mean, you've had your eye on the AI sector as well, right, Cosmo?
D
Yeah, it's.
C
It's an interesting one because we do hear a lot about it and we always have guests come on, and we love to get different opinions on it. But what do you think about the two working together? Like, what could the two sectors of blockchain, tech and crypto, and then AI on the other end? What could seeing those two sectors work together look like? And what could that unlock?
D
Well, I think it really starts with the entrepreneurs. And when you think about it, blockchain and AI are both just branches of math, right? And when you blockchain is cryptography, AI used to be called statistics. And so, like, all these things are just as branches of math. And I studied math in college. A lot of my classes were much smaller and much smarter, ended up studying math in their PhD programs. And everyone in this space has experience in both cryptography and in statistics. And so in our group of entrepreneurs at Pantera, we. We also see a lot of people with AI experience that publish AI papers. And if you look in the AI world, a lot of them do have cryptography experience. And so there's already this really natural blending of talent that exists at that intersection. And then when you think about what they are philosophically, AI is all about creating infinite Infinite, infinite content, infinite abundance, right? There's going to be infinite AI generated content, there's going to be infinite AI identities and AI agents out there. Whereas blockchain is all about creating, creating authenticity or verifying authenticity. And so they're very yin and yang and how they fit together and how they can help. And so we actually spend a lot of time at this intersection because we do believe the two fastest growing sectors of our economy are blockchain and AI. And so we're spending a lot of time at that intersection too. And it's not that blockchain is going to solve everything for AI or anything, but it is very useful in a lot of ways, whether that's in helping coordinate resource aggregation, like all these Deepin protocols that are aggregating data or computer or energy to power AI models. Whether it's this concept of open source and open Systems.
Stuff like BitTensor or our investment in OpenMind, which are enable open source development for AI or if it's around identity, right. We're invested in WorldCoin, which is also founded by Sam Altman, the same Sam Altman that founded OpenAI, because he really sees blockchain as a necessary tool for identity authentication in a world that's dominated by AI. And so those three areas we think are really worth exploring. And in addition to, on the flip side, AI agents are obviously going to use blockchain rails for all their activity because it's just a better solution and they don't have the pre existing biases that we do. And so we're really excited about the intersection. We're spending a lot of time there.
C
And we've talked to a couple of the agent guys and we've had them on the podcast and talking about it. And the things are like AI agents, they're not humans. You can't go get them a bank at like, you know, you can't just go get them a bank with anyone.
D
Right?
C
Because they're not human beings. They don't have a Social Security number, you can't go set them up with a bank account. So what do you do? You set them up with the crypto wallet and all of a sudden they're able to actually try like transact and do things and it gives them a lot more freedom. And the, the other part of this that I find ironic is that there's two areas where everyone's saying it's a bubble, we could be at the top right now. And it's AI and crypto.
D
Right.
C
The two areas that you said are the fastest growing in the US economy. It's where all the attention is, is towards and for all these different reasons. You know, maybe it's AI, maybe it's chatbots, maybe it's defense and on crypto, maybe it's stable coins, maybe it's tokenization, maybe it's payment solutions, maybe it's all these other things. And they both have so many different ways to succeed and I think ways that they will succeed. Yet people are still looking at both of these AI and crypto and saying they're a bubble. We could be at the top. It's overextended. How are we going to actually make money off these things? And that's the most common thing that I see. How are we going to capitalize off of this from a monetary standpoint? And so are the companies that are, that are investing in these. And it's funny because Bryce, like you said earlier, people said the same thing about like the Internet and social media and these different platforms and people are like, how are they actually going to capitalize off of all of this and all of their users? And it's cool that they have this, but how do they make money? Fast forward to 2025. I mean they are the most valuable companies on the earth and it's like, how could they not make money at this point? You look at it and they've capitalized on it a gazillion different ways and they're worth trillions of dollars. And it's funny what's happened in like seriously less than, less than two decades. They have gone from how are these things ever going to be possible, they're a bubble. To now being these like trillion dollar valuation companies that are just the behemoths of the world.
B
Just a tale as old as time, it seems like. And you know people are going to call for bubbles in all the fast growing things because of how much exciting things that are going on. But Cosmo, I know we're at the top of the hour and that's all the time of yours that we have. So before we let you go, we just want to thank you, the inventor of the dat, Cosmo Zhang, who's the general partner, one of the general partners at Pantera Capital. Where could people kind of follow along with your story, your journey and any resources you want to share? We'll have those below in the show notes.
D
Yeah, awesome. You guys can find me on Twitter at cosmojang. And then, and you know, you should, we encourage everyone to follow what we're doing at Pantera. You can go to our website, Pantera Capital.com subscribe to our monthly Blockchain Letter where we talk about all the things that we're seeing and we're excited about.
B
Incredible. Thank you so much for joining us today and for your generous time and everybody at home watching. Thank you for your support and your interest. Come back next week, same time, same place. We'll have some more great guests for you. Take care.
H
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Title: The Inventor of the DAT: What is Next for Digital Asset Treasuries w/ Cosmo Jiang of Pantera Capital
Date: December 9, 2025
Host(s): Bryce Paul & Brendan Viehman
Guest: Cosmo Jiang, General Partner at Pantera Capital, "inventor" of the DAT (Digital Asset Treasury)
In this insightful episode, Bryce and Brendan host Cosmo Jiang, General Partner at Pantera Capital and self-declared inventor of the "Digital Asset Treasury" (DAT). The discussion dives deep into the evolution, opportunities, controversies, and future of DATs and digital asset investment strategies, especially touching on Pantera's pioneering role. The trio also unpacks broader crypto market cycles, the rise of Solana, AI's intersection with blockchain, macro-global liquidity, and how retail investors can navigate today’s volatile landscape.
(01:36, 02:08, 13:48, 15:02, 18:15)
(04:02, 06:13, 12:42, 13:22)
(13:22, 26:45, 27:09, 28:23, 30:30, 32:30, 35:38)
(47:20, 47:46, 48:26, 50:35)
(37:33, 39:19, 43:03)
(45:43, 47:20)
(52:14)
(54:04–56:54)
Volatility Philosophy:
On DATs’ Rapid Growth:
Bank Analogy for DATs:
Valuation Guidance:
On Solana’s Strength:
On Bubbles and Opportunity:
AI x Blockchain: