Pantera Capital

The newest buyers of US stocks will be outside the US and aren't even humans. I had a blast chatting about this + more with Johann Kerbrat (Head of Crypto at Robinhood) and Nikil Viswanathan (CEO of Alchemy). We covered so much, from Robinhood Chain's launch success to AI agents sending flowers to Nikil's girlfriend to buying stocks for grandma on a Saturday. In case you missed it: Robinhood Chain now has 190 tokenized US stocks & ETFs. Within 2 weeks of launch, they became the top chain running on Alchemy and powering the equivalent of 25% of Google's search volume in API calls. As I wrote about in my Great Onchain Migration essay, the gravitational pull of onchain assets will be swift & violent and that's playing out now through Robinhood Chain and Stock Tokens. The agents are showing up just as fast. In my piece on 80 Billion Customers, I threw out a question for businesses: can agents discover, purchase, and use your product without a human in the loop? Well, Alchemy deleted CAPTCHAs from their signup process, so agents could pay for their product themselves. They grew 20% in two weeks. Meanwhile, Robinhood's agentic trading saw about 100K accounts in roughly a month. Wall Street has talked about "global capital markets" for decades. In practice it's never existed. Now we're finally seeing the first true layer of global capital markets, built for 8 billion people and 80 billion agents. Here's my conversation with Nikil and Johann: https://lnkd.in/gcNrWijU

Johann Kerbrat (Robinhood) and Nikil Viswanathan (Alchemy) join our Stateful podcast, hosted by our General Partner Franklin Bi. In this episode, they discuss how tokenized assets, stablecoins, and agentic commerce are converging on Robinhood Chain: • Robinhood Chain is two months old and already the number one most used chain on Alchemy. It accounts for 40% of all new developers and 78% of new app traffic. • Why Robinhood built its own chain: low latency, low cost, high throughput, L2 interoperability, and deep integration across 27 million funded accounts. • 190 tokenized US stocks and ETFs with $170M in TVL, which is still a small fraction of what it should be. Most of the world cannot access US equities. • The 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 produced things nobody planned for: memecoin and stock token pairs, hooks into stock tokens, and lending through Morpho via Robin Earn. • Alchemy made its entire product autonomously accessible to agents. No CAPTCHAs, no human touchpoints. The business grew 20% in two weeks. • Agentic cards and verifiable intent let you give an agent real spending power with precise controls on amount, merchant, and purpose, paired with a crypto wallet. • Robinhood's agentic trading launch saw roughly 100,000 accounts created in about a month, with an MCP spanning stocks, options, and crypto. • The SEC innovation exemption is a good start but only runs five years. Institutions need a longer roadmap than that to commit. • Developer activity on Alchemy is roughly 37x the 2021 peak and has more than doubled in the last 13 months, a leading indicator for usage and adoption.

Crypto Regulation Update! SEC & CFTC Provide Guidance as Clarity Act Vote Failed! Katrina Paglia, Chief Legal Officer at Pantera Capital, joined me to discuss what happens next after the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate and how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and CFTC could move crypto regulation forward through rulemaking. https://lnkd.in/gnUVGxAb #crypto #clarityact #sec

The CLARITY Act did not advance in the Senate. Prediction markets now put 2026 passage in the single digits. But the agencies were never waiting on Congress. Katrina Paglia, Chief Legal Officer at Pantera, joins Stateful, hosted by Mason Nystrom, to break down what happens next: - The ethics provisions killed it, not the bank and exchange yield fight - Reg CA is the real unlock: raise US capital pre-decentralization, then self-certify into commodity status - Disclosure finally built for tokenomics and governance instead of IPO-style filings - Prediction market regulation is the next fight, and it may reach the Supreme Court Watch the full conversation: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gS4iGVVQ Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gNu6vM-7 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/g3DTFdEC