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 alternatively-weighted indexes to ETFs, and now to tokenized real world assets on eight public chains. With over $700M in AUM growing 6x year over year, their tokenized money market fund WTGXX is already being used for corporate treasury sweeps, cross-border payroll, and stablecoin reserve management.

Key Topics:

• The ETF analogy: tokenization is to ETFs what ETFs were to mutual funds, democratizing access from brokerage accounts to smartphones, and WisdomTree has been building for this moment for years
• Why public chains over permissioned chains: permissioning belongs at the token level, not the chain level, and the real users are already on public chains
• WTGXX in practice: $700M AUM growing 6x year over year, used for corporate treasury sweeps via StableC, cross-border vendor payments, and payroll via Toku and Plume with block-by-block yield accrual
• The product roadmap: from money markets and treasuries to equity betas, derivatives, and option income strategies, and why WisdomTree rebalanced 3,000 model portfolios with JP Morgan and Apollo using smart contracts
• Rookie mistake and pleasant surprise: trust matters more in crypto than anyone expects, and Europe led the US on crypto ETPs by five years

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 pension funds are considering Bitcoin as a portfolio diversification asset. And a new STO legislation passed in January is expected to become a major bridge between crypto and traditional finance. The institutional wave is coming.

Key Topics:

- Why the West misunderstands Korea: trading volumes overwhelm the narrative, but Korea is actually the world's most aggressive early adopter of new technology, from 5G and open banking to ChatGPT and Claude Code

- Agentic commerce in Korea: Kakao and Toss are already building payment rails for the agent era, KakaoPay joined X402, and pay-as-you-go AI payments are on the verge of exploding the same way subscriptions did

- The Terra shadow and the builder economy: Terra's collapse devastated Korea's crypto builder culture, but institutional adoption from firms like Mirae 
Asset is slowly rebuilding credibility and drawing developers back in

- Four Pillars' APAC expansion: from Korea to Japan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia via the Asia Stablecoin Alliance, and why blockchain is the distribution rail that lets Korean fintech companies like Toss finally compete globally

00:00 Pantera Invests in Four Pillars from Seoul
01:00 Why the West Misreads Korea
04:30 AI Adoption and Agentic Commerce in Korea 
8:30 Korean Crypto Regulation Before and After
12:10 STO Legislation and the Institutional Wave 
16:20 Top Crypto Verticals in the Korean Market 
32:00 What Western Companies Should Know Before Coming to Korea 
36:40 The Terra Collapse and the Builder Economy 

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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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 layer built to answer that question at scale, privately, and without collecting your data.

Key Topics:

- Why proof of human is the foundational layer the agentic internet needs: from public discourse manipulation and catfishing to deepfake wire fraud, the cost of not knowing who is human is rising fast

- World ID as a credential stack: Orb verification as the gold standard, Selfie Check as the entry point, and school, work, and national IDs layered on top, all privacy-preserving and held on your own device

- Agent delegation and human continuity: how World ID lets your agent book flights, make purchases, and act on your behalf while keeping a verified human accountable for every action via Agent Kit

- Why blocking all bots is the wrong answer: how World ID enables good agents to access platforms frictionlessly while bad actors are penalized, and why this unlocks the next wave of consumer agentic use cases

- World ID vs Face ID: why uniqueness is the missing piece, how one person with 1,000 phones can fool Face ID but not World ID, and why anonymous verification protects users and partners alike

01:00 Tiago Sada on Proof of Human in the Agent Age
05:40 Scaling to 40 Million Verified Humans
07:07 What Tiago Is Most Excited About Next
08:50 Andy Wang on World as the Identity Layer
10:00 Good Bots vs Bad Bots: Why Blocking All Traffic Is Wrong
13:02 Restaurant Reservations, Scalpers, and Proof of Human
17:00 Tawanda Mahere on What Partners Are Looking For
22:08 The Consumer Value of World ID
23:15 Agent Kit and Human-in-the-Loop Commerce
25:21 World ID vs Face ID: Why Uniqueness Changes Everything
29:00 Orb On Demand and How to Get Verified Today


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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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 challenge. Tinder's answer is World ID, already live in Japan and now expanding to the US.

Key Topics:

• Tinder's World ID integration: how a pilot in Japan cut age verification from 30 minutes to under 2 minutes, and seconds for already-verified users
• No more catfishing: how World ID moves toward ensuring the person behind a profile matches their photos
• Orders of magnitude improvement: why the 30-minute to 2-minute reduction was far beyond what the team expected
• Expanding to 190 countries: Tinder announcing the US rollout and what global scale looks like for World ID
• Proof of human plus uniqueness: why Tinder needs to know not just that you are human, but that you only have one account
• The line Tinder will not cross: AI doing everything for a user and replacing the human connection entirely
• The long-term vision: World building out capabilities so fewer tools are needed to check more boxes

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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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 the agentic economy cannot be unlocked.

Key Topics:

• The agentic landscape today: real scaled applications and agentic experiences are being built, but identity and security are foundational blockers
• Binding agents to humans: why trust is lost the moment you cannot verify that an agent is working on behalf of a real, verified individual
• The proliferation of agents: there are now more agents than humans, and the 
• World ID as the trust credential: how a verified human identity can be transacted and bound to an agent so downstream service providers can trust who is calling their APIs
• Why trust unlocks commerce: when you can trust, new product experiences and B2B commerce models become possible that simply cannot exist without it
• Auth0 for AI agents: a suite of tools to help developers manage the full agent life cycle
• The economic value of verified identity: as agents take over more aspects of labor, knowing a human is behind them becomes increasingly valuable

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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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 a bot, developers can now build software that is human-only by default and then decide what access to grant to agents operating on a human's behalf.

Key Topics:

• Vercel as agentic infrastructure: three parts, deploy software with agents, build and run agents, and a self-improving platform that sends pull requests to fix its own errors
• From framework-defined infrastructure to agentic infrastructure: the evolution of Vercel's core product philosophy
• Why proof of human is the perfect poster child for Workflows: a multi-step async process that becomes one line of code
• CAPTCHAs are archaic: why the entire model of bot detection is broken and needs to be inverted
• Human-only by default: the new model where software starts as human-only and then grants access to agents that have a verified human backing them
• Trust scores and Uber-style ratings for agents: how proof of human enables differentiated experiences for humans versus bots
• Getting started: one NPM package, one line of code, and the Workflow SDK makes World ID integration dead simpleConcert tickets, sneaker drops, and high-cost actions: the real-world use cases where human verification is non-negotiable

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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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 valuable primitives on the internet. World is building the cryptographically secure, verifiable proof of human layer to make that possible.

Key Topics:

- Why Sam Altman believes World is especially urgent now: AI is advancing faster than expected and proof of human has never been more necessary

- AI as technology of abundance, World as technology of scarcity: why the two are complementary not competitive

- Pantera's investment thesis: blockchain as the right infrastructure for cryptographically secure, sybil-resistant proof of human

- Agents need to move money: why agentic payments are one of the things Sam is most personally excited about

- Proof of human as a substrate for layered credentials: driver's licenses, education, employment, all appended to a verified human identity

- Advertising as the first massive use case: a half trillion dollar industry that will pay a significant premium for verified human impressions

- Dating apps, government services, and enterprise partnerships: Tinder, DocuSign, Zoom, Okta, and Versa all announcing how they will work with World ID

- Human-directed agents: why proof of human accelerates agentic commerce rather than blocking it

- A potential $50 billion free cash flow protocol if verified humanness generates even $5 to $10 per person per year

01:27 Sam Altman Keynote at World’s Lift-Off Event
02:12 Why World Was Built
03:48 Blockchain x AI
04:08 World ID Use Cases
04:47 World's Founding Vision
05:10 World ID Trajectory
05:50 Why Pantera Invested in World
06:45 Sam Altman Saw This Coming
07:10 Proof of Human at Scale
10:12 The Value of Digital Identity
11:11 Agents Need a Human in the Loop
11:42 Scaling to Billions of Users
12:53 Enterprise Partnerships

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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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:

• Stablecoin growth in 2025: 40% supply expansion, 90% growth in adjusted transaction volume
• Stablecoin-linked cards: why wallets need card credentials to reach 150 million merchants on day one
• Vibe coders as the most exciting customer segment on the planet and why headless merchants serve them best
• The three generations of small business: brick and mortar, e-commerce, and the headless merchant endpoint you can build in an hour from bed
• One human companies: why the barrier to starting a business has never been lower
• Killing the API key: why wallet-based identity over X402 and MPP is a 10x better developer experience
• Visa CLI: how Visa built a card-based agent payment tool for vibe coders, starting by solving their own problems
• Why the value of software is trending to zero and trust plus distribution is the only remaining moat

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 stablecoins and real-time market-making, moving money across borders in single-digit minutes, 24/7.

Key Topics:
- Why cross-border FX is broken: opaque spreads, pre-funding requirements, and a stack built to keep money, not move it

- How OpenFX works: stablecoins replace SWIFT, real-time market-making on both sides, settlement in under 60 minutes

- $4 trillion trapped in transit at any given moment and how eliminating pre-funding unlocks it

- From zero to $40B+ annualized TPV in 18 months: the three factors behind OpenFX's growth

- 99.99% automation: three trade ops staff processing nearly $50B in volume

- Compressing FX spreads by 90-95% in every market OpenFX enters, including UAE from 50bps to single digits

- The postbox to SMS analogy: why spot FX could grow from $2 trillion to $200 trillion a day

- Agentic payments: why the timeline just collapsed from 7-10 years to 24-36 months

- Moats in the AI era: why licensing, compliance, distribution, and brand only matter together

- Lessons from co-founding FalconX: compliance first, culture by design, and why fiat still rules cross-border

- Culture at OpenFX: respect, velocity, and full ownership as non-negotiables

- Founder advice from a five-time founder: how you get there matters as much as where you are going


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. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

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 who have never had access via the crypto wallets and exchanges they already use.

Key Topics:

- Franklin Templeton's 5-year journey: launching a tokenized money market fund in 2021 and proving blockchain rails to the SEC

- Ondo's model: tokenizing treasuries, stocks, and ETFs as permissionless wrappers like stablecoins, but for equities

- Global access: hundreds of millions of offshore investors can now hold tokenized US assets in the same wallets they use for crypto

-24/7 markets: why real-time settlement, intraday collateral, and always-on rails change everything

-AI agents and tokenization: why machine-to-machine transactions at scale require blockchain rails and why this is the bridge for institutional crypto allocation

-Smart wrappers vs. dumb wrappers: programming stops, rewards, and collateral directly into the asset itself

-Back office to front office: 100% of Franklin Templeton's digital asset AUM comes from net new crypto-native customers

-The $700M Ondo Global Markets platform: 70% market share, 5% week-over-week growth, and a whale who bought $50M of Google stock

-What's next: perpetual swaps on equities, on-chain portfolio construction, Franklin Crypto multi-manager platform

-Rookie mistakes: smart contract edge cases, lost private keys, and the horror of checking lifetime gas fees when ETH is at all-time highs