# Crypto AI Convergence and Institutional Shifts

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-03-17

## Transcript

Crypto and AI are probably the two most exciting technologies that have come in the past decade.
And, you know, they have their areas where they don't overlap.
But I do think, you know, as we continue to see AI and crypto proliferate, they're naturally going to intersect.
Bitcoin is finally showing signs of life and the altcoin market is coming up to support it.
Is crypto VC dead though, or is it just growing up?
And has artificial intelligence killed investor interest in crypto for good, or are these technologies going to converge?
And most importantly, when Lambeau.
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that Solana has been dead so many times that it just might live forever.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Tuesday, March 17th.
And today we are joined by Mason Nystrom.
Mason is a junior partner at Pantera Capital, where he focuses on the firm's venture capital and growth investments in blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Mason is absolutely one of the most plugged in people in the world when it comes to crypto investing.
And he's going to give us an inside look into that world.
If that all sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
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And without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road show.
Mason, how are you, sir?
I'm doing well, John.
Thanks for having me.
Excited to chat.
I'm excited too.
I hope I don't stumble as much as I did on that intro.
Uh Mason, I thought a good place to start today's conversation would be with Solana.
Pantera has been longtime bulls on Solana, on Seoul, on the whole ecosystem.
Uh, but Sol's price action has been struggling here a little bit.
It's currently still sitting below $100 as of the time of recording.
What's your take on Solana here?
And how are you thinking about how it's holding up during this bearish period we've seen in the market?
Yeah, I think that if you look at the broader markets, they've all tended to be correlated uh over the past year.
Um, you know, despite like uh, you know, strong fundamentals or increasing fundamentals, uh, with the exception of like notable players like hype, uh, which have kind of acted as like safe haven assets uh over the past couple months.
But I think when we look at the market more broadly, I think what we see is the crypto industry maturing and starting to look at fundamentals and how we value these assets, in particular these L1s and base layer assets, uh, starting to value them more based on the actual usage and you know transaction revenue that they can drive to eventual token holders.
And so uh at Pantera, we've been investors in Solana.
We continue to be incredibly excited about Solana as well as you know a variety of other ecosystems.
Uh, but I think if you look at the data, it just tells a very different story than maybe price action.
And so, for example, like if uh you look at where a lot of on-chain trading activity is happening, Solana has obviously been a dominant force uh for that, both from a retail perspective.
And then if you look at you know more institutional adoption, in February, it was actually the first month in Solana's history that it led all other chains, including Ethereum, in adjusted stable coin transaction volume.
And uh adjusted stable coin transaction volume just means that it removes wash trading, it removes like internal centralized exchange transactions and other inorganic activity.
And so even in a bear market, we continue to see Solana making like really important strides on the metrics that matter.
Gotcha.
Okay, so unpack that for me.
Why does that metric matter so much?
Because I saw some reporting on this too, that uh Solana is now leading Ethereum in stablecoin transaction volume.
What's the message that's sending?
What's the takeaway there?
Like explain to me why that matters so much.
Yeah, I think if you break apart the use cases that blockchains can provide, it's largely around financial applications and payments.
And if you kind of dig deeper into the data, the reason transaction volume is so important is because that indicates actual usage, right?
That's people who are using stable coins for their intended purpose.
And so while Ethereum, for example, has a much higher total TVL of stable coins, Solana is now seeing an increase in velocity of its capital, meaning like per dollar of stable coins it has, it's turning over faster on its network.
And to be clear, like both Ethereum and Solana can build out their own niches.
And so if as you continue to look into the data, uh it continues to tell a different story.
So if you look at the average transaction on Solana versus Ethereum, on Solana, it's about 4200.
On Ethereum, it's an order of magnitude larger of like 45k.
And so what that tells you is, you know, Solana is really gaining this adoption in terms of maybe more day-to-day transactions, more B2B transactions that are like of smaller dollar figures, whereas Ethereum is kind of still maintaining this like more institutional flow.
And I think you see that in, you know, it's like lending in capital markets where Ethereum continues to dominate.
As we look towards the future, I think Solana is putting itself in a great spot because uh it is bringing on more stable coins, more stablecoin supply.
Uh, and that is all laddering up to greater transaction volume.
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Gotcha.
Okay.
So there's a lot that goes into driving that volume higher, and it's a sign of just robust adoption of the chain.
I want to ask about something.
You touched on this a little bit, but Solana sort of made its brand, made its business on retail adoption, retail focused businesses.
But retail has largely been missing from crypto for the last several years.
And institutional adoption, on the other hand, is taking off.
And like you said, uh Ethereum has sort of been leading on institutional adoption, but Solana, it seems like is pivoting to sort of try to compete in that space.
Um talk to me about this dynamic and and how you see this playing out as Solana grows up along with the rest of crypto here.
Yeah, Solana has always had a consumer arc, uh, whether it was, you know, with the initial uh FTX exchange that kind of brought on a lot of uh retail volume who wanted to trade, you know, new net new tokens, whether it was around uh NFTs uh or even around like meme coins, uh, which Pump Fund has kind of catalyzed uh in terms of that market uh adoption.
And there's always some baseline of this volume.
Pump fund still does about like a uh over a million in revenue a day.
And so I hesitate to say like retail is like uh dead.
Uh, there's always some baseline level of activity that is going to be happening.
But I do think we are seeing crypto as an asset class mature.
That's obviously, you know, evident in things like uh ETFs passing.
It's evident with like more institutional players uh, you know, coming on chain, launching stable coins.
Uh, you know, Solana has partnered with with Western Union, uh, Jupyter launched its own stablecoin, FiServe uh has launched its own stable coin.
And we can, and so we'll continue to see this type of institutional and like broader like fintech adoption onto chains like Solana and Ethereum.
And so I think that like whether retail comes back or not uh in the same way that it has in previous cycles is probably less important because institutional flows will will outpace that to a much wider degree.
Gotcha.
Okay.
And I want to just ask one more question around this.
Um, is like Solana's differentiation or its brand or how it goes about distinguishing itself from the rest of the market.
Because you know, Ethereum is this big institutional focused L1.
There's a lot of other uh L1s in the space, you know, like Sui and others and hyperliquid has come in to take a lot of volume trading on on perps and so forth.
And then there's a lot of institutions that are sort of building their own chains.
Talk to me about Solana's uh like you know role in uh in the market here and how it differentiates itself in this like ever growing landscape of competing L1s.
Yeah, I mean, the value proposition of Solana has always been cheaper and faster transactions.
And the Solana Foundation and companies building on top of it have always tried to focus on those types of use cases, whether it's around trading, derivatives, payments.
Uh and I think where you start to see a little divergent today in Ethereum versus Solana is the use cases that require that, you know, faster speed, uh, you know, faster uh transactions, cheaper transactions are moving towards there.
And so like, you know, payments volume has increased significantly on Solana.
Uh, you see a lot of trading happen on Solana today, in particular when it is in regards to like retail uh activity.
Whereas like where Ethereum has continued to dominate uh is on the kind of the capital market side where the lending markets are still the most robust on Ethereum uh where asset issuance uh has tended to still be it quite strong and so it's possible that we'll just see these two chains start to bifurcate as their intended uh you know use cases naturally diverge a bit um so that's one version of the future uh at the end of the day I think um you know both Ethereum and Solana are competing for very large prizes and so you know they can both be successful uh in in the future yeah one of the nice things about this space in this industry is it's such a large addressable market that there's room for a lot of people to succeed I think that's a great point great observation uh and it's nice to hear that Pantera is still bullish on Solana I'm sure our audience will be enthusiastic to hear that um I do want to pivot a little bit more towards Pantera and uh starting the conversation more broadly with crypto venture capital uh because there's been a lot of changes in this space and it's it's showing signs of life again which is good.
One point I've heard you make is that there is uh still a lot of capital going into crypto, but we're seeing it going into fewer and fewer deals.
Uh, what's driving this change and what does this mean for the industry?
What should investors know about that?
Yeah.
So in 2025, we saw a record amount of capital flow into the space, but that was concentrated in uh a much smaller number of deals.
And so what that tells you is that it's naturally going into later stage activity, you know, series being above.
Uh, for example, you know, there's existing uh companies like Colchine and Polymarket that have taken in a ton of capital over the past 18 months.
Um, and so as the market has matured, as we've seen product market fit happen in new categories like prediction markets, as well as in existing categories like stable coins, we've naturally just seen more venture dollars go into the places that have that market pull.
And so if you look at the stablecoin landscape, like that has probably been one of the biggest beneficiaries of uh, you know, venture dollars over the past 12 uh to 24 months.
Uh, you've had a lot of capital move into stablecoin neo banks like the dollar apps, the Felix Pagos, the Redot pays of the world, uh, as well as into stablecoin infrastructure like bridge and B VNK, uh, you know, both of which have been acquired uh by you know Fortune 500, uh or not Fortune 500, but but major uh fintech players.
Gotcha.
Okay, so I want to ask about how Pantera is navigating this because, like you said, we're seeing a lot of capital coming in, but it's going into later stage things, sign that maybe the industry is maturing.
Um, what is Pantera's vision here?
Or are there are like a set of guiding principles that you were all using?
Like, what is the overall strategy Pantera has for being successful in uh investing in crypto these days?
Yeah, you might get a different response based on different people you ask at the firm.
So I can maybe provide like my lens.
Um, and you know, for context, I Pantera is a generalist focused crypto fund, so we'll invest in anything that touches crypto.
We typically invest C through Series B.
I tend to focus more on financial applications uh and stable coins and payments.
And so my kind of view of the world is that you know, given our flexibility to invest in slightly later stage companies, like where that has been really attractive is in companies that were built like two, three years ago.
So like the stablecoin neobanks, a lot of the stable coin payments infrastructure uh that is really starting to see adoption.
And so a lot of our investments in that space have tended to come uh a little later towards like the series A, series B stage, whereas what we're more excited about on like an early stage landscape is you know, net new ideas or where we might see trends that are kind of just burgeoning but uh don't yet necessarily have like product market fit or they're not like consensus investments.
And so, you know, if you what one extrapolation of that and is like of how I think about kind of investing in like remote early stage companies, is we definitely know that stable coins are going to be a tailwind and continue to grow.
And so the question is what does that ripple out into?
Uh, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts that lead towards uh exciting new opportunities of investment?
Uh, for example, today most stable coins are non-USD pegged.
You know, we've been in investors in companies like Circle historically, but there's obviously going to be stable coins that are pegged to other currencies.
Uh, that opens up, you know, a lot of opportunities, uh, both from new stablecoin issuance from new types of structured products, similar to like what Athena is doing, but you can apply that to a variety of other types of industries like insurance, or uh, you know, even like how if you imagine a world in which we have more uh non-USD stable coins or USD stable coins that have varying uh uh aspects of yield that they're giving, will you start to create greater FX opportunity?
And so that you know spurs a whole new uh set of companies uh that can be built on chain.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So I want to kind of like get into some specific examples here to sort of illustrate this for our users.
Um, one thing I wanted to ask you about was that uh, you know, you brought up prediction markets.
Obviously, this has been a hugely exploding use case that's come out of crypto and kind of taken over a lot of things.
Uh an investment you all made recently was in a company called Novig, which is a sports-focused prediction market.
I'm curious your thoughts on this, what opportunity you're seeing here, because I think a lot of people might say the prediction markets space is saturated.
Do we really need another you know, prediction markets platform?
What's the opportunity you see here?
And uh walk me through the thinking on this.
Yeah, absolutely.
If we're honest about where prediction markets have had the most volume, it's been in sports.
So on platforms like Calci, it's you know, sometimes upwards of 90%.
And so uh, you know, while we're bullish on prediction markets that expanding across different types of markets, where we see the landscape today is that there's a unique opportunity uh, you know, to build a dedicated sports focused prediction market that is closer towards like what a true sports uh better would want from a product experience.
And so, you know, you can kind of look at it from two competing lenses.
You can look at it from the existing uh prediction markets, and you can look at it from the traditional sports books.
Prediction markets are like a much better version of a sports book because a sports book is going to take a VIG or a guaranteed rate.
Uh they'll kick off users who are profitable, uh, and you know, otherwise it always ensure that like they're gonna have the you know last uh last win on the platform at the expense of users versus prediction markets kind of flip that model into an exchange model where it's a peer-to-peer exchange where anyone can you know take or place a bet.
Uh and so it's a uh a much more uh ethical model for betters because you know, you're not just like competing against the house.
And so that's how it's better against like one end.
And then if we take the existing prediction markets, you know, if you see that 90% or you know, the vast majority of volume is dedicated to one type of application, well, that kind of indicates that you should build a verticalized experience for that market.
And so, you know, I think one of the things that's going to happen with prediction markets is that you'll continue to see like these horizontal markets exist, but we're also going to start to see more verticalization uh as you know, certain markets grow.
So talk to me about what verticalization means in this context.
So, like as these markets are growing and expanding, they're going to be verticalized.
What does that look like?
And and how does that benefit the user?
And why is that a great investment opportunity?
Yeah, I think there's a variety of ways uh where verticalization benefits the user.
I mean, you can provide a better consumer experience because like you can actually tailor uh you know, the application to what that specific type of user would want.
In the same way that like uh, you know, in crypto exchanges, you have exchange terminals that are built for normal users, and then you have terminals that are built for more professional traders.
Those experiences look different and you want to tailor it to them.
From like an infrastructure side, like the way you're going to make those markets is also uh gonna differ if you're only focused on one market because you can kind of target your uh liquidity providers uh who you know are actively making the markets on the back end in a much more you know efficient way because they don't have to quote, you know, a dozen markets that maybe like they don't feel comfortable with, they can just focus on on what they're good at and that can create tighter spreads and a better product experience for the end user.
In terms of like broader verticalization and how we might see that, one area of prediction markets that I'm really excited about is this idea of corporate earnings.
And if you look at you know the broader stock market, a lot of stock trading happens around earnings because it's kind of a point of uh uncertainty or or a catalyst.
And you could very much imagine a world in which uh you could build like a new financial application that doesn't focus on like a variety of markets, but really focuses on earnings.
Uh, because today if you look at you know, the earnings markets on PyMet, it's like, did Netflix beat the market or did they not beat the market?
But you could have a much more granular market where, oh, Netflix beat earnings by a dollar, by 1.1 dollars.
And then in that same kind of application experience, you could imagine, okay.
Well, if I have that as an information piece, maybe you have certain users who want to bet on that, but maybe they want to use that information to then go take a perp or an option uh on that stock.
And so you can imagine a much more verticalized experience based on a key piece of information, uh, you know, as part of uh that market.
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Gotcha.
Okay, so you're bringing things together, streamlining, streamlining things, uh and making it more efficient and effective for the user to articulate ideas into the market.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
It's interesting.
Okay.
I want to ask you a question about another investment you guys made into a project called Doppler Protocol, which, if I understand this correctly, is designed to try to help uh projects do more like fair launches of tokens and bootstrap liquidity for new projects.
ICOs obviously have kind of fallen out of favor and out of style.
I'm curious your thoughts on this.
What problem this is solving?
Why Pantera was excited about this opportunity?
Yeah.
So Doppler is building custom capital market infrastructure.
So basically providing a flexible platform for any type of token issuance.
And there's a few things that are exciting.
One is I think, you know, over the long arc, you know, I personally believe that we're going to see more on-chain capital formation.
Uh, you know, as we look towards a future in 10, 15 years, like I think stocks will be directly issued on-chain rather than you know, going through the typical IPO process.
And Doppler provides infrastructure to make that possible today.
And there's actually like a set of complexities uh that happen during any type of on-chain capital formation.
You want to prevent, you know, simple things like sniping, but you also want to give flexibility in terms of uh, you know, the auction method by which a company might want to raise, or you know, once the company has raised, like you want to give them programmability into the types of uh fees or buybacks or burns that they might want in their network.
And one of the I think maybe underrated things that Doppler allows token projects to do is uh earn a percentage of their trading fees via their LP position.
And so, why is that important?
Uh, it's important because if you think about any token that launches, the most important asset they have initially is their own trading revenue.
Let's it's the own kind of like speculative flywheel uh of people wanting to buy and sell the token.
And so if you give a project the ability to monetize that, that actually creates like a pretty powerful incentive mechanism.
Like imagine if Microsoft or Apple uh or any stock was able to like earn a portion of you know their LP liquidity fees based on their stock trading, like that could be 100 million dollar revenue line uh to them.
And so I think there's uh a lot of longer-term things like that that are super exciting, but on a near-term scale, it's just about getting to better asset issuance.
Let's talk a little bit more about this idea of capital formation, because I think that the digital asset industry has gone through several iterations of trying to figure this out, and there's been regulatory constraints.
You know, there was the the ICO craze in 2017, 2018, and the SEC kind of squashed that.
Um, but IPOs have been a common way of raising capital in public markets, those have become much less popular and have become more of like an exit strategy, like a last resort than uh than a first offering, really.
Um, talk to me about capital formation.
Where do you see this evolving here overall in the marketplace?
Yeah, there's a variety of ways I think capital formation is going to evolve.
Um, you know, crypto has obviously been a pioneer here.
You've gone from ICOs to initial exchange offerings to new types of auction mechanisms uh with NFTs, now towards kind of launch pads uh and instant liquidity mechanisms.
And what I think you're gonna continue to see is new experiments and really pushing the fold of like how we can do on-chain capital formation.
And I think that will manifest in like a few ways.
One is we're going to start to see, you know, more projects have a single asset model.
Uh, and so if you think of companies like Morpho uh, or uh, you know, there's a great article from an options protocol called Derive that came out yesterday, where they're wholly focused on there being one single asset, a token, rather than the historical dual like equity token split that we've seen, which I think is uh caused liquid and public market investors like more hesitancy to buy those assets.
And so by having this single asset model, you know, that really provides like an effective like on-chain uh stock because like that is the asset that people are gonna want to own.
And I think we'll continue to see more teams take that route.
Uh simultaneously, I think we'll start to see the traditional capital markets infrastructure move on chain.
Uh, you're already seeing that with you know equities moving on chain, commodities moving on chain.
Um, you know, one of our portfolio companies, Figure Markets, uh recently did a you know capital markets raise on-chain.
And so I think as you know, the infrastructure gets better, partly enabled by companies like Doppler, then we're gonna see a lot more experimentation on on-chain capital formation, both from you know, continued continued side of crypto native companies as well as more traditional uh capital markets.
This is something we've been focused on a lot here at Milk Road.
We call this the great on-chain migration, uh, which is happening rapidly.
So I'm excited to see how that develops.
Yes.
And well, and I like your point too about like collapsing from this like equity and token model down towards a single asset where investors can put their capital.
I think that's just like a much better reality to live in.
So I'm excited to see how that takes shape here.
Um, a question I wanted to ask you is around artificial intelligence.
Another thing we've been here at Milk Road is the rise of AI.
Um, but this has taken a lot of capital, talent, resources that used to be in web three and and turn them towards AI.
Do you see these two technologies converging and presenting new opportunities in the future here, or is this still something that's being figured out?
Talk to me about this tug-of-war of talent and capital between crypto and AI and where can these two technologies actually work together as opposed to like, you know, splitting the market so much like this?
Crypto and AI are probably the two most exciting technologies that have come in the past decade.
And, you know, they have their areas uh where they don't overlap, but I do think, you know, as we continue to see AI and crypto proliferate, they're naturally going to intersect.
Uh, and I think that happens in a few ways.
If if you look at the properties that crypto offers, it's things like ownership, it's things like verifiability, programmability.
That uh are those are all properties that AI can benefit from.
And so we already see projects that are kind of merging these two things today.
You can look at something like WorldCoin, which is using kind of verifiability uh of identity, and that can be combined uh in a world of AI where you know there's an increasing amount of bots uh and non-humans uh that are running around.
I think you see it in uh technologies like ZKTLS, uh, where you know one of our portfolio companies, transcripts uh provides employment verification uh using ZKTLS.
And so, in the same way that uh traditional institutions have really loved non-custodial wallets because it reduces counterparty risk, you can now create non-custodial data uh that can reduce counterparty risk for a variety of these types of companies, allowing you to verify selectively pieces of information, you know, which is obviously incredibly important for AI because you know it's all about the type of data and information that you can get.
Um, and so I think we'll continue to see these two trends intersect.
If you look at kind of the the broadest framing of both of them, like AI is truly about abundance uh and more creation, and crypto is inherently a technology that provides scarcity and verifiability.
Uh, and it's natural that those two things uh you know are complements to each other rather than adversaries.
Gotcha.
So, when do we start seeing those two things actually intersect in really more meaningful ways, or is it still at the prototype level?
Because I think that, you know, stable coins are this the huge thing that found product market fit and are sort of exploding from the crypto side, and people are kind of forecasting, and like there was that Citrini article saying that AI is going to be transacting in stable coins, but we haven't really, I mean, maybe I we have, and I just haven't seen it myself, but like we haven't really seen like this actual merging starting to happen.
And the people on the AI side seem very hostile to crypto, even though crypto really wants to work with AI.
Talk to me about where this actually starts to meet rubber meets the road with this intersection here.
Yeah, we're at a mass experimentation phase.
And so if you look at agentic payments, uh, there's people who are trying to, you know, tackle that in a few ways.
There's companies that are trying to create standards, uh, like X402, uh, which you know created by CloudForming and Coinbase.
And the amount of volume that is moved through those rails is like inherently small today.
But that's because like it's not the there's like a growth of agent infrastructure that has to happen before like agents start paying themselves.
Um, and so if we look at like kind of like the near to medium term arc of like what we're gonna see, I I think you'll continue to see people try and build out new standards, uh, but I also think you'll see people try and build out uh whole workflows.
So rather than maybe like the agent uh, you know, trying to work across some horizontal, you know, stripe like agentic layer, someone just goes and builds like a vertical stack where you want your agent to do, you know, one or two things really well.
Like you want to be able to go and find and pay for your travel uh and you connect it to like the set of APIs that do that, and you allow it to, you know, have a card uh or you know, stablecoin wallet and make those payments.
The other way I think we're gonna see AI and crypto intersect in a near term is in terms of uh neofinance or you know, basically looking at financial applications that are leveraging both crypto rails as well as uh AI.
And so we'll see that across trading.
I think as you think of Chat GPT as like one interface model, there's a variety of ways that that can expand uh both to complement uh retail traders, uh, but also uh you know move into uh you know more institutional trading as well.
Talk to me about this concept of neofinance because when you first I heard first sure you mentioned this.
I thought you were talking about a project that Pantera had invested in.
And I think you're really talking about this sort of like larger idea of like converging trends in the marketplace.
What is neofinance and how do you see that playing out in the markets here?
Yeah, so neofinance is not a term that I I coined.
I uh just really like the term.
I think the the guys at the roll up uh may have been the kind of creators of it.
But I view in my you know perspective, neofinance is the culmination of three major trends.
Uh one is crypto, one is AI, and the other is fintech.
And so all of these trends have properties that they provide.
I already kind of mentioned them, you know, in terms of crypto.
If you look at fintech, it you know provides like massive distribution, it's typically pretty compliance focused.
If you look at AI, it's about automation and intelligence.
And all these trends are intersecting.
And I think where they intersect is this area of neofinance, uh, where it's any type of application or infrastructure that is building across you know all three of these types of rails.
Um, and that's where I really see a lot of uh, you know, capital is gonna go into things that are building it at you know the start of neofinance because those markets are incredibly large uh across capital markets, across AI, across, you know, you know, verification.
Um, and so it's it's a trend that I'm increasingly really excited to invest in.
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Yeah, and one of our chief researchers here at Milk Road, Martin has been pounding the drum on this neofinance, neo banking idea.
Um, so we're we're trying to keep our audience on top of that as well.
I'm glad you're paying attention too.
Um Mason, I wanted to ask you for your reaction to something that came out in the news today.
And I just want to see what your thoughts are on this.
We talked a lot about Solana and the Solano ecosystem.
Um, Phantom recently received a no action letter from the CFTC, which I believe means that they're not going to sue Phantom.
Um, but I I wanna I want to understand the implications here because this seems like a green light to operate in the space uh for Phantom for Solana for a lot of digital asset businesses.
Just talk to me about what the implications are from this.
What's your reaction to this no action letter from the CFTC today?
Yeah, so this no action letter to provide a bit more framing is around derivatives contracts and event market contracts, which is you know what prediction market uh you know contracts are called.
And so this means Phantom can offer those types of markets to their users without uh operating a broker.
And the reason that's really important is because in the same way that uh we saw neobanks and fintech be able to create massive distribution flywheels by just leveraging existing Rails.
This allows neo-brokerages like Phantom to continue to be the distribution funnel and offer you know these types of financial products to their users without having to go through the cumbersome, you know, regulatory process of getting license.
And so this is great in a few ways.
One is it uh means that you know, we don't have to see like a regulatory capture of you know companies uh, you know, try and like capture these licenses and it it really prevents like a barrier to entry.
Uh, but it's also great because it's gonna enable a new wave of neo brokerages, uh, because rather than have to go get licensed and get a broker uh broker account to offer derivatives or prediction market contracts, it means you can just you know create a neo bank like model, uh, which has been incredibly successful over the past you know decade and a half in FinTech.
Uh and so I think it's really gonna be a, you know, a call to entrepreneurs uh that this is your green light to go build in that space.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So the exciting thing about this is that it gives people more confidence that they're gonna have regulatory clarity around launching businesses, innovating.
And just like you said, we're in this phase of mass experimentation.
So this is gonna allow more experimentation to take place.
Is that kind of how you see this here?
Yeah, exactly.
I think it's gonna allow more experimentation and just think about it from the lens of an entrepreneur.
Like, you know, if you want to go build a dedicated app to trade crypto options, or maybe you want to build a terminal on top of predictions and you had fears that, oh, I don't want to go build this because I'm going to have to go get regulated.
That's going to cost a lot.
Like I'm going to lose to the incumbents.
Like this allows you to create an aggregator or a new type of application without having to go through the cumbersome regulation process.
And so this is specifically a no action letter for Phantom, but I think it sets an important precedent for other companies in the space.
Right.
It's a signal for the rest of the market.
Okay.
Yeah, that's really helpful.
Mason, I want to ask your thoughts around something that a lot of our audience is struggling with.
I think we have a lot of very savvy but self-directed investors, retail sentiment and just investor sentiment right now.
There's a fear at all time highs and uh you know crypto sentiment in general is kind of in the toilet.
At the same time though, like you're saying, there's a huge amount of institutional demand in in innovation and all kinds of things happening in the space.
Talk to me about you know what you are excited about for 2026.
What are some things, opportunities that people are missing in all of this fear?
And you know, where should investors be paying attention to look for opportunities in this market here.
In any market that is volatile, in particular crypto, I think that there's always opportunities to be found.
Um, you know, if in I think you can look at this in like the broader public markets as well.
Like SaaS multiples have uh compressed all at once together.
Uh, but that's not to say that some of those companies aren't great companies.
Just the market is really uncertain about what the future of AI holds for those companies.
And so if you as an investor can have an informed opinion and build conviction, like you have the ability to, you know, get into an asset at really really attractive prices.
And I think the same thing is is happening in crypto today, where everything is kind of correlated to uh the way down and volatility.
And so if you can go uh and analyze assets either in the public, you know, crypto markets uh or the private markets, I think there's uh a lot of attractive investments to be made.
In particular, I think, you know, we're gonna continue to see a lot of excitement across a few major trends, whether it's tokenization, whether it's perps, whether it's prediction markets, whether it's stable coins, those are trends that we certainly will continue to invest across.
But I think, you know, coming back to my earlier point, you have to imagine like what those things ripple out into and go and try and find it, at least from a venture perspective, the things that are are non-obvious today that uh maybe seem obvious to uh me as an individual investor or you know, someone else.
Gotcha.
So you're saying that there's a lot of value in understanding the second and third order impacts of a lot of things that we're seeing just beginning to happen in the market today.
And it sounds to me like you're saying my line, which is stay safe, stay educated, and stay bullish.
Um, Mason, this is a really uh helpful conversation, really informative.
And I think that's a lot of great takeaways for our audience from today.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Yeah, you can uh follow me on Twitter at Mason Nistrom.
I'm always looking to chat with more founders and entrepreneurs in the space.
So if you're building something interesting, please reach out.
I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of fan mail for that.
Uh, Mason, thanks so much for being on the Milk Road show.
I really appreciate you coming on, sharing all this insight with our audience.
And I hope we can do this again soon.
Thanks, John.
It was a blast.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
And we will see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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