Pantera
Blockchain
Summit

Monday, April 3rd – Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco
600 Stockton Street, San Francisco, CA 94118

The Pantera Capital team is honored to invite you to attend our Pantera Blockchain Summit 2023, as we bring together our family of portfolio companies, partners, and investors for a day of learning, inspiration, and connection.

The Pantera Blockchain Summit 2023 also marks the 10th anniversary of Pantera’s foray into blockchain. Join us in celebrating ten exciting years of investment and technology.

The Pantera Blockchain Summit 2023 is a free, limited-capacity event, curated by the Pantera investment team and focused on the most important & exciting topics in the blockchain industry. Our goal is to uncover valuable insights, foster great conversations, and empower the entire Pantera network to move our industry forward.

If you are interested in attending, you may fill out this application form and one of our team members will contact you regarding availability.

Register Now

“I’ve spent my career looking for asymmetric trades – trades where the upside is many times the downside. Blockchain is the most asymmetric trade in a generation.” 

— Dan Morehead, CEO
“Blockchain tech and cryptocurrency are the underpinnings of a new financial infrastructure, just as the internet was the underpinning of a new information infrastructure. Neither was, nor will be, built overnight.”

— Joey Krug, Co-Chief Investment Officer
  • Speaker
    Alvin Xu
    Co-Founder, Maverick Protocol
    Alvin Xu is Co-Founder of Maverick Protocol, a permissionless derivatives DEX that created a new proprietary Automated Liquidity Placement (ALP) AMM that effectively shifts the liquidity to the market price. Prior to Maverick Protocol, Alvin worked in product roles at MetaMask, Abra, BitTorrent, and TRON.
  • Speaker
    Robert Masiello
    Co-Founder, Arcade
    Robert Masiello is Co-Founder of Arcade, a decentralized lending platform leading the financialization of NFTs. Prior to founding Arcade, he was Strategic Advisor for digital infrastructure and crypto assets at Industry Capital. He previously founded Aludra, and held roles at EY and Accenture.
  • Speaker
    Won Soh
    Co-Founder / CEO, Space Runners
    Won Soh is the Co-Founder and CEO of Space Runners, a metaverse fashion brand focused on creating NFTs and other digital wearables. Prior to Space Runners, he was founder of social metaverse platform Onara and was Senior Engagement Manager at MicKinsey & Co.
  • Speaker
    Lily Liu
    President, Solana Foundation
    Lily Liu is the President of the Solana Foundation, which aims to advance the Solana protocol and ecosystem with initiatives around the world. She was Co-Founder and CEO of Earn.com which was acquired by Coinbase. She is an investor at Volar Capital and was a Venture Partner at Dragonfly Capital. Co-author of The Little Bitcoin Book.
  • Speaker
    Ritchie Torres
    Rep. NY-D Congress
    Ritchie Torres is a member of the Democratic Party and is the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district. He served as the New York City Councilmember for the 15th district from 2013 to 2020. Ritchie Torres chaired the Committee on Public Housing and was a deputy majority leader. As chair of the Oversight and Investigations Committee, he focused on taxi medallion predatory loans and the city’s Third Party Transfer Program. He won the November 2020 general election and assumed office on January 3, 2021.
  • Speaker
    Illia Polosukhin
    Co-Founder, NEAR
    Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a decentralized developer platform powered by a sharded smart contract blockchain. NEAR’s vision of a scalable, robust, and highly usable blockchain began in 2018 when they couldn’t find a protocol that met the needs of builders. NEAR Protocol launched its main net in 2020 and is focused on supporting the creator economy. Illia has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor and manager of the team building question-answering capabilities for the core Google search, as well as an author of several notable research papers.
  • Speaker
    Bill Miller
    Founder / CIO, Miller Value Partners
    Bill Miller is the founder of Miller Value Partners, and currently serves as the Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, and co-Portfolio Manager for Opportunity Equity and Income Strategy. Prior to Miller Value Partners, Bill and his partner, Ernie Kiehne, founded Legg Mason Capital Management and served as portfolio managers of the Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust from its inception in 1982. Bill took over as sole manager in December 1990 and served in this role for the next 20 years.
  • Speaker
    Scott Ryan
    Director of Investments, Indiana University Foundation
    Scott Ryan, CFA, CAIA is Director of Investments at Indiana University Foundation where he oversees the investment portfolio of Indiana University’s $3.5 billion endowment. He has expertise in alternative and private investments and all areas of institutional portfolio management. Prior to Indiana University Foundation he was a portfolio manager at Charles Schwab.
  • Speaker
    Dan Sullivan
    Sen. AK-R, Congress
    Dan Sullivan was sworn in as Alaska’s eighth United States Senator on January 6, 2015. Sullivan serves on four Senate committees vital to Alaska: the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee; the Armed Services Committee; the Environment and Public Works Committee; and the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Sullivan has a distinguished record of military and national security service. He is currently a Colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. Sullivan earned a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University in 1987 and a joint law and Masters of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1993.
  • Speaker
    Sam Bankman-Fried
    Founder / CEO, FTX
    Sam Bankman-Fried is an MIT graduate with a degree in physics who started his career in financial markets with Jane Street. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system. After Jane Street, he founded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. During his time at Alameda, he and his colleagues noticed that the technology from cryptocurrency exchanges for institutional investors could be better. As a result, he created FTX in 2019, which is now the largest crypto trading exchange outside China. Beginning during his time at MIT and continuing throughout his professional career, Sam has been a believer in effective altruism in which he has dedicated his time to maximizing his earnings in order to affect as much positive change in the world as possible. Over the past decade, Sam has donated to initiatives that focus on animal rights, climate change and more.
  • Speaker
    Raj Gokal
    Co-founder / COO, Solana
    Raj Gokal is Co-Founder and COO of Solana. Solana is a high-performance blockchain supporting builders around the world creating crypto apps that scale today. Prior to Solana, he spent 8 years investing at General Catalyst, built Sano as Co-Founder and scaled Omada Health as Director of Product. He held advisory roles with Platejoy, Sibly, ZenFit, and Path.
  • Speaker
    Marieke Flament
    CEO, NEAR
    Marieke is a French-born computer engineer who has worked across the globe in a diverse range of companies from the luxury giant LVMH of Louis Vuitton fame to Boston Consulting Group and Expedia’s Hotels.com and crypto giant Circle. At Hotels.com she was in charge of Europe, Middle East and Africa Region, a $2bn P&L. In her last role she was Managing Director of Europe and Global CMO for Circle, one of the largest crypto companies. At Circle she pioneered the consumer application of blockchain taking to market several products, building from scratch a user base of over 2M users in less than 2 years. She also helped move the blockchain agenda forward working with key decision makers, including governments and financial policy makers across Europe.
  • Speaker
    Tracy Fong
    Partner, Albourne
    Tracy is an alternative investment professional with over 20 years of experience across startups, public technology companies, investment banking, alternatives endowment management, fixed income, and strategic equities management. She was previously a Managing Director at SVB Capital’s VC fund-of-funds and direct VC fund. Tracy also spent four years at the Harvard University endowment, Harvard Management Company, where she was Vice President of Alternative Assets and worked on HMC’s $20bn+ alternatives portfolio construction, investment manager selection, and direct natural resources transactions (including timber and agriculture).
  • Speaker
    Amir Bandeali
    Co-CEO, 0x
    Amir Bandeali is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of 0x. 0x is an open-source, decentralized exchange infrastructure that enables the exchange of tokenized assets on multiple blockchains. Prior to founding 0x, Amir Bandeali was a trader at DRW and Chopper Trading.
  • Speaker
    Joe Marenda
    Partner, Blockchain Research Head, Cambridge Associates
    Joe Marenda is a Partner at Cambridge Associates and Head of Blockchain Research. Cambridge Associates is a global investment firm that works with premier institutional investors and family offices to manage custom investment portfolios that aim to generate outperformance so they can maximize their impact on the world.
  • Speaker
    Rob Schwartz
    General Counsel, CFTC
    Rob Schwartz is the General Counsel at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In that role, Mr. Schwartz leads the agency’s Legal Division and serves as the Commission’s chief legal advisor. He was appointed General Counsel in January 2022 after serving for a year as Acting General Counsel.

    Since joining the CFTC in 2011, Mr. Schwartz has served primarily as the CFTC’s chief litigator, in the position of Deputy General Counsel for Litigation, Enforcement and Adjudication.
  • Speaker
    Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie
    CEO, BCB Group
    Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie has led a highly technical career in finance technology, forming a robust platform for solutions architecture and fintech innovation. He has helped Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Barclays Investment Bank (2004-15) and Lloyds Commercial Bank bring a number of strategic and tactical projects to fruition as a hands-on SME in derivative instruments, regulations and technology. After nearly 20 years in investment banking Oliver founded BCB Group where his mission is to accelerate global adoption of digital assets as money, as ownership and as a commodity of value.
  • Speaker
    Ola Doudin
    CEO, BitOasis
    Ola Doudin is the co-founder and CEO of BitOasis, which offers digital assets to buy, sell and trade against the U.A.E. Dirham. The platform is available to users in the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. She is also co-founder of Yellow, a bitcoin payment processor.
  • Speaker
    Nikil Viswanathan
    Co-Founder / CEO, Alchemy
    Nikil Viswanathan is the co-founder and CEO of Alchemy, the world’s leading blockchain developer platform. He was honored as Forbes 30 Under 30, received his BS & MS in Computer Science at Stanford, and formerly did product management at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. A serial entrepreneur, he co-created the #1 social app in the world, Down To Lunch, which was featured in international media such as a New York Times business cover story. He’s been featured in numerous global media outlets including the New York Times, Forbes, NBC, Business Insider, and TechCrunch.
  • Speaker
    Nathan Allman
    CEO, Ondo Finance
    Nathan Allman is Co-Founder, CEO at Ondo Finance. Formerly, Global Markets Division, Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs, focused on cryptocurrency markets; Managing Partner at ChainStreet Capital.
  • Speaker
    Nader Al-Naji
    Founder, DeSo
    Founder of DeSo. Intangible Labs, cofounded by Nader Al-Naji, Josh Chen and Lawrence Diao, raised $133 million from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures to develop a cryptocurrency that can be used to make payments. A former junior world champion rower and Google software engineer, Al-Naji’s other major project, Basis, is a stable cryptocurrency designed to replace central banks.
  • Speaker
    Matthew Gould
    Co-founder / CEO, Unstoppable Domains
    Matthew is a co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, working to put domain names on the blockchain. Matthew is a serial entrepreneur building among other things the first consumer rating system on Bitcoin (Forum) and Verified News, an ethereum app to validate the truthfulness of news stories on the blockchain. Matthew is also a alumni from YC startupTalkable, helping grow the company from 5 to 50 people. Recently his company was awarded a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to build a batteries included front end library for ethereum development (Browseth). Additionally Matthew is a mentor with the ENS foundation annual hackathon which is building the protocol layer for blockchain based domain names on Ethereum.
  • Speaker
    Matt Halstead
    Director, Teacher Retirement System of Texas
    Matt Halstead is the Director of Real Estate Investments & Digital Assets at Teacher Retirement System of Texas. Texas Teachers is one of the world’s largest investment funds with over $200 billion of AUM. Since 2021, Matt has led the Digital Assets efforts for the firm. They are building the leading institutional investment business focused on early-stage investing in the Digital Asset ecosystem.

    Winner – 2021 TRS Excellence in Investing Award (Peer-determined award given to the most outstanding investor at TRS)
  • Speaker
    Lauren Abendschein
    Head of US Institutional Sales, Coinbase
    Lauren Abendschein is a sales and trading executive based out of San Francisco, California. She is currently a Institutional Sales Manger at Coinbase, a leading digital asset exchange company. She was previously a Director at Credit Suisse in their Prime Services department.
  • Speaker
    Joe Lau
    Co-Founder / CTO, Alchemy
    Joe is the cofounder and CTO of Alchemy. A serial entrepreneur, he cofounded the #1 social app in the world and has been featured in international media including a New York Times Business cover story, Forbes, Business Insider, and TechCrunch. He has been honored as Forbes 30 under 30, formerly did engineering at Pinterest, Google, and Linkedin. Joe graduated with both an undergraduate and master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.
  • Speaker
    Jeff Wu
    Co-founder / CTO, Notional
    Jeff Wu is Co-Founder and CTO at Notional Finance. Formerly, Senior Product Manager at Splunk, Co-Founder at Ohmstead. He has spent over 10 years in software, working at Epic Systems, Atlassian and Splunk where he’s worked on data and analytics projects.
  • Speaker
    Farzam Ehsani
    CEO, VALR
    Farzam is the CEO and Co-Founder of VALR.com, a platform that bridges the gap between our traditional financial system and the new world of cryptocurrencies. He was previously the Blockchain Lead at Rand Merchant Bank and the FirstRand Group, and was the inaugural Chairperson of the South African Financial Blockchain Consortium. He previously worked at McKinsey & Company in Johannesburg, Deloitte Consulting in San Francisco, the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, and the United Nations in Nairobi. He studied economics at the University of California – Berkeley.
  • Speaker
    Edgar Pavlovsky
    Founder, MarginFi
    Edgar Pavlovsky is the founder of MarginFi, a decentralized portfolio margining protocol for trading on Solana. The protocol gives traders a unified account to access margin, compose a portfolio, and improve capital efficiency across underlying trading protocols.
  • Speaker
    Doug Petkanics
    CEO, Livepeer
    Doug Petkanics is an entrepreneur and software engineer. He’s currently Co-founder at Livepeer, where they’re building the world’s open video infrastructure. He previously co-founded Wildcard and Hyperpublic, and served as VP Engineering at both. Hyperpublic was acquired by Groupon in February 2012. Doug is excited about challenges in blockchain and decentralization focused technology, as well as challenges involved in building, leading, and scaling effective engineering organizations.
  • Speaker
    Do Kwon
    CEO, Terra
    Do Kwon cofounded Terra to use blockchain technology to develop a more efficient payment system. Its eponymous price-stable cryptocurrency, or stablecoin, attracted 40 million users to work with the company at launch in January 2018. With the aim of building a blockchain-based payment system, Terra has raised from crypto-giants such as Binance, Arrington XRP and Polychain Capital, as well as assembling an alliance of commerce partners including Korean ticketing giant Ticketmonster and travel service Yanolja.
  • Speaker
    Dannie Chu
    CEO, MakersPlace
    Dannie Chu is a tech entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. He’s a YCombinator Alum, founder, early Pinterest leader and now founder of MakersPlace. He is a product and engineering leader with a passion for applying technologies to drive real-world change.
  • Speaker
    Dan Berkovitz
    General Counsel, SEC
    Dan M. Berkovitz serves at the Securities and Exchange Commission as its General Counsel. Prior to joining the SEC’s staff in November 2021, Mr. Berkovitz was a Commissioner for three years at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he previously served as General Counsel from 2009 to 2013. In between those CFTC roles, he was a Partner and Co-Chair of the futures and derivatives practice at the law firm of WilmerHale, an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law School, and Vice Chair of the American Bar Association Derivatives and Futures Law Committee.
  • Speaker
    Cactus Raazi
    US CEO, Amber Group
    Cactus Raazi is the CEO of Amber Group US and previously the founder of Elefant Inc., a startup building smarter marketplaces through AI-powered pricing, which was acquired by Exos Financial. In more than three decades in sales, Cactus has developed an acute sense of how price affects the commercial transaction (and how we get it wrong). He has a graduate degree in business analytics from NYU, and now focuses on applying data analytics to personalized pricing.
  • Speaker
    Bette Chen
    Co-founder / CTO, Acala
    Bette Chen is co-founder of Laminar & Acala and is a graduate of Duke University. Acala is the cross-chain decentralized financial hub and stablecoin platform of Polkadot that makes it fast and easy to use or build financial applications, improving trading efficiency and saving time.
  • Speaker
    Andre Portilho
    Head of Digital Assets, BTG Pactual
    Andre Portilho is a trader and intrapreneur from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In his early career, he created multiple trading desks at Banco Pactua, including the Equity Derivatives Trading Desk and the FX Derivatives Trading Desk, and acted as market maker in the local and offshore BRL markets. When UBS acquired Banco Pactual in 2004, Andre became responsible for the Latin America Equity and FX Derivatives trading desks with traders in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Stamford, CT. In 2007, he left Banco UBSPactual to join Paineiras Investimentos, a newly formed hedge fund, as trader and partner focused in Equity and FX Derivatives. In May 2011, Andre left Paineiras Investimentos and returned to BTGPactual, now a Global Emerging Markets Investment Bank formed after Banco UBSPactual’s acquisition by BTG Partners. Here he led the launch of ReitBZ, the first Security Token Offering done by an investment bank in the world.
  • Speaker
    Alex Paley
    CEO, Faraway
    Alex Paley is a Co-Founder at Faraway and Halo Kitchens. Formerly Scopely, Co-Founder of Dairy Free Games (acquired by Glu Mobile). He is a graduate of the University of Michigan – Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Faraway is building Mini Royale: Nations, a web3 browser-based battle royale game built on Solana.
  • Speaker
    Albert Chen
    CEO, Genopets
    Albert Chen is Co-Founder and CEO at Genopets, a play-to-earn and move-to-earn blockchain-based game built on Solana. Albert has 10+ years in growth marketing as owner of multiple e-commerce businesses and 10+ years in software development with 4 years focused in blockchain engineering. Winner of EOS Global Hackathon in 2018.
  • Speaker
    Adam Jackson
    CEO, Braintrust
    Adam is a serial technology entrepreneur and investor that has spent his career creating and deploying capital into software systems that make complex tasks simple and intuitive. He’s started 4 VC-backed companies and an asset management company over the last 16 years. He is an angel investor in 45+ companies/projects, including: LTSE, Seated, Bolt, Placer, Aktana, Skale Labs, Protocol Labs, JCTurbo, Apero Health, Rapportive, MyTime, Automatic, Womply, Superhuman and Zenefits.