What is Pantera Capital doing now after being hit hard by FTX?

Author: sky53 ττ, Source: Author's Twitter @sky_gpt

@PanteraCapital once heavily invested in FTX, which went bankrupt in November 2022, and Pantera was hit hard.

In fact, heavily investing in a project seems to have always been Pantera's style, for example, last year it said that investing in Ton was its largest investment.

Former employees told me that Pantera's secondary fund treats all tokens except BTC and ETH as meme coins. So this also reflects the nature of the crypto market:

All tokens, except BTC, ETH, and Sol, are memes. Whether it is a vc coin/project coin with layers of packaging (such as a team from Harvard Berkeley, endorsed by top vcs) or a dog coin that opened at $1,000, they are essentially memes, and no one is better than the other. As retail investors, we don't need to pay for packaging.

Why do some current star startups prefer to recruit people from large companies? I won’t discuss whether large companies or grassroots companies are more capable, but the core point is that these projects are packaged well for the next round of financing.

Although @PanteraCapital has suffered a heavy blow, it is still a first-tier crypto VC, because the og VC in 2013 was really embarrassed and raised a lot of funds. Now Pantera has publicly raised funds. I feel that it is also under pressure from the return rate and fund reputation to invest heavily in Ton again.

Founder, Managing Partner: @dan_pantera Founded Pantera in San Francisco, California in 2003, and then opened an office on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. Later, he entered crypto with Joey Krug, the founder of Augur, the first major Ethereum project. Morehead previously led global macro trading at Tiger Management and was called "Tiger Cub".

Managing Partner: @veradittakit Former Strive Capital partner, focusing on investments in the mobile field. Former daily trading aggregation startup Urban Spoils.

Portfolio Manager: @cosmo_jiang Former Nova River, Hitchwood Capital Managing Director, Apollo Global Management, Evercore Partners.

Head of Content: @Erik_M_Lowe joined Pantera in 2017, initially as an investor relations assistant.

In short, although Pantera was hit hard by FTX, it is still one of the top VCs.

For LPs, from the perspective of pure investment return, Pantera is currently under pressure to return, because the previous return rate was very poor and there was pressure to raise funds, so it may be a good choice to inject capital appropriately now.

For entrepreneurs, Pantera's resources may be of great help to the project, especially in the North American market.

For retail investors, Pantera's past investment return rate is not very good, not even for LPs, let alone retail investors. There may be some changes in the near future, so pay appropriate attention and it is better to enter and exit quickly.