Pantera Capital is going big on AI projects in the next decade with plans to inject $200 million from a pool of $1 billion in funding.
Cryptocurrency hedge fund Pantera Capital is set to secure $1 billion in funding out of which it plans to allocate $200 million to developing its Artificial Intelligence (AI) arm.
According to a report from DL News, Pantera Capital’s Portfolio Manager Cosmo Jiang said every crypto firm will soon become an AI venture. Therefore, investing in an AI firm “will be as stupid as saying ‘I’m investing in a company that has a website’.”
Pantera Capital Seel AI-related Blockchain Projects
As the company’s portfolio manager, Jiang’s responsibilities include prospecting for clients, identifying potential investment opportunities, and conducting risk management amongst others. With the newly found AI passion of the hedge fund, Jiang claimed to be actively looking for projects using AI to boost blockchain businesses or vice-versa.
He also mentioned an earlier fund that injected about 15% to 20% of the entire capital into AI-linked blockchain projects. The Pantera Capital executive expects that a higher percentage will be invested from the new fund. With these statistics, more than $200 million may be going to AI-related blockchain projects within the next ten years. Jiang tried not to commit himself to this figure, adding that “the math would suggest that’s reasonable.”
This latest move from Pantera Capital reflects the growing intersection of AI and blockchain technology. In the last few months, many investors have injected a sizable amount of funds into the AI ecosystem. Their investment choice is largely informed by the estimation that the combined power of crypto and AI may add as much as $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
AI And Blockchain Integration Gains Traction
In April, BytePlus, a unit of TikTok owner ByteDance hinted at it partnership with Mysten Labs to integrate AI algorithms in the Sui Blockchain. The deal affords Sui the opportunity to combine its entire nodes’ data with ByteHouse, a cloud-native data warehouse. This provides room for real-time and batched analysis, improving performance and guaranteeing faster delivery for users.
AI tokens like Render (RNDR price data) are outperforming several digital assets and have caused their total market value to reach $26 billion. With mining revenue suddenly down following Bitcoin halving (BTC price data), Bitcoin miners have started augmenting their income by providing processing power for Silicon Valley giants to train their AI tools.
Pantera Capital has shown interest in AI and blockchain integration. It is common knowledge that the AI niche is largely in its early stages. However, Jiang sees a prospect in how blockchain can provide AI agents with the rails that they need to better perform whatever tasks they wish. This stance fuels the hedge fund’s investment in projects that are now pioneering this movement.
Nexus Laboratories is one of such firms and Pantera Capital co-led the startup’s recent $25 million Series A funding round. There is also Bittensor (Bittensor price data) which Pantera Capital also invested in, however, it refused to disclose how much it injected in the project.
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