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“Everyone will use artificial intelligence” – DL News
- Cryptocurrency investor Pantera Capital is raising a new $1 billion fund.
- Portfolio manager Cosmo Jiang said more than $200 million is earmarked for AI.
- He shared his AI encryption strategy and how he searches for projects.
As Cosmo Jiang put it, every cryptocurrency company will soon be an AI company.
“In ten, fifteen, twenty years everyone will be using artificial intelligence,” he said DL Newsso saying you’re investing in an AI company “will be as stupid as saying ‘I’m investing in a company that has a website.'”
As a portfolio manager at cryptocurrency hedge fund Pantera Capital, Jiang says he is actively looking for projects that use artificial intelligence to power blockchain businesses – or vice versa.
The cryptocurrency investment company – which lists Coinbase, Circle and Bitstamp among its portfolio companies, it is raising a new one $1 billion fund to inject new capital into the sector.
An earlier fund injected about 15-20% of its capital into AI-adjacent blockchain projects, Jiang said, expecting the new fund to invest even more.
This would suggest that Pantera Capital, which is expected to close the fund’s first close in 2025, will invest over $200 million in AI-adjacent crypto projects over the remainder of this decade.
While not actively committing to that figure, “calculations suggest it is reasonable,” Jiang said.
Artificial intelligence opportunities
Jiang’s comments highlight the growing buzz around the intersection of AI and blockchain technologies.
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Supported by estimates that the combined power of cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence could add $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030, investors have injected more than $98.8 million into the sector since Beginning of 2024.
AI tokens have reached a total market value of $26 billion, and Bitcoin miners they are supplementing their revenue by providing processing power to Silicon Valley giants to train their AI tools.
Others are also catching on to the trend.
Hedge fund manager Brevan HowardGautam Sharma head of digital assets said he is exploring opportunities in this sector.
Jiang said that artificial intelligence and blockchain have a shared heritage, with many of its developers naturally floating between the two sectors.
As an example, he pointed to Sam Altman, who “started two independent companies that he believes are actually synergistic and should coexist: OpenAI and Worldcoin.”
What is Pantera looking for?
Pantera Capital has almost never kept secret its interest in the intersection of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies: the company has signed blog posts, hosted panelsAND generally gushed out about it for months.
When asked what the company is looking for, Jiang was more coy.
He revealed, however, that he wants to avoid “opportunistic entrepreneurs” who “go to college saying they want to be an entrepreneur with no idea what they want to build, and just do whatever gets the most funding.”
While acknowledging that the AI industry is still in its early stages, Jiang said he sees opportunities in how blockchain can provide AI agents with the foundation to better perform their tasks, whatever they may be.
AI agents are programs that interact independently and collect data to better perform predetermined tasks.
He also sees opportunities in how blockchain can help the development of artificial intelligence verify data.
A company that does just that is Nexus Laboratorieswhich is one of the reasons Pantera Capital co-led the startup’s recent $25 million Series A funding round.
A third opportunity is to use blockchain binaries to train artificial intelligence. Bite is one such project, Jiang said.
Pantera Capital invested in Bittensor, but did not disclose how much it invested in the project.
Bittensor operates a blockchain similarly to other cryptocurrencies. Unlike Bitcoin, Bittensor miners validate new blocks by completing tasks, many of which are related to artificial intelligence.
But these examples are just the surface, Jiang said. “There will be tons of opportunities related to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies.”
Eric Johansson is the news editor of DL News. Do you have advice? Email to eric@dlnews.com.