In 2016, Dan Morehead embarked on a world tour to preach the gospel of Bitcoin. A former trader at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, Morehead had become orange-pilled just a few years before, convinced that Bitcoin would reshape the global economy. He believed in the currency so fervently that he came out of semi-retirement to remake his hedge fund Pantera Capital into one of the world’s first Bitcoin funds. 

The new operation, launched in 2013, got off to a roaring start, with backing from two of Morehead’s fellow Princeton alumni, Pete Briger and Mike Novogratz, both from the private equity giant Fortress. The trio watched with glee as the Bitcoin purchased by Pantera at an initial price of $65 soared to over $1,000 by the end of the year. But then, disaster struck as hackers cleaned out the fledgling crypto industry’s main exchange, Mt Gox, and the price of Bitcoin plummeted 85%. “People would say, ‘Didn’t you do that Bitcoin thing that died?’” Morehead recalls. “It’s still alive!” he would respond. 

During his 2016 trip to evangelize Bitcoin, Morehead took 170 meetings, each time going into a prospective investor’s office and spending an hour arguing why the new currency was the most compelling possible opportunity. The result: He managed to raise just $1 million for his flailing fund. Even worse, Morehead’s own fees totaled around $17,000. “I earned $100 a meeting, going out there trying to evangelize people to buy Bitcoins,” he tells Fortune.

Less than a decade later, as Bitcoin pushes $120,000, Morehead’s brutal early slog feels like the stuff of founder mythology— right up there with the tales of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering in Jobs’ parents’ garage, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger trading stock tips at an Omaha dinner party. 

Today, Pantera manages over $5 billion in assets across different crypto funds. Its holdings comprise digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as venture investments in projects such as Circle, which went public in June, and Bitstamp, which was acquired by Robinhood earlier this year for $200 million. But what sets the firm apart from the crowded field of crypto VCs is its early-mover status as a storied bridge between the buttoned-up world of traditional finance and the once-renegade crypto sector. At the center is Morehead, an unsung figure in an industry dominated by larger-than-life characters. 

“I’m very stubborn, and I am totally convinced [Bitcoin] is going to change the world,” Morehead tells Fortune. “So I just kept going.” 

The Princeton mafia

Back before Wall Street infiltrated the blockchain industry, Morehead’s stuck out in the chaotic world of early crypto. A two-sport athlete at Princeton in football and heavyweight crew, Morehead still has the broad shoulders and square jaw of his youth. The figure he cut was a far cry from the wiry, iconoclastic types who spent most of their time on internet message boards. Morehead, in contrast, came from the conventional world of finance. He’s still rarely spotted without a blazer. 

Morehead had already had a long trading career before learning about Bitcoin. After stints at Goldman Sachs and Tiger, he began his own hedge fund, Pantera, which flamed out during the 2008 financial crisis, right around the time that a shadowy figure named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world in an online white paper.

Morehead first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from his brother and was vaguely aware that a classmate from Princeton, Gavin Andresen, was running a website that gave out 5 Bitcoins to any user for solving a captcha (current street value: $575,000). But Morehead didn’t think much about it until a couple of years later, when another classmate, Briger, invited Morehead for coffee at the San Francisco office of Fortress to talk crypto, with Novogratz calling in. “Since then, I’ve been possessed by Bitcoin,” Morehead says. 

Tech is famous for its so-called “mafias”—clusters of employees from prominent organizations like PayPal who go on to lead the next generation of startups. In crypto, it’s not a company but a university, with Princeton responsible for some of the industry’s most influential projects. Briger and Novogratz both served as key backers of Pantera, with Morehead even moving into empty office space at Fortress’s SF office. Briger remains a powerful, albeit behind-the-scenes, presence in crypto, recently taking a seat on the board of directors of Michael Saylor’s $100 billion Bitcoin holding firm, Strategy. Novogratz went on to found Galaxy, one of the largest crypto conglomerates. And another classmate, Joe Lubin, went on to become one of the cofounders of Ethereum.

But back in 2013, it still seemed far-fetched that Ivy League graduates working in the rarified fields of private equity and macro trading would be interested in Bitcoin. Briger tells Fortune that he first learned about it from Wences Casares, an Argentine entrepreneur and early crypto adopter, while sharing a room at a Young Presidents’ Organization gathering in the San Juan Islands. Briger quickly saw the appeal of upending the global payments system—a point he sticks by today, though he argues that Bitcoin is still in its infancy. He says that Bitcoin mirrors the promise of the internet, which facilitated a new form of information flow. “The fact that money movement doesn’t happen in the same way is a real shame,” he says.

After sharing the idea with Novogratz, they thought that Morehead, who had experience working in foreign exchange markets, would be the right person to bring on. When Morehead decided to devote the rest of his financial career to crypto, he rebranded Pantera as a Bitcoin fund and opened it back up to outside investors. Briger and Novogratz both signed on as limited partners, with Fortress and the venture firms Benchmark and Ribbit taking general partner stakes, though they would later withdraw. His old mentor at Tiger, the legendary investor Julian Robertson, even backed a later fund. 

Pantera’s rebirth 

In the hurley-burly early days of crypto, entrepreneurs had to confront dramatic booms and busts that make today’s volatility look like minor blips. But the wild price roller-coaster wasn’t the biggest headache, Novogratz recalls. It was simply trying to procure BTC in the first place.

He went to Coinbase, then just a year old, to try and buy 30,000 Bitcoins, which would have sold for around $2 million. He was met with a pop-up that his limit was $50. After trying to work it out with Olaf Carlson-Wee—Coinbase’s first employee, who would go on to become a famed crypto figure in his own right—the firm agreed to increase his limit all the way to $300. 

Morehead’s most impressive achievement, however, may be sticking it out during the doldrums of 2013 through 2016, when prices remained in the basement and no one outside of the insular blockchain community paid Bitcoin much mind. “In those quiet years where crypto wasn’t doing shit, Dan was out there beating the pavement,” Novogratz tells Fortune. 

That epoch still had its highlights, including three annual conferences hosted by Morehead out of his Lake Tahoe home. At one, Jesse Powell, the founder of the exchange Kraken, opted out of taking a private plane chartered by Morehead and drove instead. “There was a large enough fraction of the Bitcoin community [there] that he feared if the plane crashed, it would take Bitcoin down,” Morehead recalls. 

Unlike many of his compatriots, Morehead never positioned himself as a “Bitcoin maxi,” or someone who argues that no other cryptocurrencies should exist. After buying up 2% of the global Bitcoin supply, Pantera became an early investor in Ripple Labs, which created the digital asset XRP. “The way I think about it is Bitcoin is obviously the most important,” Morehead says. “But there isn’t one internet company.” 

According to Morehead, Pantera has made money on 86% of its venture investments. It’s a staggering figure considering that the vast majority of VC-backed startups fail. Crypto may be more forgiving given that many projects come with an accompanying cryptocurrency, meaning speculative value often endures even if a startup’s product goes nowhere. 

Morehead now spends half his year in Puerto Rico, which has become a hotbed for crypto. Joey Krug, then a partner at Pantera and now at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, had relocated down there, and Morehead decided to make the move. He estimates there are 1,000 blockchain entrepreneurs on the island, though they’ve drawn scrutiny for driving up real estate prices. Morehead faced an inquiry from the Senate Finance Committee over whether he violated federal tax laws by moving to the island and earning more than $850 million in capital gains from Pantera. He told the New York Times earlier this year that he believed he “acted appropriately with respect to my taxes” and declined to comment further to Fortune. 

Bitcoin’s future

Morehead acknowledges that much of the crypto industry is saturated with gambling, with Pantera staying away from memecoins, unlike many other venture firms. Still, he argues that it shouldn’t distract from blockchain’s broader goal of reshaping global finance. “It’s ridiculous to try and take down the blockchain industry because of a little sideshow,” he says. “[GameStop] doesn’t mean the entire U.S. equity market is tainted.” 

Pantera continues to grow, including raising a fifth venture fund with a $1 billion target, which Morehead says the firm will close after finishing investing out of its fourth fund later this year. Pantera has also moved into the red-hot field of digital asset treasuries, where publicly traded companies buy and hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets. 

But Bitcoin remains at the core of Pantera’s strategy. At the end of last year, its Bitcoin fund hit 1,000x, with a lifetime return of over 130,000%. When asked for a prediction of where Bitcoin is headed, Morehead has always had the same answer: The price will double in a year. For the most part, the simple model has worked, though Morehead admits the days of rapid growth are likely slowing down. He argues Bitcoin will still go up another order of magnitude, meaning it will approach $1,000,000, though he thinks that will be the last time it has a 10x increase.  

Morehead is happy to shoulder the criticism if Bitcoin never reaches that milestone. In 2016, after all, he was struggling to make the case for the cryptocurrency at $500. And less than a decade later, he’s just getting started. “I have the same conviction—the vast majority of institutions have zero,” he tells Fortune. “It feels like we have another couple of decades to go.”   

Updated to reflect the latest regulatory filing figures on assets under management.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Pantera

Points fatigue is real. What started as a nice-to-have bonus for traveling has ballooned into a sprawl of rewards programs and arcane conversions that requires an advanced degree in statistics to manage. 

Brian Kelly made a whole career off the cottage industry, parlaying a side hustle of maximizing credit card and travel rewards into a blog, The Points Guy, that became a verifiable franchise. Now he’s arguing that the points system has jumped the shark. Alongside Lerer Hippeau and Slow Ventures, he’s backing the New York-based startup Journey in a $7.7 million seed round to set it back on the right track. 

Maybe this is too much of a first-world problem to care about, but I’m sure plenty of this newsletter’s readers were distraught when Chase announced an abstruse modification of their Sapphire Reserve credit card, or when Marriott acquired Starwood. Who doesn’t love fake internet money that can occasionally give you an airline upgrade or a free hotel night? 

John Sutton, the cofounder and CEO of Journey, thinks the system needs a revamp. A longtime tech entrepreneur, Sutton met Kelly while serving as the chief digital officer at Red Ventures, a media-focused investment firm that owns brands like Bankrate, Lonely Planet, and eventually, The Points Guy. 

When Sutton left his role in 2021, he took a couple of years off to play professional volleyball before figuring out his next venture. After exploring the idea of investing in short-term rentals like Airbnb properties, he had the idea of building out a loyalty program for travelers. After consulting with Kelly, he realized there was a broader problem—not only of short-term rentals and many independent hotels lacking the infrastructure to create rewards systems, but that points in general were increasingly broken. “They’ve been losing the magic of loyalty,” Kelly told me. “There’s a big opportunity to create a program that people are excited about.”

Journey’s website looks like a cross between a travel platform like Booking.com (an online travel agency, in industry parlance) and an Instagram feed, with lush snippets of desert hideouts and jungle treehouses. On the backend, Journey’s small team curates properties, now totaling more than 1,500 from around the world, that want to participate in their loyalty program—a combination of independent hotels and rental properties. Sutton says they’re not looking for certain price points (with properties ranging from several hundred to many thousand dollars per night) or stars, but whether they’ve “created something special that has a story to tell” (you can check out their portal, which just launched, to judge for yourself).

The upshot for visitors, Sutton and Kelly argue, is that the system is straightforward: You earn five points per dollar spent if you book directly through their platform, with each point worth about two cents, equating to a 10% rebate, which can be instantly redeemed during stays. “Our program is engineered so that you’re not being taken advantage of,” Kelly said.

Journey is the type of consumer-forward, design-first tech product that you don’t see much anymore—a simple concept executed with flair. But this being 2025, there is AI involved, of course. The company has built tools that track visitor preferences and behavior, like whether they’d prefer to be greeted with red wine or mineral water, to help property managers customize the experience. And Journey is also building out a platform for influencers like Kelly that matches them with properties. Eventually, the goal is to build out AI agents that will help tourists. Sutton says it will make platforms like Expedia, where you find a hotel by searching for the top 10 hotels in Paris, look antiquated.

“Travelers will be on a trust journey with us,” he told me.  

Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: [email protected]

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Journey

On Thursday, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Paul Atkins delivered an address signaling a new era for the top regulator. After the SEC spent years combating the blockchain industry through enforcement actions, the newly appointed Atkins announced an initiative dubbed “Project Crypto” that will turn the U.S. into the “crypto capital of the world.”

Atkins’ speech comes just a day after the White House released a 166-page report outlining its own approach to regulating the crypto industry, and just over three months into his tenure leading the top financial regulator. Atkins has repeatedly signaled he plans to take a markedly different approach to crypto regulation than his predecessor, Gary Gensler, who was widely reviled by the industry.

In his Thursday address, Atkins laid out a series of priorities for SEC staff, including drafting “clear and simple rules of the road” for different crypto behavior, including custody and trading, as well as allowing intermediaries like exchanges to become “super-apps” that offer a broad range of services.

“When our regulatory posture is calibrated to meet innovation with thoughtfulness rather than fear, America’s leadership position has only grown stronger,” Atkins said.

The new SEC

Atkin’s speech on Thursday reflected the most explicit overview to date of the agency’s new approach. It comes as crypto dominates the headlines, with Bitcoin reaching record highs and Fortune 500 companies exploring blockchain projects.

In his address, Atkins detailed the top initiatives for his staff: bringing crypto activity back to the U.S. after many companies fled under Gensler, modernizing the SEC’s custody requirements for companies that want to hold digital assets, and allowing firms to experiment with new types of on-chain technology, such as “tokenizing” equities, or creating blockchain versions of assets like stocks and money market funds.

“Under my leadership, the Commission will encourage our nation’s builders rather than constrain them with red tape and one-size-fits-all rules,” Atkins said.

The challenge for the new chair will be establishing its own rules as Congress continues to debate broad legislation that would regulate the market structure of digital assets, which governs how cryptocurrencies can be issued and managed. While the House passed its own version of a bill, the Senate has yet to signal its own approach.

A sharp break from the Gensler era

Under Gensler, the SEC cracked down on top crypto companies such as Coinbase and Gemini, arguing that they were operating outside of long-established securities laws and presenting threats to consumers—a reaction, in part, to the high-profile collapses of projects such as Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX in 2022.

Aggrieved by Gensler’s campaign, the crypto industry fought back by raising hundreds of millions of dollars to back pro-blockchain candidates in the 2024 election, including Donald Trump, who embraced the sector on the campaign trail and was swept into office promising to staff his administration with digital asset-friendly officials. Those included Atkins, a former SEC commissioner who served as an advisor to crypto projects after leaving the agency in 2008.

Even before Atkins was sworn in as agency head in April, the SEC began to roll back Gensler’s actions, with the reversal led by Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has adopted the moniker “crypto mom” for her open stance toward the industry. That included dropping a series of lawsuits against companies such as Coinbase and launching an agency-wide effort to engage in new rulemaking.

Gensler sympathizers in D.C. are likely to raise alarm bells that a lax approach to crypto will usher in a new era of fraud and collapses like FTX. “As happened when [Atkins] was an SEC Commissioner from 2002-2008, Wall Street’s megafirms and politically favored companies will be protected while investors will be left to protect themselves,” said Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the consumer advocacy organization Better Markets, when Atkins was sworn in.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Jonathan Levin comes across as an Oxford scholar with his beard, spectacles, and plummy English accent. And indeed that’s what he was when the conversation in the pub one night turned to Bitcoin and, before long, drew him into a world of cops, hitmen and a global web of cybercrime. Today, Levin is the CEO of Chainalysis, one of the world’s pre-eminent crypto forensic firms, and whose origins he shared on the latest episode of Fortune’s Crypto Playbook podcast. 

When Levin co-founded Chainalysis in 2014, most people still hadn’t heard of Bitcoin and far fewer understood the workings of a blockchain. That included nearly everyone in law enforcement. That began to change, however, when special agents began investigating so-called dark web sites where a wide variety of illicit goods and services could be bought and paid for using Bitcoin.

Soon, Levin’s startup had its first customer: the U.S. agency known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Agents at the ATF asked Levin to come over from England and show them how Bitcoin—far from being anonymous—left an indelible trail as money moved from wallet to wallet, providing clues about the location and often the identity of criminal actors.

Chainalysis’s help tracing the steps of would-be hitmen helped the company land its first contracts, which Levin says were paid for as a credit card expense rather than as part of a full-blown contract. Business really took off, however, when the startup showed U.S. law enforcement how its tracing tools could help identify the perpetrators of the Mt. Gox hack, a notorious event in the early days of crypto that saw Russian criminals make off with a good portion of Bitcoin then in circulation.

“We helped them figure out where the money had gone, and when we figured out that the money had actually been stolen from the exchange, obviously, the law enforcement agencies in the United States took a great interest in figuring out where that money went and how was it laundered,” Levin recalls.

Today, Chainalysis has teams on the ground in over 30 countries, and works with around 330 government agencies around the world. The firm also has a thriving line of business catering to the private sector, helping companies with compliance and, more generally, keeping bad guys off their platforms. All of this has helped Chainalysis raise over $536 million in funding, and achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation that puts it in position to go public. 

The world of crypto has changed dramatically since Levin helped ATF agents chase hitmen on the dark web. Most obviously, it is not viewed primarily as a tool for criminals, but instead as a mainstream technology used by banks, brokerages and Fortune 500 companies. The criminal element still remains, however, and the tactics of bad actors have become more sophisticated, meaning the blockchain detective work of firms like Chainalysis remains essential as ever. 

Just three days after his January inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order that he had promised on the campaign trail, establishing a digital assets working group comprised of top administration figures that would usher in a new era for crypto in the U.S.

On Wednesday, the group—which includes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, and other leading officials—released a 166-page report detailing the administration’s new approach, which Trump pledged would be a departure from his predecessor, President Biden, who cracked down on the blockchain industry.

The report outlines different priority areas for the White House moving forward, from enacting rulemaking laid out in the Genius Act, a bill establishing regulation for stablecoins passed by Congress earlier in July, to modernizing anti-money laundering rules.

In a press briefing call on Wednesday, senior administration figures touted the report as the “most comprehensive product that’s ever been produced in regards to digital assets.” But as Congress debates an ambitious bill to create guardrails around cryptocurrencies and exchanges, and federal agencies deliberate on how to police the sector, the White House’s work is just beginning.

Search for clarity

While Trump has fully embraced the role of the crypto president, Wednesday’s report is not the first from the White House. The Biden administration released its own back in September 2022, just weeks before the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX.

The Biden report presaged a period of enforcement actions from agencies including the Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission against top crypto companies, including Coinbase. In response, the blockchain industry mounted a campaign to elect pro-crypto politicians, replete with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations.

It proved to be a success, with Trump promising a raft of crypto policies, including a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the pardon of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, and crypto legislation. He has already fulfilled many of the pledges, with Wednesday’s report capping off a flurry of executive orders that he signed right after taking office. The composition of the working group, filled with pro-crypto officials, reflects the massive sea change from the Biden administration.

While a major win for the crypto industry, the report leaves still leaves open certain questions, including ones related to the future scope of the federal government’s crypto reserve. In the press call, one official said that the report is focused on a regulatory framework rather than the reserve, and said that more information should be coming soon.

The report also acknowledges the limitations posed by the reality that Congress has yet to pass a market structure bill, which would establish more comprehensive regulation for the issuance of cryptocurrencies, as well as the operation of exchanges like Coinbase. While the report encourages the SEC and CFTC to provide more clarity on key functions like registration, custody, and trading, many market participants will remain in limbo while Congress continues to debate legislation.

Though the Senate and House of Representatives were able to agree on a stablecoin bill, the looming market structure bill will likely remain more of a challenge. The senior Trump administration officials argued that the House version—the Clarity Act—has received bipartisan support, with the report pointing to the bill as a “guiding star” for market structure.

“They’ve built the proper foundation for getting this home,” the official added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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