MoneyGram Is Bringing Stablecoins to 60 Million Users with M0

MoneyGram Is Bringing Stablecoins to 60 Million Users with M0

Mason Nystrom sits down with Anthony Soohoo (MoneyGram) and Luca Prosperi (M0) to explore the future of money creation and movement, why stablecoins are not the product but the foundation, and how MoneyGram's 60 million customers are about to get access to financial services they have never had before. Having a stablecoin is not the differentiator. What you need to do is build kickass products and services on top of it. That is what unlocks adoption. MoneyGram and M0 are building those products together with MGUSD, a stablecoin purpose-built for MoneyGram's global network of 60 million active customers. Key Topics: - Why MoneyGram built its own stablecoin MGUSD instead of integrating USDC or USDT: control over economics, features, and the ability to verticalize like Apple did with its chips - M0's infrastructure play: building the smart contract layer that powers, connects, and enables hundreds of different tokenized dollar platforms, from MoneyGram to PayPal and Visa - Just having a stablecoin is not the differentiator: distribution wins, and why the App Store analogy explains why stablecoin adoption is really about what you build on top - The moats that survive AI and stablecoins: distribution at scale, regulatory relationships, trust, and the personal connections that no AI can replicate Stablecoin supply forecast: $500B by 2027, $1 trillion by 2030, and why the real inflection point is large-scale platforms like MoneyGram integrating stablecoins into their payment infrastructure, migrating their entire network onto stablecoins The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

Tokenization Is the Next ETF with WisdomTree

Franklin Bi (Pantera Capital) sits down with Jeremy Schwartz, Global CIO, and Maredith Hannon, Head of Business Development for Digital Assets at WisdomTree, to explore why tokenization is doing to ETFs what ETFs did to mutual funds, and how WisdomTree is building the infrastructure to make that happen. WisdomTree has been at the frontier of every major wrapper evolution in asset management. From alternatively-weighted indexes to ETFs, and now to tokenized real world assets on eight public chains. With over $700M in AUM growing 6x year over year, their tokenized money market fund WTGXX is already being used for corporate treasury sweeps, cross-border payroll, and stablecoin reserve management. Key Topics: * The ETF analogy: tokenization is to ETFs what ETFs were to mutual funds, democratizing access from brokerage accounts to smartphones, and WisdomTree has been building for this moment for years * Why public chains over permissioned chains: permissioning belongs at the token level, not the chain level, and the real users are already on public chains * WTGXX in practice: $700M AUM growing 6x year over year, used for corporate treasury sweeps via StableC, cross-border vendor payments, and payroll via Toku and Plume with block-by-block yield accrual * The product roadmap: from money markets and treasuries to equity betas, derivatives, and option income strategies, and why WisdomTree rebalanced 3,000 model portfolios with JP Morgan and Apollo using smart contracts * Rookie mistake and pleasant surprise: trust matters more in crypto than anyone expects, and Europe led the US on crypto ETPs by five years

Why Blockchain VC's are Betting On Korea

Franklin Bi and Jonathan Gieg (Pantera Capital) sit down with Steve Kim and Heechang Kang from Four Pillars Research to discuss why Korea is one of the most important and most misunderstood crypto markets in the world, and why Pantera just led their Series A. Korea has the highest ChatGPT and Claude subscription rate per capita in the world. Kakao Pay just joined the X402 Foundation. Korean pension funds are considering Bitcoin as a portfolio diversification asset. And a new STO legislation passed in January is expected to become a major bridge between crypto and traditional finance. The institutional wave is coming. Key Topics: - Why the West misunderstands Korea: trading volumes overwhelm the narrative, but Korea is actually the world's most aggressive early adopter of new technology, from 5G and open banking to ChatGPT and Claude Code - Agentic commerce in Korea: Kakao and Toss are already building payment rails for the agent era, KakaoPay joined X402, and pay-as-you-go AI payments are on the verge of exploding the same way subscriptions did - The Terra shadow and the builder economy: Terra's collapse devastated Korea's crypto builder culture, but institutional adoption from firms like Mirae  Asset is slowly rebuilding credibility and drawing developers back in - Four Pillars' APAC expansion: from Korea to Japan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia via the Asia Stablecoin Alliance, and why blockchain is the distribution rail that lets Korean fintech companies like Toss finally compete globally 00:00 Pantera Invests in Four Pillars from Seoul 01:00 Why the West Misreads Korea 04:30 AI Adoption and Agentic Commerce in Korea  8:30 Korean Crypto Regulation Before and After 12:10 STO Legislation and the Institutional Wave  16:20 Top Crypto Verticals in the Korean Market  32:00 What Western Companies Should Know Before Coming to Korea  36:40 The Terra Collapse and the Builder Economy  The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

How World ID Is Redefining Internet Identity

Mason Nystrom sits down with three leaders from Tools for Humanity and World ID to explore how proof of human is redefining identity on the internet in the age of AI agents. We are moving from a majority of humans with a few bots to a majority of bots with a few humans. That is not necessarily bad. But it makes knowing who the real humans are more important than ever. World ID is the identity layer built to answer that question at scale, privately, and without collecting your data. Key Topics: - Why proof of human is the foundational layer the agentic internet needs: from public discourse manipulation and catfishing to deepfake wire fraud, the cost of not knowing who is human is rising fast - World ID as a credential stack: Orb verification as the gold standard, Selfie Check as the entry point, and school, work, and national IDs layered on top, all privacy-preserving and held on your own device - Agent delegation and human continuity: how World ID lets your agent book flights, make purchases, and act on your behalf while keeping a verified human accountable for every action via Agent Kit - Why blocking all bots is the wrong answer: how World ID enables good agents to access platforms frictionlessly while bad actors are penalized, and why this unlocks the next wave of consumer agentic use cases - World ID vs Face ID: why uniqueness is the missing piece, how one person with 1,000 phones can fool Face ID but not World ID, and why anonymous verification protects users and partners alike 01:00 Tiago Sada on Proof of Human in the Agent Age 05:40 Scaling to 40 Million Verified Humans 07:07 What Tiago Is Most Excited About Next 08:50 Andy Wang on World as the Identity Layer 10:00 Good Bots vs Bad Bots: Why Blocking All Traffic Is Wrong 13:02 Restaurant Reservations, Scalpers, and Proof of Human 17:00 Tawanda Mahere on What Partners Are Looking For 22:08 The Consumer Value of World ID 23:15 Agent Kit and Human-in-the-Loop Commerce 25:21 World ID vs Face ID: Why Uniqueness Changes Everything 29:00 Orb On Demand and How to Get Verified Today The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

How Tinder Uses World ID to Fight AI Catfishing & Bots

Mason Nystrom sits down with Mark Kantor, Chief Product Officer at Tinder, to discuss how Tinder is partnering with World to bring proof of human verification to 190 countries and combat AI catfishing. The problem: the rise of bots and synthetic content is making it harder and harder to tell who is real online.  On a platform built entirely on human to human connection, that is an existential challenge. Tinder's answer is World ID, already live in Japan and now expanding to the US. Key Topics: * Tinder's World ID integration: how a pilot in Japan cut age verification from 30 minutes to under 2 minutes, and seconds for already-verified users * No more catfishing: how World ID moves toward ensuring the person behind a profile matches their photos * Orders of magnitude improvement: why the 30-minute to 2-minute reduction was far beyond what the team expected * Expanding to 190 countries: Tinder announcing the US rollout and what global scale looks like for World ID * Proof of human plus uniqueness: why Tinder needs to know not just that you are human, but that you only have one account * The line Tinder will not cross: AI doing everything for a user and replacing the human connection entirely * The long-term vision: World building out capabilities so fewer tools are needed to check more boxes The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.