Junior Partner
Pantera CapitalCheck size: No person-specific check size is publicly disclosed. Pantera's published venture strategy typically spans Seed through Series B and aims to lead or co-lead; Joey's own mandate is DeFi and infrastructure rather than a stated ticket size.
Joey treats blockchain as a permissionless, composable technology stack for programming value and human behavior—not merely a digital copy of traditional finance. He is looking for institutional DeFi stacks, novel market structures and Web3 infrastructure primitives with tangible use cases, especially net-new experiences that change user behavior.
Creative, technically competent founders with high conviction, strong opinions, deep target-market expertise and visible obsession with the problem. He values a clear reason for building, independent first-principles thinking, products that exploit genuinely DeFi-native primitives and teams able to learn quickly from transparent onchain data.
No formal pass list is public. His first-person thesis implies skepticism toward projects that only reproduce TradFi onchain, infrastructure without a tangible use case, teams without deep target-market expertise, and products that cannot find or retain product-market fit despite the rapid feedback available from public onchain data.
Email joey.shin@panteracapital.com, which he explicitly publishes for builders. Explain the net-new experience, which user behavior changes, the technical primitive that makes it possible and why the team has earned a strong view of the target market. For DeFi or trading, include market structure, value flow and onchain evidence; for infrastructure, identify the concrete application and user rather than pitching an abstract primitive.
Ask whether the product uses trustless programmability to create an experience or behavior that could not simply be reproduced as a digital version of traditional finance.
Use public onchain activity to test adoption and failure quickly; strong teams should turn that unusually fast feedback loop into product and market learning.
Look for high conviction, strong independent opinions and deep target-market expertise, reinforced by obsession with the reason the product must exist.
Evaluate an infrastructure primitive through the tangible application, market structure or user behavior it makes possible, not technical novelty alone.
Blockchain's opportunity goes beyond recreating traditional finance: permissionless, composable primitives can produce net-new experiences and programmable value, with transparent onchain data accelerating the search for product-market fit.
Meaningful consumer-crypto usage already exists at scale in markets such as Manila, Lagos, Buenos Aires and Hanoi, but is systematically undercounted by U.S.-centric industry narratives.
Oracle update latency creates extractable value that searchers, builders and validators can capture at the expense of protocols and users; OEV mechanisms seek to redirect that value and improve execution.
No podcast appearances are linked yet. Ask Kit to check for interviews that reveal how this investor thinks.
Quote coverage is incomplete. Kit can look for direct comments on markets, founders, and investment criteria.
Joey focuses on DeFi and Web3 infrastructure at Pantera. He previously invested at IOSG Ventures across consumer infrastructure, DeFi, and trading, and began in Web3 through MEV and zero-knowledge research at FranklinDAO.