Pantera Research Lab

AI agents are redefining the narrative economy, taking on a role once held by human influencers as they shape and amplify trends that drive market sentiment. Unlike passive content distributors, these agents can leverage data-driven insights to detect emerging trends, respond in real-time, and craft targeted narratives that rally attention around specific crypto sectors or tokens.

We report findings from Pantera Capital's cross-sectional survey of blockchain industry compensation. This survey, with 502 respondents from the general population, is the largest of its kind to date. Our analysis finds that gender wage differentials among crypto employees are the reverse of what is normally observed - in our sample women outearn men.

For most people, unexpected disruptions in supply chains have little upside. However, for researchers, these disruptions offer valuable opportunities to understand market dynamics that are otherwise hard to disentangle. For instance, because prices and quantities are the observed outcomes of supply and demand, it's hard to know whether supply, demand, or both have an impact. This gives rise to the old saying don't reason from a price change. But when one or the other factor suddenly changes in a predictable way, sometimes you can.

A classic story in Silicon Valley startup lore is Paypal’s decision to pay people $10 to use their product. The reasoning was that if you could pay people to join eventually the network value would be sufficiently high that new people would join for free and you could stop paying. It certainly seemed to work, as PayPal was able to stop paying and continue growing, thereby bootstrapping its network effects.