Pantera Capital Partner: General-Purpose Chains are 'Dead'
Mason Nystrom of Pantera Capital stated that new general-purpose blockchains are no longer an investable thesis for venture capital. He argued, "Building a general-purpose chain today is dead on arrival. The only chains that will succeed are application-focused and opinionated about their use case." This view highlights a broader market trend favoring specialized, vertical-specific blockchains like Base and Hyperliquid over generic Layer 1s.
- The modular blockchain framework, Cosmos, has become a preferred platform for institutional-grade real-world asset (RWA) tokenization projects. For instance, MANTRA is a purpose-built Layer 1 on Cosmos for RWAs, and Provenance, another Cosmos chain, powers Figure's home equity lending platform. As of early 2025, the tokenized RWA market had grown 455% over the previous three years to approximately $17.8 billion. - Pantera Capital recently led an $11.5 million Series A funding round for Based, a "SuperApp" for trading and payments built on Hyperliquid's application-specific blockchain. This investment highlights venture capital's growing interest in the application and user-interface layers built on top of specialized chains. Pantera's portfolio also includes other application-specific infrastructure plays. - Hyperliquid, a derivatives-focused Layer 1 blockchain, has seen explosive growth, demonstrating the success of the app-specific model. Its Total Value Locked (TVL) grew over 1000% in a single month after its token launch to over $3.2 billion, and its 24-hour trading volume has at times exceeded $10 billion. As of mid-2025, Hyperliquid captured over 73% of the trading volume on decentralized perpetual exchanges. - The Cosmos SDK, a toolkit for building custom blockchains, is also gaining traction for AI-focused crypto projects. Projects like Fetch.ai use the SDK to build networks that can handle the high transaction throughput required for AI computations and autonomous agents, a task for which general-purpose chains are often ill-suited. - While specialized chains are gaining momentum, well-funded new general-purpose Layer 1s are still emerging. For example, Monad Labs raised $225 million to build a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1, and Berachain raised $100 million for its modular blockchain platform, indicating that the thesis for new general-purpose chains is not entirely dead. - The debate between specialized and general-purpose chains is part of a broader architectural discussion: modular vs. monolithic blockchains. Modular designs, like app-chains, separate core functions like execution and settlement, offering developers more flexibility. In contrast, monolithic chains like Solana handle all tasks on a single layer, which can simplify development but may lead to congestion. - Institutional players are increasingly using public blockchains for tokenization. BNP Paribas, for instance, issued a tokenized money market fund share class on the public Ethereum network, using a permissioned model to ensure only eligible participants can hold the tokens. This hybrid approach leverages the security of a general-purpose chain while maintaining control for institutional use cases. - The Layer 2 network Base, built by Coinbase, exemplifies a specialized approach on top of a general-purpose chain. Its TVL grew from zero to a peak of over $5.3 billion in just over two years, and its monthly active users reached an all-time high of nearly 35 million in June 2025. This indicates strong market appetite for application-focused environments, even when they are built upon existing Layer 1s.
