Dan Morehead is founder and CEO of Pantera Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm focusing on bitcoin and other digital currencies.^[1]

Career

Morehead founded Pantera Capital in 2003, originally focusing on global macro hedge-fund investments.  Pantera shifted its focus exclusively to bitcoin and other digital currencies when it partnered with Fortress Investment Group, Benchmark and Ribbit Capital to launch an investment fund, Pantera Bitcoin Partners LLC.  Pantera controls the fund while the other firms became minority equity partners.

Prior to founding Pantera, Morehead was Chief Financial Officer and head of macro trading at Tiger Management. Morehead previously held executive roles at Deutsche Bank in London, Bankers Trust, and Goldman Sachs. He founded and was CEO of Atriax, an electronic foreign exchange platform,  which closed in 2002  amid controversy. In 2008 he was quoted as saying "We are in the process of trying to figure out if the world is coming to an end (which we still doubt)" before the global financial metldown which resulted in the shutdown of Pantera capital as a Hedge Fund in early 2009.

Morehead led funding in and is on the board of directors at Bitstamp,  which as of May 2015 is the fourth-largest bitcoin exchange,  and BitPesa, a Nairobi-based startup focusing on remittances.^[2]

When Pantera Capital’s BitPesa investment was made public, Morehead said:

People talk about the 5 billion people in the developing world as being unbanked, and it’s like calling them un-landlined — they skipped the whole landline thing and went straight to mobile phones. I think for most purposes they’re going to skip what we call traditional banking and go straight to mobile money.

Education

Morehead received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1987 and receiving the Carmichael Prize for outstanding thesis.