Pantera president: Fundamentals matter to large investors
Pantera president: Fundamentals matter to large investors
Jackson Alton HinkleFri, October 23, 2026 at 11:35 PM UTC
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Pantera Capital President Scott Lawin wants crypto held to the same test as stocks.
Investors have long struggled to value tokens because there was rarely a clear way to link a network’s success to its token without revenue or other fundamentals, like those in stock markets.
That is why Pantera built the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index with S&P Dow Jones Indices, announced on July 21, 2026, using only tokens that generate revenue.
“A lot of institutional investors, as they’re learning about the space, said, how do we value these things?” Lawin said in an interview at TOKEN2049.
A benchmark built on revenue
The index does not rank tokens by size. It admits only protocols with positive revenue, verified with on-chain data from Artemis.
It launched with 18 constituents, including Hyperliquid, Solana and Aave.
Those 18 had more than $3 billion in annualized revenue over the trailing two quarters, according to Pantera.
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“Fundamentals do ultimately matter to large investors,” Lawin said. “We brought that idea to Standard & Poor’s, and we said, hey, we think this can be the S&P 500 of the crypto token world.”
Lawin called it “the first index that (S&P) have ever co-branded.”
Bitcoin gets left behind
Bitcoin is not in the index, which admits only tokens with protocol revenue.
Pantera says a back-test over the last five years beat S&P’s broad crypto index, with or without Bitcoin. Those results are hypothetical, not actual performance.
The exclusion stands out because Pantera founder Dan Morehead has said he remains bullish on Bitcoin.
When institutions ask how to value a token, Lawin’s answer is the one Wall Street gives for any stock: show the revenue.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Oct 23, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Source: “AOL Money”
