Pantera Capital: Why did we invest in Surf?

Author: Jay Yu Source: @0xfishylosopher Translation: Shan Ouba, Jinse Finance

Industry Pain Points

Currently, we believe the cryptocurrency industry is facing a huge challenge in popularizing knowledge—obscure technical jargon and a unique industry subculture deter the general public. Mainstream AI products often struggle to keep up with the pace of development in the crypto field: even with tool-calling functions, many off-the-shelf AI agents, including GPT-5, Grok 4, and Claude Opus, can only output rough project summaries; when asked specific data-related questions, such as "query the timestamp of Ethereum block 19,560,000" or "how many stETH were newly minted on December 31, 2024, UTC," their accuracy rate is less than 70%.

The image shows the accuracy performance of mainstream AI models in the CAIA cryptocurrency query benchmark test. This directly leads to current on-chain research being highly fragmented and time-consuming: practitioners need to constantly monitor exchange charts for analysis, manually write application programming interfaces (APIs), and also write potentially vulnerable Dune query statements. As cryptocurrency adoption continues to increase, this inefficient research model clearly cannot achieve scalability. Surf was born out of necessity. The emergence of Surf AI has completely changed this landscape. This product uses a familiar chatbot interface, allowing users to simply enter any cryptocurrency-related question—whether it's price trends, project fundamentals, whale wallet tracking, or anything else—to receive a high-quality, in-depth research report. Behind the seemingly simple product interface, Surf has overcome several challenging technical hurdles in the field of artificial intelligence. In the high-risk environment of cryptocurrency, a single token code may correspond to hundreds of different contract addresses, and a tiny error could result in the loss of millions of dollars. Faced with such challenges, Surf needs to address key issues such as model illusion, data accuracy verification, and cross-validation across multiple data sources. To this end, Surf has innovatively launched a transparent multi-agent inference system that integrates social sentiment analysis, technical analysis, and on-chain tracking capabilities to uncover potential excess returns in the "high noise, low signal" environment of cryptocurrency data. This product combines the user-friendly experience of mainstream AI chatbots with the accuracy of professional data tools such as Dune and Dexscreener.

Core Team Introduction

Ryan, Shiyu, Wilson, and Zhimao are all serial entrepreneurs. They possess not only strong technical backgrounds—having worked at BitTorrent, Instagram, and Google—but also keen consumer-level product thinking, enabling them to drive rapid product iteration at the Surf level. The team has previously built and successfully sold consumer-grade internet companies such as DLive, as well as Web3 companies such as Cyber. Furthermore, Surf's technical team comprises numerous PhDs and AI engineers from top laboratories, including winners of international Olympiads and research talents who have won major awards in computer vision and ZK Bridges. Investment Philosophy: Within just a few months of its launch, Surf has experienced explosive user growth, with registered users exceeding 80,000. This includes institutional investors validating investment logic and grassroots community users seeking in-depth understanding of the token market. During product testing and user feedback collection, we were pleasantly surprised to find that ordinary users' enthusiasm for the product stemmed entirely from spontaneous word-of-mouth, with many users stating that Surf has become an indispensable tool in their daily workflow. Looking ahead, we firmly believe that Surf will become the authoritative interactive portal in the field of cryptocurrency intelligent analysis—a place where investors, developers, and community members can jointly gain insights into the true dynamics of the industry. By combining an intuitive user experience with verifiable data to deliver concise and actionable analytical insights, Surf significantly lowers the technical barrier to understanding cryptocurrencies for ordinary people, enabling more people to truly participate in the industry. At Pantera, we firmly believe that better information leads to more informed decision-making, ultimately driving the market in a healthier direction. Surf is a practitioner of this vision, and we are honored to lead this $15 million funding round and work hand-in-hand with the Surf team. Let's make the cryptocurrency industry smarter through intelligent questioning.