Aya Kantorovich and the trouble with trust

The week Aya Kantorovich and Alexandre Elkrief closed their seed round, FTX collapsed. It was November 2022, and the pair were raising money for a business that would help institutions handle digital assets. The industry had supplied an unusually forceful demonstration of why their idea might be needed. It had also made asking for money rather awkward.

Their company was called Fractal. It would become August, with Kantorovich and Elkrief as co-founders and co-CEOs. They had begun working on it before FTX failed. The collapse sharpened an existing concern: a financial platform could show a reassuring balance while leaving a customer unable to judge what was happening underneath.

Kantorovich had come from FalconX, where she helped build the institutional trading business. She knew the customers, the operational demands and the vocabulary. Now she was helping design an answer to a question that a glossy dashboard could conceal: what, exactly, are you trusting?

A diplomat takes a different route

Her first imagined profession involved a different sort of negotiation. Growing up, Kantorovich wanted to be a diplomat. At George Washington University, she studied international affairs and finance. By her third year, the machinery of government was testing her enthusiasm. “I wanted solutions faster,” she recalled.

After graduation in 2016, she worked in banking and capital markets consulting at Navigant. An early role at research company Tegus followed. She has described being its first hire and getting her first experience of building a business from the ground up. Crypto, which she encountered in 2016, began as an interest alongside work.

The career change did not arrive with a childhood prophecy about Bitcoin. There was a student weighing bureaucracy, a graduate trying consulting, and an early employee discovering that building something suited her. The finance degree gave her one set of tools. The international affairs degree suggested a wider field of problems.

Before the vault, a box

There was also Jewdash, a venture she created with her sister. After leaving university, Kantorovich found that sustaining familiar Jewish celebrations outside an established campus community could be difficult. Her sister, at UMass Amherst, was encountering her own version of the problem. They had grown up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where access had been an issue too.

The proposed solution was a monthly subscription box containing Jewish gifts and food. The sisters also wanted to work with organizations and support communal celebrations. A doorstep delivery was a practical way to bring traditions closer to people who were having trouble finding them.

Challah and collateral belong in different conversations, preferably at different tables. Still, the earlier venture offers a useful way into Kantorovich’s later work. She had already tried building a business around the distance between something people valued and their ability to reach it. That interest in access predates the trading desk.

The education of a trading desk

In 2018, Kantorovich joined Pantera Capital as an associate. She moved to FalconX in 2019 and became its head of institutional coverage. The work placed her close to institutions trying to participate in a market whose liquidity was spread across venues and countries.

She helped build a FalconX trading desk that supported more than 700 clients. By the time her university recognized her inclusion on the 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list, it could point to that work as a substantial chapter before her own company. There is a difference between having a theory about institutional customers and answering their requests.

In June 2021, she was already describing how market trouble could compound: liquidations on offshore venues, further forced selling, and difficulties getting onto trading platforms. When money could not move freely, falling prices became harder to contain. These were questions about the operation of a market, as much as opinions about the assets being traded.

Her departure from FalconX was announced in October 2022. Moving from an early executive role to co-founder meant taking responsibility for which of those problems her own company would choose to solve.

Make the balance explain itself

August’s work sits in the territory called prime brokerage: the services around trading, borrowing, collateral and settlement that large investors need. Its approach puts more of that machinery on-chain, using smart-contract accounts, pricing and risk tools, and execution software.

The appeal is concrete. A client should be able to monitor positions and counterparty exposure, manage collateral and understand how transactions are being handled. August’s website describes automated lending operations and reporting designed for administrators and auditors. These are the less photogenic parts of finance. They become interesting very quickly when they stop working.

In March 2025, August announced a $10 million Series A led by Dragonfly. The company reported more than $7 billion in monthly transaction volume and more than $400 million in loans originated over the preceding year. Kantorovich’s stated priorities were “transparency and risk management.”

The figures measure different things. Trading volume records activity passing through a system; loans originated describe credit arranged over a period. Neither is company revenue. Keeping those distinctions intact is part of taking an infrastructure business seriously. A big number deserves a noun, a date and a little scrutiny.

The customer has enough homework

Upshift extended the team’s work to vault products and a broader audience. It publicly emerged from stealth in April 2025, with roughly $250 million in deposits reported at the time. The premise addressed an everyday difficulty of decentralized finance: opportunities were spread across many systems, and keeping up could become a job in itself.

As the product developed, distribution became central. Rather than requiring every user to arrive at a new destination, Upshift could supply infrastructure to wallets, exchanges and financial apps. In January 2026, Kantorovich announced work with Tria and Sentora: Upshift provided vault infrastructure for Tria’s BTC and USDC Earn products, while Sentora curated strategies.

That division of labor matters. The company supplying the application, the team managing a strategy and the infrastructure underneath it can perform different roles. Users still need to understand the product and its risks, but they need not personally assemble every connection that makes it function.

In an April 2026 conversation, she described the choice as bringing products to the places users already visit. There is a comic nickname for the arrangement: the DeFi mullet. The joke depends on keeping the elaborate business out of the customer’s face. It is a useful design brief, even for people who decline the haircut.

The current Upshift offering lets partners configure vaults, choose managers and distribute products through an SDK or API. Its website lists both tokenized money-market products and DeFi strategies, with different risk levels. As of October 2026, it reports more than $500 million in total deposits and 66,000 depositors. Those are company figures, describing a business that has moved beyond its initial introduction.

The habits behind the machinery

Kantorovich’s approach to founding has some distinctly practical details. In 2023, she talked about the advantage of already knowing people across the industry: which lawyers to call, which providers could handle checks on customers and businesses, and how to get work done without buying every service afresh. Existing relationships could save a young company both time and money.

She also wanted more women on founding and leadership teams. Having noticed how few female founders she encountered at Pantera, she saw senior women inside a company as a reason other women might feel more comfortable applying. Culture, in that account, begins with decisions about who can picture themselves joining.

Her own management advice includes a compact phrase: “Delegation is a superpower.” In February 2025, she emphasized giving colleagues the authority to execute without constant supervision. She also explained the company’s name: August carried the meaning of honorable and respected. It was an aspiration with operational consequences.

“Delegation is a superpower.”

Aya Kantorovich · February 2025

Outside the organization chart, she has described setting quarterly goals for herself and taking a personal retreat to review her progress. The former would-be diplomat had found another institution to hold accountable: herself. Her reading tastes offer a softer counterpoint. The Alchemist remained a favorite when she was asked again in 2025, alongside more recent nonfiction.

A bigger market, fewer public quarrels

By April 2026, Kantorovich was also making a case for more cooperation among crypto prime brokers. Traditional financial firms can be one another’s clients even while competing. She wanted the crypto industry to take that interdependence seriously and spend less energy on public sparring.

“The goal is to expand the market,” she said. Her argument was that the range of possible uses exceeded what one or two businesses could serve. Institutions evaluating infrastructure had other concerns than the rivalries playing out on social media.

That position fits the work she has chosen: connections between customers, trading venues, managers and financial products. Each connection requires someone to think about the details. Kantorovich has spent much of her career getting closer to those details. The business she now runs asks customers to inspect more of them, too.