pantera-capital
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The Chicago Startup That Wants to Make Waiting for Money Feel as Weird as Waiting for a Fax
Daniel Lev and Benjamin Meeder built a payment layer on stablecoins instead of the batch files banks still run on. Two years in, Pantera wrote a $25M check and revenue is up 23x.
Fin
Fin is a New York-based stablecoin payments company building a mobile app for high-value, global, and instant money movement. Founded by ex-Citadel engineers Ian Krotinsky and Aashiq Dheeraj - the team behind TipLink - Fin unifies balances into USDC and lets users and businesses send millions of dollars in near real time to other Fin users, bank accounts, or crypto wallets. In December 2025 it raised a $17M Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating, to launch a product aimed at import/export businesses and high-value transfers that traditional banks handle slowly and expensively.
Ian Krotinsky
Ian Krotinsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fin, a New York based payments company that uses stablecoin infrastructure to move large sums of money instantly across borders. A former quantitative portfolio manager and trader at Citadel, he and co-founder Aashiq Dheeraj first built TipLink, a tool for sending crypto with a link, before rebranding around a broader ambition: to build the payments app of the future for high-value transfers. In December 2025 the company raised a $17 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating.
Nathan Allman
Nathan Allman was the founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, the firm that did more than almost anyone to drag tokenized U.S. Treasuries from a whitepaper idea into a multi-billion-dollar reality. A Brown graduate and former Goldman Sachs digital-assets trader, he left Wall Street in early 2021 to build what he framed as a decentralized investment bank, betting that boring, yield-bearing, regulation-aware products - not speculation - would be how traditional finance finally moved on-chain. Under his watch Ondo grew to roughly $3.5 billion in total value locked, launching USDY, OUSG, Ondo Global Markets and the institution-focused Ondo Chain. He died unexpectedly in May 2026.
Zain Zaidi
Zain Zaidi is the co-founder and CEO of TransCrypts, a blockchain-powered credential and employment verification platform he started after struggling to access his own college transcript as an SJSU student. Backed by Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, and Techstars, he has grown the company to 450+ enterprise clients and 4 million users across 9 countries, raised $18M+, launched JustScreen (the world's first free background check service), and earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2026 — all before turning 30. His platform has also helped over 4,000 Ukrainian refugees access medical records.