Pantera Portfolio Spotlight :: April 2026
April 14, 2026
Welcome to Portfolio Spotlight, Pantera Capital’s series highlighting portfolio companies at key inflection points and what those moments reveal about where progress is compounding.
Blockchain technology has reached an inflection point. Some of the world’s largest financial institutions are rolling out tokenization, exploring 24/5 and 24/7 trading, while decentralized identity is taking on new urgency in the age of AI.
This edition comes at a time when market signals are mixed and volatility remains elevated across asset classes. Yet within our portfolio, companies continue to execute, take share, and build through the cycle. In this issue, we highlight four companies at different stages and across different parts of the stack: Figure, Ondo, Surf, and M0.
Let’s get into it.
Figure :: AI-Driven Blockchain Infrastructure for Credit and Capital Markets
Figure, which emerged as one of 2025’s best-performing IPOs, reached a defining milestone with its $787 million Nasdaq listing in September. As one of four Pantera portfolio companies to go public that year, Figure shares priced above range, achieving a first-day market capitalization of approximately $6.6 billion.
Operating at the intersection of AI and blockchain, Figure is redefining the movement of assets. Founded in 2018 by Mike Cagney and June Ou and helmed by CEO Michael Tannenbaum, the company leveraged its early success in blockchain-based HELOCs to build a foundational highway for capital markets. This infrastructure has recently expanded into auto lending, further scaling Figure’s ecosystem to streamline how credit is originated and financed.
To date, Figure has originated over $22 billion in loans and facilitated more than $50 billion in public blockchain transactions. The platform’s growth is propelled by fast-growing components, including Figure Connect, a premier consumer credit marketplace, and Democratized Prime, an on-chain lend-borrow marketplace.
The Figure ecosystem is supported by proprietary technology and regulated financial products, including:
- DART (Digital Asset Registry Technology): A streamlined solution for asset custody and lien perfection.
- $YLDS: An SEC-registered, yield-bearing stablecoin issued by a tokenized face-amount certificate company (a type of registered investment company).
Beyond credit, Figure has extended into equity market infrastructure to enable direct stock lending, removing the friction and costs of traditional intermediaries. Today, Figure is the market leader in Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization, commanding a 75% market share.
Ondo:: Tokenized Finance at Institutional Scale
Bringing real-world assets on-chain has been one of crypto’s most talked-about ideas and one of its hardest to actually build. Ondo Finance is proving it can be done.
Ondo bridges traditional finance and blockchain infrastructure by tokenizing institutional-grade financial products, reducing friction in capital markets while improving accessibility and operational efficiency. Nowhere is that clearer than in Ondo’s new partnership with Franklin Templeton. The 79-year-old asset manager, which oversees $1.7 trillion in AUM, is working with Ondo to tokenize five of its ETFs spanning U.S. equities, fixed income, and gold. Available 24/7 through crypto wallets, the tokens can be posted as DeFi collateral, bypassing the brokerage accounts and limited trading hours that have defined fund investing for decades.
The rollout begins in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America, with U.S. availability awaiting further regulatory clarity. When an asset manager of that size chooses Ondo’s infrastructure to go on-chain, every institution watching now has a template to follow.
Ondo’s momentum is hard to ignore. Ondo Global Markets launched in September 2025 and has since drawn more than $700 million in TVL and handled over $13 billion in trades, capturing roughly 70% of the tokenized equity market.
Pantera has backed Ondo since its seed round and co-led the Series A alongside Founders Fund. That conviction deepened in July 2025 with the launch of Ondo Catalyst, a $250 million strategic initiative backed by Pantera to invest in real-world asset tokenization projects.
▶ Watch the full conversation on Pantera’s Stateful Podcast: Capital Markets Are Moving Onchain with Franklin Templeton & Ondo Finance
Surf AI :: The AI Research Tool for Digital Assets
Ask ChatGPT to track a token’s on-chain activity or to create a dashboard about DeFi protocol’s risk profile and you’ll quickly hit a wall.
General-purpose AI models weren’t built for crypto as they hallucinate data, miss context, and lack the real-time market awareness that serious research demands. Surf is purpose-built to fill that gap.
The platform is the first AI model designed specifically for digital asset research, combining proprietary models with on-chain data from over 40 blockchain networks, real-time social sentiment analysis, and live updated prediction market data. In a benchmark co-developed with Princeton University, Surf outperformed ChatGPT and Grok by 4x on crypto-specific tasks with fewer hallucinations, more reliable references, and meaningfully better analytical output.
In December, Surf raised $15 million led by Pantera, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Digital Currency Group. Since launching publicly in September, the platform has attracted over 300,000 users, generated more than one million research reports, and is growing at 50% month-over-month and already producing $2 million in subscription revenue with a target of $10 million by year-end 2026.
Click here to try Surf and receive 2000 studio credits
M0 :: The Infrastructure Layer for Stablecoins
A growing number of platforms — including MetaMask, MoonPay, and Noble — are launching their own branded stablecoins. M0 is building the shared infrastructure making it possible.
Founded in 2023 by Luca Prosperi and Gregory Di Prisco — both veterans of MakerDAO — M0 provides the rails that let developers launch application-specific stablecoins without assembling the full issuance stack from scratch. The platform separates reserve management from programmability: regulated entities handle the reserves, while builders control how their stablecoins function.
The model is already attracting marquee partners. MetaMask launched mUSD, the first stablecoin created by a self-custodial wallet, built on M0’s infrastructure with Bridge (now part of Stripe) as the issuer. In February 2026, MoonPay and M0 introduced PYUSDx, a framework for creating application-specific stablecoins backed by PayPal USD.
Pantera led the seed round for M0 in 2023. M0 then raised a $40 million Series B in August 2025 led by Polychain Capital and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Pantera and Bain Capital Crypto, bringing total funding to approximately $100 million.
Looking Ahead
The companies in this edition sit at different points across the stack, but they share a common thread: building infrastructure that is earning adoption from consumers, institutions and major platforms. From credit markets to tokenized funds to AI-driven research to stablecoin rails, the pattern is the same. Blockchain is steadily becoming a core layer underneath financial services. There are more stories like these across the Pantera portfolio, and we look forward to sharing them.
The Pantera Team
This material has been prepared by Pantera Capital Partners LP (together with its affiliates, “Pantera”) for informational purposes only and is intended exclusively for the use of the person to whom it was delivered. It is not an offer or solicitation and may not be used or relied upon in connection with any offer or solicitation, with respect to the Fund or any other future Pantera investment partnership. This material is confidential, proprietary and a trade secret of Pantera. By acceptance hereof, you (and your employees and affiliates) agree not to release or reveal it (or any of the information in it) to any third party and, upon request from Pantera, will return or destroy such material and all copies thereof. This material does not constitute financial, investment, tax or legal advice (or an offer of such advisory services) and should not be viewed as advice or recommendations (or an offer of advisory services). The holdings identified do not represent all of the securities purchased, sold or recommended for advisory clients. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Certain information (including certain forward-looking statements and information) has been obtained from published sources and/or prepared by other parties, which in certain cases has not been updated through the date hereof. While such sources are believed to be reliable, neither Pantera and any general partner affiliated with Pantera or any of its respective directors, officers, employees, partners, members, shareholders, or their affiliates, or any other person, assumes any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information.