Portfolio Spotlight :: May 2026
May 21, 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.
Today’s internet is flooded with AI agents acting as humans, and generative models are capable of faking almost any document or face. The verification systems behind humans, credentials, and applications were designed for the pre-AI era.
With the recent progression of the CLARITY Act, crypto now has powerful regulatory tailwinds. The industry is shifting from regulatory ambiguity to a clear framework for digital assets, unlocking institutional capital and giving builders the confidence to ship at full speed. Read the full analysis here.
In this edition, we highlight three Pantera portfolio companies building the new foundation: Alchemy, the developer platform crypto and AI apps run on; World, the proof-of-human network verifying real people across the internet; and TransCrypts the credential layer putting individuals back in control of their own records.
Let’s get into it.
Alchemy :: The Developer Platform Web3 Is Built On
Before Alchemy, shipping a crypto app meant running your own blockchain infrastructure, building data indexers, and stitching together wallets, gas, and transaction tooling before writing a single line of product code. Alchemy turned that fragmented stack into a unified developer platform, letting teams focus on product instead of infrastructure.
The next wave of users won’t be human. AI agents are starting to browse, decide, and transact on behalf of users, and they need infrastructure built for agents not humans clicking through checkout flows.
Alchemy’s answer is AgentPay, a payments layer purpose-built for AI agents. It plugs into the rails agents will use, including Stripe, Visa, American Express, Mastercard, Coinbase, Google, and Tempo, and connects to the merchants agents will transact with, from Amazon and Uber to Shopify, Airbnb, and OpenAI. One integration lets an agent pay, verify, and complete a transaction across the open internet.
In a recent conversation with Alchemy co-founder Joe Lau, Dan Morehead discussed why Pantera sees the convergence of AI and crypto as one of the most important shifts in finance, with autonomous agents creating entirely new transaction rails. Watch the conversation here.
Pantera led Alchemy’s Series A in 2019 and has remained a close partner.
TransCrypts :: Verified Identity and Credentials
Verifying who someone is or what they’ve done still relies on employers calling HR departments, landlords requesting pay stubs or lenders running credit checks. The process is slow, expensive, and increasingly unreliable in a world where AI can generate convincing fake documents, identities, and histories at scale.
TransCrypts is rebuilding that system from the ground up. Its platform allows individuals to own their verified credentials such as employment, income, education, and health records and share them instantly with cryptographic proof. Instead of relying on third parties, verification happens directly, with the individual in control.
How does it work? TransCrypts converts real-world data into tamper-proof, reusable credentials. Each record is encrypted, hashed, and verifiable without exposing underlying data, enabling faster decisions across hiring, lending, and housing while reducing fraud.
TransCrypts is building the infrastructure where verification is instant, portable, and user-controlled.
Adoption is growing across employment verification, tenant screening, lending, and healthcare, with the platform expanding into a broader credential ecosystem. The long-term vision is a consumer-controlled identity and credit layer that can replace traditional background checks and credit bureaus.
Pantera led TransCrypts’ seed round in 2025 and is partnering closely as the company builds a foundational trust layer for the next generation of the internet.
World :: Proof of Human for an Internet Run by AI
How do you prove a real human is on the other end of a transaction, a message, a dating profile, or a vote?
For most of the internet’s history, nobody had to ask it. Today it’s one of the defining problems of the internet: AI agents post and transact at scale, generative models fake photos and voices, and the usernames, passwords, and document scans we’ve leaned on for decades are easy to spoof and routinely leaked. World, co-founded by Sam Altman and built by Tools for Humanity, is building a privacy-preserving network that lets any app verify a unique human without collecting personal data.
At the center is the Orb, an iris scanner that confirms each person is real and unique, encrypts the image on the device, and deletes it immediately after generating a credential called World ID. The World App ties it together: sign in with World ID, send and request payments the way you would on Venmo, and chat in an end-to-end encrypted messenger that shipped in December 2025. In April 2026, World open-sourced the protocol and announced integrations with Zoom, DocuSign, Tinder, Okta, Shopify, and Vercel, turning proof of personhood into infrastructure any company can plug into.
Pantera invested in World with a simple thesis: as AI makes faking digital content easier and easier, proof of a real human on the other end becomes one of the most valuable pieces of infrastructure on the internet. The more platforms that need to distinguish humans from AI, the more critical this layer becomes, and the more it points toward World as core infrastructure for the internet.
Looking Ahead
As AI reshapes the internet, entirely new systems are emerging for how software transacts, how identity is verified, and how trust is established online.
Alchemy, World, and TransCrypts are each building different layers of that stack, helping move blockchain from a financial niche toward foundational internet infrastructure. We believe these shifts are still early.
To view previous Portfolio Spotlights and other insights from Pantera, visit our Blog here.
We’ll see you next month!
The Pantera Team
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