Portfolio Spotlight :: August 2026
August 13, 2026
For years, blockchain technology has operated adjacent to traditional industries. Today, that boundary is rapidly dissolving. We are entering an era of deep structural convergence, where decentralized systems are moving from novel alternatives to core infrastructure. Across global capital markets and frontier tech, Pantera portfolio companies are at the forefront of this shift.
In this edition, we spotlight three Pantera portfolio companies driving integration across global payments, banking and sovereign AI:
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B3 is dismantling the public cloud monopoly on AI compute through B3IQ, offering rent-to-own dedicated NVIDIA hardware for universities and enterprises that require private, sovereign infrastructure for confidential AI models.
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Bitso is leveraging its foundation as Latin America’s leading digital asset platform to build the global cross-border backend for traditional finance, accelerating institutional stablecoin settlement and tokenized fiat assets through its B2B engine.
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Anchorage Digital is the first federally chartered digital asset bank with institutional-grade custody infrastructure, ensuring safe, compliant digital asset management and settlement across global markets.
Whether eliminating multi-day banking friction or providing dedicated compute for confidential AI research, Pantera portfolio companies are building the internet-native infrastructure modern businesses rely on globally.
Let’s get into it.
B3 :: Private AI Infrastructure You Own
Every prompt sent to a centralized AI provider leaves the sender’s control. Research data, business logic, and proprietary ideas all flow into systems run on someone else’s terms. That’s a problem for the teams whose data can’t leave their control. The obvious fix, running AI on your own hardware, has been mostly out of reach for almost everyone.
B3IQ, launched in August 2026 by B3 Labs, makes owned hardware practical, giving teams private AI infrastructure without the upfront cost or operating it yourself.
Until now, teams needing AI compute had two bad options. Rent from the cloud, and you get variable pricing, no ownership, and rationed access during GPU shortages. Buy outright, and you take on the full upfront cost plus the burden of power, cooling, and maintenance. B3IQ combines the two. You buy a dedicated NVIDIA system through an incremental payment plan and you own it outright once it’s paid off. When you’re not using it, you can put its unused capacity to work through B3IQ’s network and apply the revenue toward the balance or keep it as income.
The demand is coming from teams that can’t send sensitive data to an outside source. Researchers at NYU, Stanford, Dartmouth, and the University of Hawaiʻi are already using B3IQ for work that can’t run on commercial providers, from cancer research to modeling nation-level diplomatic negotiations. CTO Sean Geng said, “Organizations want more control over where their AI runs, how their data is handled, and what they pay for compute.”
In a 2026 Broadcom survey of 1,800 IT leaders, 56% of enterprises said they now run or plan to run production inference on private infrastructure, while public-cloud use for the same work fell from 56% to 41% in a single year. As open-weight models catch up to closed ones, the main thing standing between a team and private AI is hardware to run it on. That’s what B3IQ sells.
B3 Labs, founded in 2024 by a team of Coinbase alumni, has raised over $21 million from investors including Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures. Fortune profiled B3 this month, reporting it is on track for $50 million in revenue this year.
Pantera has backed B3 since its seed round.
Bitso :: Global Payments Infrastructure for Business
Bitso is the leading digital finance group in Latin America. Founded in 2014, it now serves more than 10 million retail users and 2,000 institutional clients. It earned that position by being one of the most compliant and trusted platforms in its markets, and it’s now using that foundation to build a global payments business.
Sending money to another country is still slow and expensive. A payment is moved from bank to bank, each one taking a cut and adding time, and nothing moves on nights or weekends. For a business paying suppliers or workers in another country, that delay and expense is just the cost of doing business.
Bitso Business, the B2B arm, is built to remove that friction. It moves money across borders on stablecoin rails. Funds convert to a stablecoin, settle onchain in minutes, and pay out in local currency, skipping the bank-to-bank chain entirely. Transfers clear 24/7, including weekends. Its network is deepest in Latin America, and it’s growing worldwide.
Bitso Business reported that stablecoin payment volume grew 81% year over year in the first half of 2026, and that over 60% of new institutional clients onboarded this year were banks and traditional financial institutions, not crypto-native firms. The rails Bitso built are becoming the back end for traditional finance.
Pantera has backed Bitso since its early rounds, including its Series B and Series C.
Anchorage :: Banking Built for What Comes Next
Anchorage Digital is home to the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC). This regulatory standing is central to why institutions trust Anchorage Digital to safeguard and move their assets.
As institutional adoption of AI agents accelerates, a gap has emerged: agents are beginning to move money, yet treasury and payment systems were built for people, not software. What’s missing is regulated infrastructure with guardrails that let agents engage in commerce safely. In May 2026, Anchorage Digital Bank moved to close that gap, becoming the first federally chartered digital asset bank to launch an Agentic Banking offering. The product gives AI agents controlled access to capital within limits an institution defines, each agent operates with a verifiable identity, defined spending limits, and a full audit trail. In practice, that means a company can fund an agent without handing over the keys to its entire treasury.
A month later, Anchorage Digital launched its Tokenized Deposit infrastructure, which enables banks to issue tokenized deposits and offer 24/7 onchain settlement, all while deposits remain in the bank’s own accounts. Nathan McCauley, CEO and Co-Founder of Anchorage Digital, described the goal simply, “Tokenized deposits are not meant to replace the trust built by banks, but rather to make that trust function faster, smarter, and around the clock.”
Anchorage Digital spent years establishing itself as the regulated standard for holding digital assets. Now it’s applying that same standard to moving them.
Anchorage Digital is one of Pantera’s longest-standing portfolio companies serving hundreds of leading institutions globally.
Looking Ahead
The ongoing convergence between blockchain technology and legacy enterprise relies on three essential pillars: frictionless global settlement, sovereign compute, and trusted institutional infrastructure. Bitso, B3, and Anchorage Digital are addressing these high-value problems across payments, AI, and digital asset custody. At Pantera, we are proud to partner with the visionary founders building this underlying architecture for the modern economy.
You can view previous Portfolio Spotlights on our Blog here.
We’ll see you next month!
The Pantera Team
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