Portfolio Spotlight :: July 2026
Welcome to Portfolio Spotlight, Pantera Capital’s series highlighting portfolio companies driving growth and solving real world problems.
The majority of today’s financial system runs during traditional business hours. Banks and Markets close on weekends. Trades settle days later. Money sent across borders sits in limbo while it passes through intermediaries adding delay and cost.
That world is evolving and being disrupted and upgraded by Blockchain technology.
In this edition, we highlight three Pantera portfolio companies each addressing how we can make the rails of financial services, better, faster, and more accessible.
OpenFX moves money across broaders in minutes instead of days.
Orthogonal is building the payment rails for AI agents, that don’t sleep and don’t wait for business hours to complete a transaction.
TurboFlow gives everyday traders access to markets that never close.
Speed used to be a luxury reserved for institutions with the infrastructure to move fast. Now it’s becoming the default, as annualized volumes hit $70 billion in cross-border payments alone, prediction markets exceed $24 billion, and perpetual futures top $4 trillion, for everyone and everything transacting online.
Let’s get into it.
OpenFX :: The Bank That Never Closes
If you want to send $5 million (or even $50 million) from the US to the UAE through a bank, you’ll likely have to wait two to five business days for it to arrive; and that’s if you send it on a weekday. Along the way to your destination, your payment gets handed off between multiple banks, each one taking a cut and adding delay. It’s the same process the world has used for cross-border payments since the 1970s.
OpenFX is replacing that process. Instead of routing a payment through a chain of banks, OpenFX settles it directly using stablecoins. The sender pays in their currency, stablecoins move the value instantly, and the receiver gets paid out in their currency. The sender and receiver never have to touch or think about crypto. They just see their money sent and received fast.
Transactions settle in under an hour 98% of the time, compared to 2-5 days the old way. Costs run 90% lower. And the network works 24/7/365, including weekends and holidays, when traditional banks are closed.
OpenFX moved its first $1 billion in year one. By month 18, it was moving $1 billion a month. It’s now on pace to move $1 billion a day. In just two years, annualized volume has hit $80 billion. And that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the cross-border payments market, which is worth roughly $200 trillion a year.
Clients like Yellow Card and VelaFi already rely on OpenFX to settle hundreds of millions of dollars a day. And demand isn’t just coming from humans. As AI agents start initiating their own payments, they’ll need a network that never sleeps and never waits for the banks to open on Monday.
Pantera participated in OpenFX’s $94 million Series A in March 2026, alongside Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed, M13, and Northzone. Money used to move at the speed of banking hours. Now it moves at the speed of the internet.
Orthogonal :: Giving AI Agents a Way to Pay
You’ve probably asked an AI assistant to draft an email, summarize a contract, or research a product and have been happy with the output. That’s because the agent is just processing information. However, the moment you ask it to actually do something like book a flight or pay an invoice, it can’t. AI tools are only built to transact with a handful of services they were specifically designed to talk to. Ask it to work with anything outside that list, and it gets stuck, stalls, or hands the task back to you to finish.
Orthogonal is building the missing piece: a way for AI agents to find the right service in real time, use it, and pay for it, all without a person involved. The agent describes what it needs, Orthogonal finds a service that can do it, plugs it in, and settles the payment automatically. It’s already wired into more than 50 different services agents can tap into.
This matters because agents don’t work like people. They don’t take weekends off, they don’t wait until Monday morning, and they don’t stop just because it’s the end of their workday. If AI agents are going to transact on their own, the infrastructure underneath them has to be always-on as well. That is what Orthogonal is building.
McKinsey projects that agentic commerce, AI agents autonomously buying and selling on their own, could drive $3 to $5 trillion in economic activity by 2030. As Pantera General Partner Franklin Bi said, the internet is moving toward agents as “the primary consumers of data and services,” not humans clicking links.
Pantera led Orthogonal’s $4.3 million seed round in June 2026, alongside Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, and Surreal. The internet has a new kind of user; one that never sleeps and never logs off. Orthogonal is building the plumbing underneath it.
TurboFlow :: Bringing Institutional-Grade Trading to Everyday Traders
If you live in most of Asia and want to trade on the outcome of an election or whether a stock beats earnings, you’re mostly out of luck. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket built this kind of trading for U.S. and European users. In other regions, retail traders are stuck choosing between platforms that don’t serve their region, or trading experiences that feel like a translated afterthought.
TurboFlow is closing that gap. It’s a single onchain platform where users can trade both prediction markets (betting on real-world event outcomes) and perpetual futures (leveraged bets on asset prices), the two fastest-growing categories in crypto trading, side by side from one account. The platform is built specifically for Asia-Pacific traders. Pricing, liquidity, and risk management usually reserved for institutions are wrapped in an app simple enough for a first-time trader. You can get started with as little as $2.
Prediction market volume grew from under $5 billion in September 2025 to over $24 billion by April 2026, and industry forecasts put it above $1 trillion by 2030. Perpetual futures have seen $4 trillion in trading volume in just the last six months. TurboFlow is betting the two will keep converging into one larger category of event-driven trading, and wants to own that category across Asia.
The early numbers back it up. Still in beta, TurboFlow has already attracted more than 15,000 registered users and processed over $30 billion in trading volume, all before a full public launch.
Founder Tony He, previously a co-founder and partner at Amber Group, one of Asia’s largest crypto trading firms, put it simply: “We see a large unfilled gap between Asian users and proper institutional-grade liquidity, and we’re striving to become that bridge.”
Pantera led TurboFlow’s $6 million seed round in March 2026, alongside Susquehanna Crypto and Digital Currency Group. Markets don’t wait for any one region’s business hours to open, and increasingly, neither do the traders who use them.
Hear more from founder Tony He on Pantera’s Stateful Podcast, where he discusses why Asia has been missing a world-class trading platform and how TurboFlow is building it.
Looking Ahead
OpenFX moves money around the clock. Orthogonal lets machines pay without waiting on a person. TurboFlow gives Asia-Pacific traders a platform built for them, open every hour markets move. Different problems, same underlying shift: the infrastructure of finance no longer waits for business hours, borders, or even a human to be the one transacting.
There are more stories like these across the Pantera portfolio, and we look forward to sharing them with you! You can view previous Portfolio Spotlights on our Blog here.
We’ll see you next month!
The Pantera Team