Pantera leads $10 million round for a startup that buys tokenized fund shares on demand

Shaffer put the whole product in one sentence. The CEO told Fortune that selling such a product would normally take about 200 days, and that for a fee a seller can sell it right now, get the money back and have it settle in 90 seconds or less ^[15]. Two hundred days is 17.28 million seconds, so 90 seconds is a cut of 192,000 times ^[12], and the seller pays for all of it through the fee.

The reports do not say what the fee is or how Fission gets out of a position once it has bought one. That second gap matters more. Fortune reports that Fission's approach is to act as the buyer ^[10]. Each position then sits on Fission's books until someone else wants it. Suppose the exit is the fund's own redemption queue. At 200 days a position, capital turns 365 / 200 = 1.8 times a year, so $10 million supports roughly $18 million of purchases annually before fees ^[14]. Some of the $11.6 million raised across both rounds ^[13] pays a team of eight ^[4], so the real ceiling is lower. That ceiling is our construction, not a company figure.

There are at least three other ways this goes. If Fission resells to third parties, the ceiling disappears, and Crypto Briefing's description (a platform open around the clock, with shares and payment swapping in one atomic transaction ^[11]) fits a venue as easily as a principal buyer. But resale needs buyers, and the record on that is thin. InvestaX said in June that investors in tokenized private-credit products mostly put money in or took it out through the funds instead of selling to other buyers ^[7], and an earlier IOSCO report found firms had made more progress creating tokens than markets to trade them ^[8]. Franklin Bi, a general partner at Pantera, told Fortune that Fission's focus, "the post-tokenization problem", is one "almost nobody is focused on" ^[9]. The third path is correlated selling: its customers are hedge funds, crypto treasuries and stablecoin issuers ^[3], and if they want out together, one buyer holds the lot.

In our view, the round tests price. The token already settles in seconds ^[11]. No one has yet set a price for holding a position through the 200-day redemption wait. Fission has also narrowed what it spends on. Its 2024 pre-seed aimed to bring venture capital products on-chain, and it now describes itself as a liquidity layer for a wider range of tokenized private funds ^[6], so the Series A is not funding new issuance products.

We would be wrong if Fission turns positions over to other buyers within days, or if its fees come in low enough that sellers use it routinely. We would also be wrong, in the other direction, if the $10 million proves too thin to absorb even one stressed week of sales.