Pantera Capital leads $17 million investment! Former Citadel elites create stablecoin payment killer Fin

Fin, formerly known as TipLink, has raised $17 million in funding led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Sequoia and Samsung Next. Fin was founded by former Citadel employees Ian Krotinsky and Ashik Dilawri. This stablecoin-powered application enables real-time, cross-border large-value remittances.

Ex-Citadel Trader’s Hackathon Project Becomes a Startup

While working at Citadel, Ian Krotinsky and Ashik Dilawri spent their nights and weekends on hackathon projects. According to Krotinsky, they built a version of Reddit where users who made it to the front page would receive a $50 reward. That’s when the pair realized that sending money to people around the world was actually very difficult. This realization led them to co-found Fin, a stablecoin-powered application that allows people to send money instantly across borders.

Citadel is one of the world’s largest hedge funds and market makers, known for its rigorous hiring standards and high-pressure work environment. Traders and engineers able to work at Citadel are often considered top talent in the fintech sector. The high-frequency trading, risk management, and system architecture experience Krotinsky and Dilawri accumulated at Citadel gave them a solid technical foundation for building payment infrastructure.

From a Reddit reward project to discovering pain points in cross-border payments, this story shows that innovation often stems from real needs. When they tried to pay $50 to users worldwide, they found that traditional payment systems were neither cost-effective nor timely: bank wires could take days with fees as high as $30 to $50, and PayPal and similar services were unavailable or severely limited in many countries. This experience prompted them to ask: why are cross-border payments still so inefficient in an era where value can be transferred instantly on blockchains?

Pantera Capital Leads, Sequoia and Samsung Next Join a Star-Studded Round

Pantera Capital led this $17 million funding round, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating. CEO Krotinsky declined to disclose the company’s valuation, but given the caliber of investors and the size of the round, market estimates put the seed valuation between $80 million and $150 million.

Pantera Capital is one of the most renowned investment institutions in the crypto space, having invested early in industry giants like Ripple, Coinbase, Circle, and Kraken. Their strategy focuses on blockchain infrastructure and projects with real-world use cases—Fin’s cross-border payment positioning is a perfect fit for Pantera’s investment logic. Pantera’s involvement brings more than just capital: it also offers rich industry resources and regulatory networks.

Sequoia Capital is one of the world’s most prestigious venture capital firms, with portfolio companies including Apple, Google, PayPal, and Stripe. Sequoia has deep investment experience in payments, and its participation means Fin’s business model and team passed Silicon Valley’s strictest due diligence. Samsung Next, Samsung’s venture arm, hints at potential future integration with Samsung’s hardware ecosystem, bringing native stablecoin payment functionality to hundreds of millions of Samsung users worldwide.

Fin Funding Highlights

Funding size: $17 million

Lead investor: Pantera Capital (top crypto VC)

Co-investors: Sequoia Capital (world-class VC), Samsung Next (Samsung strategic investment)

Founder backgrounds: Citadel traders and engineers

Valuation: Undisclosed (market estimates $80–150 million)

Such an investor lineup is extremely rare, as it covers crypto-native capital (Pantera), top traditional VC (Sequoia), and strategic corporate investors (Samsung). This diversified investment structure gives Fin comprehensive resource support: Pantera provides crypto industry connections, Sequoia offers product and market strategy, and Samsung offers potential user channels.

Fin App Design: Simple and Elegant Three-Option Structure

In an interview with Fortune magazine, the startup shared details of its app. “Fin is being built as the payments app of the future,” said Krotinsky. “We’re building an app that takes full advantage of everything stablecoins offer, without the complexity, and that can work anywhere in the world.”

The app is user-friendly at its core, with a design that is simple yet elegant. Customers have three main options: they can send and receive funds with other Fin users, to someone’s bank account, or to someone’s crypto wallet. The genius of this three-option design is that it covers all possible use cases while maintaining interface simplicity.

Transfers between Fin users are the fastest and cheapest, as funds flow entirely within the Fin ecosystem without the need for cross-system bridging. Sending funds to a bank account ensures compatibility, allowing recipients to receive fiat even if they don’t use crypto. Crypto wallet transfers cater to crypto-native users, who can move funds directly into self-custody wallets.

Krotinsky says that with stablecoin rails, Fin’s transfer fees will be much lower than bank wires. Traditional international wire fees typically range from $30 to $50 and take 3 to 5 business days. In contrast, blockchain-based stablecoin transfers can be completed in minutes, with fees usually under $1. This cost and speed advantage is especially pronounced for large-value transfers.

Targeting the Six-Figure to Seven-Figure Large-Value Transfer Market

The app is primarily designed for moving large amounts—hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars—from one country to another, or even domestically. For example, if a Swiss watch dealer wants to sell to a US customer, the buyer would traditionally wire money to a major commercial bank, which could take days and generate hefty fees. Fin aims to provide an alternative through its app.

In the US, payment apps like Venmo and Zelle have limits and cannot instantly process six-figure payments. Fin also aims to solve this problem. This market positioning is highly precise, avoiding the low-value payments market dominated by Venmo and PayPal, and instead focusing on the large B2B (business-to-business) and high-net-worth individual transfer market still monopolized by traditional banks.

The app has not yet officially launched, but plans to trial with businesses in the import/export sector next month. Choosing import/export businesses as initial pilot customers is a wise move, as these companies need to handle cross-border payments daily and are highly sensitive to cost and speed. If Fin can prove in pilots that it can reduce transfer times from 3 days to 3 minutes and cut fees from $50 to $1, these companies will become the strongest case studies and word-of-mouth advocates.

The company says it will generate revenue from transaction fees, but the costs to users will be cheaper than other options. It will also earn yield from stablecoins held in Fin wallets. This dual revenue model provides stable cash flow: fee income grows linearly with transaction volume, while stablecoin interest income grows with user wallet balances. With current US short-term rates at 4% to 5%, even if Fin keeps only a small spread, it can generate considerable revenue.

Regulatory Tailwinds and Challenging Traditional Banks

Fin is launching in a year when stablecoins have gone mainstream. In July, President Trump signed the Genius Act, establishing a regulatory framework for the technology. Since then, major remittance players and financial institutions like Western Union and Mastercard have heavily invested in their stablecoin products. This increased regulatory clarity has removed the biggest legal obstacle for startups like Fin.

Krotinsky believes that his startup’s true competitors are large commercial banks like JPMorgan or Barclays, the incumbents in international money transfers. He argues that these big financial institutions have spent decades building payment products the wrong way and will find it difficult to move their systems to stablecoin rails. This confidence stems from an understanding of banks’ technical debt: core banking systems are often built on legacy architectures from decades ago, making any major changes a massive and lengthy undertaking.

“I think we have a shot at becoming the world’s next biggest payments app,” Krotinsky says. “People will be surprised by how quickly we get there.” While ambitious, this is not without precedent. Stripe grew from a startup to a $95 billion payments giant in less than a decade, proving that it’s possible to disrupt incumbents in payments. If Fin can seize the stablecoin payments window, it truly has a shot at a similar growth trajectory.