Fission raises $10 million to buy tokenised fund exits
Fission closed a $10 million Series A led by Pantera to buy tokenised fund interests and pay USDC. The fast exit is a dealer balance sheet, not a new market.
Fission has raised $10 million to buy tokenised fund interests that still have almost no exit, paying USD Coin (USDC) and waiting out the fund's own redemption clock. The New York firm said on October 15, 2026 that Pantera Capital had led a Series A it had already closed. Fortune reported a September close and no disclosed valuation. The money is dealer capital, not another tokenised wrapper.
The PR Newswire release, source line Fission Labs, also names Circle Ventures, New Form, gumi Cryptos Capital, Borderless Capital and Ari Rubenstein, chief executive of GTS. It then lists New Form and gumi as existing backers, with Anthony Scaramucci, Manhattan Venture Partners, Reflexive Capital and Lattice Capital, and treats Pantera, Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital and Rubenstein as the names the round adds. Proceeds are for liquidity capacity, more tokenised private-credit, private-market and semi-liquid funds, and deeper integrations. Redemptions to date are "millions of dollars", with no precise total, no fee and no ticker of Fission's own.
How Fission says the exit works
The company essay is plainer than the headline. A registered holder hands over a supported tokenised asset. Fission takes it onto its book, sends what it calls atomic USDC liquidity, and waits for the fund to pay on the fund's own terms. The manager is not asked to deal daily. The holder is selling to Fission's inventory. Settlement, the firm says, uses audited smart contracts and custody including Fireblocks, on permissioned rails that keep eligibility checks and transfer restrictions. The chain moves the interest. It does not create the bid.
Founder and chief executive Jonathan Shaffer gave the only clock on that wait, and he gave it to Fortune. "It would take you normally about 200 days to sell [a] product. For a fee, you can sell it right now and get your money back, and this will settle… in 90 seconds or less," he said. The October 15 release uses neither figure. Franklin Bi, general partner at Pantera Capital, told Fortune: "Where tokenization is today has really been focused around the bridging layer and the issuance layer… but what Fission is focused on—the post-tokenization problem—almost nobody is focused on."
What the round does not settle
Circle Ventures is in the round, and the payout asset Fission names is USDC. The release quotes neither Circle nor any manager whose fund will be bought. When BlackRock put 12 Institutional Cash Series share classes on Kinexys, minting and redemption stayed on the dealing calendar. Only a secondary transfer can move at 2am on a Sunday. Fission is a bid in that space, not a shorter cycle. Fortune's examples, including BlackRock, Apollo and Janus Henderson, are easier to buy than to sell, and none of those firms is quoted here.
Oasis Pro's seat on Fund/SERV still settles money through the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) in dollars on a business-day cycle. Paying USDC postpones that stack rather than retiring it. Shaffer called the sale proceeds money. The product page says they are USDC. A holder who needs a bank balance starts a second redemption, and Circle's European USDC terms can already delay cash when reserves cannot cross a border. The speed in the quote, if it holds, is the on-chain leg, not fiat the same day.
Fortune adds the operating sketch the release skips. Fission was founded in 2024 by Shaffer, chief revenue officer Steve Bendit and chief technology officer Curtis Humphrey. Shaffer had invested at Point72. Bendit had led business development at Securitize. The release cites both firms as team experience and does not assign the jobs. Eight people work on Long Island and in Los Angeles. Shaffer said the customers are mostly hedge funds, crypto treasuries and stablecoin issuers with tokenised holdings, plus some wealthy individuals. Fortune also reported a $1.6 million pre-seed led by SALT Fund and Kraynos Capital. No live fund is named.
Spiko raised $90 million for tokenised cash, the short-duration case. Fission's $10 million is one-ninth of that round, for funds that still tender periodically. The essay says capital is recycled when the fund pays, and it discloses no credit line. DTCC's three-year tokenisation clock is an issuance timetable, not a Sunday bid. What fission.xyz still has to show an allocator is a named fund, a published fee and a redemption total that is not the word millions. Until then, the Series A seeds a dealer against a calendar the token never cancelled.
This article is informational analysis only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can lose substantial value rapidly. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.
Reporting by Karthik Subramanian. Filed 18 October 2026, 19:35 GMT.
Digital Assets Correspondent
Karthik Subramanian is a founder, writer, and technology consultant with nine years in the crypto ecosystem.
