Pantera Capital Leads $25M Series A Round in Stablecoin Startup Coinflow to Scale Up Operations

Coinflow, a Chicago-based stablecoin startup, has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Pantera Capital. The funding will be used to scale up the firm's stablecoin offerings and expand into Asia and Latin America. Coinflow has reported 23x revenue growth since 2024, with multi-billion-dollar annual transaction volume across 170 countries. The firm's growth is driven by demand for instant payments that reduce fraud risk.

Polygon's Rio upgrade, a payments-focused overhaul, aims to significantly enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the Polygon PoS (Proof of Stake) network. The upgrade, which reduces transaction reorgs, accelerates settlement, and lowers node costs, is designed to make Polygon PoS more attractive to fintech companies and merchants.

The Rio upgrade introduces a streamlined block-proposer model, replacing concurrent block proposals with a smaller, elected set of validators handling block creation sequentially. This change reduces overlaps and reorgs, increasing throughput and lowering confirmation times. Validator selection is also streamlined to improve throughput and lower hardware requirements.

The upgrade enables near-instant confirmations and targets around 5,000 transactions per second (TPS) for Polygon PoS. This positions the chain for fintech and merchant payments adoption, a critical area where competitors like Solana and Base currently lead in terms of on-chain activity and capital flows.

Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal stated, "Rio redesigns core architecture to make life easier for payments solution providers. By overhauling how blocks are created and verified, the upgrade sets the stage for Polygon PoS to reach around 5,000 transactions per second."

Despite lower TVL (Total Value Locked) compared to Solana and Base, Rio could help Polygon reclaim market share by prioritizing payments reliability and cost-efficiency. Polygon's broader roadmap, including zkEVM developments, aims to combine Ethereum-derived security with high-throughput use cases.

However, the success of Rio will depend on ecosystem adoption from wallets, stablecoin issuers, and processors. Network security, decentralization trade-offs, and interoperability with Polygon's zk and Layer-2 offerings are factors that will determine long-term success.

In parallel, Coinflow, a Chicago-based stablecoin startup, has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Pantera Capital. The funding will be used to scale up the firm's stablecoin offerings and expand into Asia and Latin America. Coinflow has reported 23x revenue growth since 2024, with multi-billion-dollar annual transaction volume across 170 countries. The firm's growth is driven by demand for instant payments that reduce fraud risk.

The combined efforts of Polygon's Rio upgrade and Coinflow's expansion into new markets could significantly boost the adoption and integration of stablecoins and high-volume payments.