New York metropolitan area-based investment firm combines venture capital, liquid yield and protocol incubation, marking the next chapter for the attorneys who bet on crypto before it was consensus.
Panther Hollow Ventures, the New York metropolitan area-based institutional crypto investment firm founded by former private equity and crypto attorneys Eric Swartz and Jacqueline Escobar, today announced the launch of its multi-strategy merchant bank focused on proliferating traditional finance rates and derivatives protocols on each of Canton, Ethereum, Solana and StarkNet with obtaining the related licensure currently in process.
Bringing together venture investing, institutional yield strategies and protocol incubation under a single umbrella, Panther Hollow is focused on backing and building the infrastructure powering tokenized asset, digital collateral and on-chain capital markets to launch products aimed at delivering traditional finance yields where decentralized finance yields are already available and vice versa.
The platform consists of:
- A pre-seed venture fund focused on crypto and AI infrastructure
- A liquid yield fund combining RWA private credit exposure with institutional grade DeFi strategies
- A dedicated StarkNet strategy available exclusively to liquid yield investors
- Panther Hollow is currently accepting LP commitments across all three vehicles.
The thesis was forged during the post-FTX bear market, when two crypto attorneys chose to take equity instead of legal fees from founders they believed could shape the future of finance.
That conviction led to the creation of Water Cooler Studios, which attracted institutional backing from Fidelity and Brevan Howard helped incubate products now launching across some of the industry’s most important blockchain ecosystems. Those products, including Kintsu on Monad, Raa on StarkNet and Cenote on Canton Network, each focused on solving critical infrastructure challenges for institutional adoption.
Rather than solely investing in emerging protocols, Panther Hollow actively incubates and supports businesses on both a minority and majority investment basis that can become part of the ecosystems in which its funds participate. The approach is designed to align capital formation, product development and ecosystem growth, allowing investors to gain exposure to both investment returns and protocol-level value creation through a single multi-manager product suite.
Current incubations include Stark Rates, an on-chain lending, repo and derivatives on Ethereum, Solana, Canton and StarkNet targeting a total addressable market of nearly one quadrillion.
A core differentiator of Panther Hollow is its closed-loop operating model: Build, Deploy, Administer, Compound.
Eric Swartz, Founding General Partner and General Counsel of Panther Hollow Ventures, said: “We built Panther Hollow the same way we built our track record by backing founders before the narrative existed and staying when everyone else walks away and forgets about crypto again. Too much of this industry is still focused exclusively on narratives. Traditional finance needs fully compliant crypto rails to even consider moving capital on-chain. We believe the next generation of value creation (we have often referred to it as a “reallocation event”) will come from the builders solving those problems. Join us and we will build together!”
The Team Behind Panther Hollow
Panther Hollow is led by a team spanning private equity, institutional finance, regulation and digital assets. Swartz previously held roles at Framework Ventures, Susquehanna International Group, Goodwin and Lowenstein Sandler, and currently serves as Chairman of Stark Rates and lead of the Panther Hollow incubation program.
Escobar is a fintech and Web3 attorney with more than 10 years of experience across financial regulators, top-tier law firms and digital asset companies. She holds an LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and has pursued additional MBA studies at The Wharton School.
The firm’s General Partner and Chief Financial Officer, Andrea Perlak, brings 25 years of experience spanning KPMG, the World Bank Treasury Department, iTrust Capital and Juniper Trust, and has maintained Panther Hollow’s financial records since inception.
