Author: Hu Tao, ChianCatcher
In 2025, the primary market of the crypto industry experienced its harshest winter in years. Although the total funding amount showed growth due to the halo effect of a few giants like Binance, the number of funded projects declined for the fifth consecutive year, with only 902 projects, a drop of 41%.
However, even in such a market environment, several crypto companies have become new crypto unicorns (with a valuation reaching $1 billion) based on their outstanding products and technology. These eight companies are Lighter, Tempo, Kalshi, Zama, Sygnum, Nous Research, Flying Tulip, and RedotPay. They constitute the most representative group of "new unicorn samples" in the crypto industry for 2025, reflecting the latest preferences and trends in the capital market.
Nous Research
Nous Research is a research-focused company concentrating on the integration of artificial intelligence and decentralized technology, dedicated to exploring large model training, inference, and collaboration mechanisms in a decentralized environment. Nous is building a fully open AI technology stack. Through its pre-training network Psyche, it allows anyone to meaningfully participate in the development of cutting-edge intelligence and contribute their idle computing power.
In April 2025, Nous Research announced the completion of a $50 million funding round at a valuation of $1 billion, led by Paradigm. Previously, Nous had raised approximately $20 million in seed funding from investors including Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, and Delphi Ventures.
RedotPay
RedotPay is a Hong Kong-based payment technology company built on stablecoins, integrating blockchain solutions with traditional banking and financial infrastructure, aiming to provide inclusive finance for the unbanked population. RedotPay is committed to using crypto assets for real-world consumption and payment scenarios. Its product system revolves around the exchange, clearing, and payment experience between crypto assets and fiat currency.
RedotPay completed three funding rounds in 2025: $40 million, $47 million, and $107 million, with its valuation exceeding $1 billion in the second and third rounds. RedotPay also stated that its annualized payment volume has exceeded $10 billion, its current annualized revenue is over $150 million, and it is operating profitably.
Kalshi
Kalshi is a compliance-oriented prediction market company that allows users to price probabilities and hedge risks around macroeconomic events, political events, and real-world outcomes. Unlike most decentralized prediction markets, Kalshi has chosen to operate within a regulatory framework since its inception, building prediction markets as a compliant financial instrument.
In 2025, Kalshi completed three funding rounds: $185 million, $300 million, and $1 billion, with its valuation reaching up to $11 billion. Investors included Sequoia Capital, a16z, Paradigm, etc. In 2025, Kalshi's trading volume reached $23.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 1108%, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in the industry.
Lighter
Lighter is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform that aims to provide the performance of a centralized exchange while remaining fully decentralized by combining on-chain verification with a high-throughput matching engine. The protocol uses its own Layer 2 infrastructure to minimize gas fees, achieve instant settlement, and provide auditable proof for every transaction.
In November 2025, Lighter announced the completion of a $68 million funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion, led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital. At the end of the year, Lighter officially launched its token LIT, which was subsequently listed on mainstream exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase; its current FDV is $1.6 billion. Lighter also launched spot trading functionality.
Flying Tulip
Flying Tulip is an intelligent trading protocol founded by DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje. It integrates spot trading, derivatives, lending, money markets, a native stablecoin (ftUSD), and on-chain insurance into a single cross-margin system, eliminating the need to transfer funds across different protocols.
In September 2025, Flying Tulip announced the completion of a $200 million seed funding round at a valuation of $1 billion. Participants included Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, Susquehanna Crypto, etc.
Compared to all other funding projects, Flying Tulip established a redemption clause for its investors: all primary market participants (including private and public sales) have the right to on-chain redemption, allowing them to burn $FT at any time and redeem the principal of their invested assets (e.g., ETH). Redemption payments will be settled automatically by程序, funded by a segregated on-chain redemption reserve established from the raised capital.
Sygnum
Sygnum is a regulated Swiss crypto bank that provides institutional and high-net-worth clients with services such as digital asset custody, trading, staking, and structured financial products. Its core positioning is to provide a compliant gateway for traditional finance clients to enter the crypto market.
In January 2025, Sygnum raised $58 million in a strategic funding round, achieving a post-money valuation exceeding $1 billion and entering unicorn status. In May last year, former CFTC chairman Christopher Giancarlo also joined Sygnum as a senior policy advisor.
Tempo
Tempo is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain designed for payment scenarios, co-developed by Stripe and Paradigm in mid-2025. Tempo supports all major stablecoins and can provide high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any commercial use case.
In October 2025, Tempo announced the completion of a $500 million funding round led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. In December, Stripe and Paradigm announced the launch of the Tempo blockchain testnet, with many traditional finance giants like Kalshi, Klarna, and UBS officially announcing partnerships.
Zama
Zama is a cryptographic privacy protocol that adds a layer of confidentiality to public blockchains. It develops fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a technology that allows data to be processed without decryption. This can be used to create private smart contracts on top of public, permissionless blockchains, where only specific users can see transaction data and contract state.
In June 2025, Zama announced the completion of a $57 million funding round at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange. In the second half of the year, Zama successively launched its testnet and mainnet. On January 21st, Zama initiated an on-chain token sale through CoinList and its own auction application, with a minimum fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $55 million, using a sealed-bid Dutch auction structure, allocating 12% of its total token supply of 11 billion tokens.
