2025's New Crypto Unicorns: Distributed Across Payments, AI, and Other Sectors, with 8 Companies Making the List
- Core View: Despite a sharp decline in the number of primary market financing projects in the crypto industry in 2025, eight companies have defied the trend to become new unicorns due to their outstanding performance in specific fields (such as AI+blockchain, compliant payments, high-performance infrastructure, etc.). This reflects that capital is focusing on projects that can solve real pain points, possess clear business models, or have regulatory compliance.
- Key Elements:
- The cumulative number of financing projects in the crypto industry in 2025 was only 902, a year-on-year plunge of 41%, but the total financing amount still showed a growth trend due to the "winner-takes-most" effect.
- The new unicorns cover multiple sectors: Nous Research (AI+decentralization), RedotPay (stablecoin payments), Kalshi (compliant prediction markets), Lighter (high-performance DEX), Flying Tulip (all-in-one DeFi protocol), Sygnum (compliant crypto bank), Tempo (payment-specific L1), and Zama (privacy protocol).
- Kalshi, as a compliant prediction market, achieved a trading volume of $23.8 billion in 2025, representing growth of over 11 times year-on-year, with a valuation reaching up to $11 billion, demonstrating strong growth.
- RedotPay's stablecoin-based payment solution has achieved scaled application, with annualized payment volume exceeding $10 billion and achieving profitability, validating its business model.
- Lighter provides decentralized perpetual contract trading with CEX-level performance through L2 infrastructure, and its token LIT has been listed on major exchanges.
- Flying Tulip was founded by renowned developer Andre Cronje, and its innovation lies in establishing on-chain redemption rights for investors, enhancing fund security.
- Tempo, co-developed by Stripe and Paradigm, is a high-performance L1 focused on payment scenarios and has already secured partnerships with traditional financial giants.
Original Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher
In 2025, the primary market of the crypto industry experienced its harshest winter in years. Although the total cumulative funding amount showed growth, influenced by the head effect of a few giants like Binance, the number of funded projects declined for the fifth consecutive year to only 902, a drop of 41%.
However, even in such a market environment, several crypto companies achieved unicorn status (valuation reaching $1 billion) based on their outstanding products and technology. These eight companies—Lighter, Tempo, Kalshi, Zama, Sygnum, Nous Research, Flying Tulip, and RedotPay—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 intersection of artificial intelligence and decentralized technology, dedicated to exploring mechanisms for large model training, inference, and collaboration in a decentralized environment. Nous is building a fully open AI technology stack. Through its pre-training network, Psyche, it enables anyone to meaningfully participate in the development of cutting-edge intelligence and contribute their idle computing power.
In April 2025, Nous Research announced a $50 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Paradigm. Prior to this, 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, stablecoin-focused payment technology company that integrates blockchain solutions with traditional banking and financial infrastructure, aiming to provide inclusive finance for the unbanked population. RedotPay is dedicated to enabling the use of crypto assets in real-world consumption and payment scenarios. Its product system revolves around the exchange, clearing, and payment experience between crypto assets and fiat currencies.
RedotPay completed three funding rounds in 2025: $40 million, $47 million, and $107 million. Its valuation exceeded $1 billion in the second and third rounds. RedotPay also stated that its annualized payment volume has surpassed $10 billion, its current annualized revenue exceeds $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, 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, and Paradigm. 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 centralized exchange-level performance while maintaining full decentralization 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 a $68 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, 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 has 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 a $200 million seed funding round at a $1 billion valuation. Participants included Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, Susquehanna Crypto, and others.
Compared to all other funded projects, Flying Tulip established a redemption clause for its investors: all primary market participants (including private and public sales) have on-chain redemption rights, allowing them to burn $FT tokens at any time and redeem their principal investment (e.g., ETH). Redemption payments are settled automatically via programmatic means, funded by a segregated on-chain redemption reserve established from the raised capital.
Sygnum
Sygnum is a regulated Swiss crypto bank that provides services such as digital asset custody, trading, staking, and structured financial products to institutions and high-net-worth clients. Its core positioning is to offer 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 of 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, jointly 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 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 being decrypted. 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 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 via CoinList and its own auction application, with a minimum fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $55 million. The sale used a sealed-bid Dutch auction structure, distributing 12% of its total token supply of 11 billion tokens.
