Author: Hu Tao, ChianCatcher
In 2025, the primary market of the cryptocurrency industry experienced the harshest winter in many years. Although the total financing amount showed an upward trend influenced by the head effect of a few giants like Binance, the number of cumulative financing projects declined for five consecutive years, with only 902 projects, a drop of 41%.
However, in such a market environment, several cryptocurrency companies have risen to become new crypto unicorns (valued at $1 billion) due to their outstanding products and technologies. 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 cryptocurrency industry in 2025, reflecting the latest preferences and trends in the capital market.
Nous Research
Nous Research is a research-oriented company focused on the combination of artificial intelligence and decentralized technology, dedicated to exploring large model training, reasoning, and collaboration mechanisms in decentralized environments. Nous is building a fully open artificial intelligence technology stack, allowing 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 financing round at a valuation of $1 billion, led by Paradigm. Previously, Nous had raised approximately $20 million in seed funding from investors such as Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, and Delphi Ventures.
RedotPay
RedotPay is a Hong Kong-based payment technology company that uses 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, with its product system revolving around the exchange, clearing, and payment experience between crypto assets and fiat currencies.
In 2025, RedotPay completed three rounds of financing, raising $40 million, $47 million, and $107 million, with valuations exceeding $1 billion in the second and third rounds. RedotPay also stated that its annual payment volume has exceeded $10 billion, with current annual revenue surpassing $150 million, and it has achieved profitable operations.
Kalshi
Kalshi is a compliance-oriented prediction market company that allows users to price probabilities and hedge risks around macroeconomic and political events as well as real-world outcomes. Unlike most decentralized prediction markets, Kalshi has chosen to operate within a regulatory framework since its inception, building the prediction market as a compliant financial instrument.
In 2025, Kalshi completed three rounds of financing, raising $185 million, $300 million, and $1 billion, with a peak valuation of $11 billion. Investors include 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 the performance of centralized exchanges while maintaining complete 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 each transaction.
In November 2025, Lighter announced the completion of a $68 million financing round, reaching a valuation of $1.5 billion, led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital. By the end of the year, Lighter officially launched its token LIT, which was subsequently listed on mainstream exchanges such as Robinhood and Coinbase, with a current FDV of $1.6 billion. Lighter also introduced spot trading features.
Flying Tulip
Flying Tulip is a smart trading protocol founded by DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje, integrating spot trading, derivatives, lending, money markets, native stablecoins (ftUSD), and on-chain insurance into a single cross-margin system without the need to transfer funds across different protocols.
In September 2025, Flying Tulip announced the completion of a $200 million seed round financing, reaching a valuation of $1 billion, with participants including Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, and Susquehanna Crypto.
Compared to all other financing projects, Flying Tulip established redemption terms for its investors: all primary market participants (including private and public offerings) enjoy on-chain redemption rights, allowing them to destroy $FT at any time and redeem their invested assets (such as ETH) at par. Redemption funds will be automatically settled through a program, with funds coming from a segregated on-chain redemption reserve established from the raised funds.
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, with its core positioning being to provide a compliant channel for traditional financial clients to enter the crypto market.
In January 2025, Sygnum raised $58 million in a strategic financing round, achieving a post-investment valuation exceeding $1 billion, entering the unicorn ranks. In May of the previous 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 and low-cost global transactions for any business use case.
In October 2025, Tempo announced the completion of a $500 million financing round, led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. In December, Stripe and Paradigm announced the launch of the Tempo testnet, with many traditional financial giants such as Kalshi, Klarna, and UBS officially becoming partners.
Zama
Zama is a crypto privacy protocol that adds a layer of confidentiality to public blockchains. Its developed homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a technology that allows data to be processed without decryption. This can be used to create privacy smart contracts on public, permissionless blockchains, where only specific users can see transaction data and contract status.
In June 2025, Zama announced the completion of a $57 million financing round, with 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 21, 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 supply of 11 billion tokens.
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