Original author: Hu Tao, ChianCatcher
In 2025, the primary market for the crypto industry experienced its most brutal winter in many years. Although the cumulative amount of funding increased due to the head effect of a few giants such as Binance, the number of projects that received funding declined for the fifth consecutive year, with only 902 projects, a drop of 41%.
However, in this market environment, several crypto companies have still risen to become new crypto unicorns (valued at $1 billion) thanks to their outstanding products and technologies. 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 in 2025, reflecting the latest preferences and trends of the capital market.
Nous Research
Nous Research is a research company focused on the integration of artificial intelligence and decentralized technologies, dedicated to exploring mechanisms for training, inference, and collaboration of large models in decentralized environments. Nous is building a completely open AI technology stack, enabling anyone to meaningfully participate in the development of cutting-edge intelligence and contribute their idle computing power through its pre-trained network Psyche.
In April 2025, Nous Research announced the completion of 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-based payment technology company that integrates blockchain solutions with traditional banking and financial infrastructure to provide financial inclusion for the unbanked. RedotPay is committed to using crypto assets in real-world consumption and payment scenarios, and its product portfolio revolves around the exchange, clearing, and payment experience between crypto assets and fiat currencies.
RedotPay completed three rounds of financing in 2025, raising $40 million, $47 million, and $107 million respectively. Its valuation exceeded $1 billion in the second and third rounds. RedotPay also stated that its annualized payment volume has exceeded $10 billion, its current annualized revenue exceeds $150 million, and it has achieved profitable operation.
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 rounds of financing, raising $185 million, $300 million, and $1 billion respectively, reaching a peak valuation of $11 billion. Investors included Sequoia Capital, a16z, and Paradigm. In 2025, Kalshi's transaction 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 deliver the performance of centralized exchanges while remaining fully decentralized by combining on-chain verification with a high-throughput matching engine. The protocol utilizes its own Layer 2 infrastructure to minimize gas fees, enable instant settlement, and provide auditable proofs for every transaction.
In November 2025, Lighter announced the completion of a $68 million funding round, valuing the company at $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 major exchanges such as Robinhood and Coinbase, and currently has a FDV of $1.6 billion. Lighter also launched spot trading functionality.
Flying Tulip
Flying Tulip is a smart trading protocol created by DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje that integrates spot trading, derivatives, lending, money markets, the 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 round of financing, valuing the company at $1 billion. Participants included Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, and Susquehanna Crypto.
Unlike all other fundraising projects, Flying Tulip has established redemption provisions for its investors: all primary market participants (including private and public offerings) have on-chain redemption rights, allowing them to burn and redeem their invested assets (such as ETH) at any time. Redemption proceeds will be automatically settled through a process, with funds coming from a segregated on-chain redemption reserve established with the raised capital.
Sygnum
Sygnum is a regulated Swiss crypto bank that provides digital asset custody, trading, staking, and structured financial products to institutional and high-net-worth clients. Its core mission is to provide a compliant pathway for traditional financial clients to enter the crypto market.
In January 2025, Sygnum raised $58 million in a strategic funding round, valuing the company at over $1 billion post-money and making it a unicorn. Last May, 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, developed in collaboration between Stripe and Paradigm in mid-2025. Tempo supports all major stablecoins and can provide high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any business 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 testnet, with many traditional financial giants such as Kalshi, Klarna, and UBS officially becoming partners.
Zama
Zama is a cryptographic privacy protocol that adds a layer of confidentiality to public blockchains. It utilizes homomorphic encryption (FHE), a technology that allows data to be processed without decryption. This can be used to create privacy-preserving 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, valuing the company at over $1 billion, led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange. In the second half of the year, Zama launched its testnet and mainnet. On January 21, Zama launched an on-chain token sale through CoinList and its proprietary auction application, with a minimum fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $55 million. The sale used a sealed-bid Dutch auction structure, allocating 12% of its total token supply of 11 billion.
