2025 Emerging Crypto Unicorn Check: Eight Companies Weathering the Primary Market Winter

Original Title: "2025 New Crypto Unicorns: Spread Across Payment, AI, and Other Tracks, with 8 Companies Making the Cut"

Original Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

In 2025, the primary market of the crypto industry experienced the harshest winter in many years. Despite the total funding amount showing a growth trend due to the "head effect" of a few giants like Binance, the total number of funded projects has declined for five consecutive years, with only 902 projects, a 41% decrease.

Nevertheless, in such a market environment, multiple crypto companies have still emerged as new crypto unicorns (with a valuation reaching $1 billion) based on their outstanding products and technologies. These companies are Lighter, Tempo, Kalshi, Zama, Sygnum, Nous Research, Flying Tulip, and RedotPay. They form the most representative group of "new unicorn samples" in the 2025 crypto industry, reflecting the latest preferences and trends in the capital market.

Nous Research

Nous Research is a research-oriented company focusing on the integration of artificial intelligence and decentralized technology, dedicated to exploring large-scale model training, inference, and collaboration mechanisms in a decentralized environment. Nous is building a fully open AI technology stack and, through its pre-trained network Psyche, enabling anyone to meaningfully participate in the development of cutting-edge intelligence and contribute their idle computing power.

In April 2025, Nous Research announced a $1 billion valuation after completing a $50 million funding round led by Paradigm. Prior to this, 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 stablecoin payment technology company that integrates blockchain solutions with traditional banking and financial infrastructure, aiming to provide inclusive financial services to the unbanked population. RedotPay is devoted to using crypto assets in real-world consumer and payment scenarios, with its product ecosystem revolving around the exchange, settlement, and payment experience between crypto assets and fiat.

In 2025, RedotPay completed three funding rounds of $40 million, $47 million, and $107 million, with valuations exceeding $1 billion in the second and third rounds. RedotPay also announced that its annualized payment volume has exceeded $10 billion, current annual revenue is over $150 million, and it has achieved profitable operations.

Kalshi

Kalshi is a compliance-focused 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 chose to operate within a regulatory framework from its inception, treating the prediction market as a compliant financial instrument.

In 2025, Kalshi completed three funding rounds totaling $185 million, $300 million, and $1 billion, reaching a peak valuation of $11 billion. Investors include Sequoia Capital, a16z, Paradigm, among others. In 2025, Kalshi saw a trading volume of $23.8 billion, marking a 1108% year-over-year growth and positioning itself as 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 trading platforms while remaining fully decentralized by combining on-chain validation with a high-throughput matching engine. The protocol utilizes its own Layer 2 infrastructure to minimize gas fees, achieve instant settlement, and provide auditable proof of each transaction.

In November 2025, Lighter announced 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, subsequently listed on mainstream exchanges like Robinhood, Coinbase, among others, with a current fully diluted valuation of $16 billion. Lighter also introduced spot trading functionality.

Flying Tulip

Flying Tulip is an intelligent trading protocol founded by DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje, integrating spot trading, derivatives, lending, money markets, native stablecoin (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 a $200 million seed round financing, valuing the company at $1 billion, with participation from Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, Susquehanna Crypto, among others.

Compared to all other funding projects, Flying Tulip has set up a redemption clause for its investors: all primary market participants (including private and public sale) have on-chain redemption rights, allowing them to burn $FT at any time and redeem their invested assets (e.g., ETH) principal. Redemption proceeds will be settled automatically through smart contracts, funded by an 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 a core focus on offering compliant pathways for traditional financial clients to enter the crypto market.

In January 2025, Sygnum raised $58 million in a strategic funding round, surpassing a $1 billion valuation post-investment, becoming a unicorn. In May of last year, former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo also joined Sygnum as a senior policy advisor.

Tempo

Tempo is a high-performance Layer1 blockchain designed for payment scenarios, jointly developed by Stripe and Paradigm in mid-2025. Tempo supports all major stablecoins, providing high throughput, low-cost global transactions for any business 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 testnet, with many traditional finance giants like Kalshi, Klarna, and UBS officially partnering up.

Zama

Zama is a privacy-centric cryptographic protocol that adds a privacy layer to public blockchains. Its Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a technology that allows data to be processed without decryption. This can be used to create privacy-preserving smart contracts on public, permissionless blockchains, where only specific users can see transaction data and contract states.

In June 2025, Zama announced a $57 million funding round, surpassing a $1 billion valuation, led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange. In the latter 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 proprietary auction app, 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.

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