Eight crypto unicorns in 2025: A new trend of capital inflow accelerating decentralized solutions

The primary market of the crypto industry in 2025 faced a historically challenging environment. While major projects like Bitcoin attracted concentrated funding, the number of new projects declined for the fifth consecutive year, totaling 902. This represents a sharp 41% decrease, highlighting a tough landscape. However, it is precisely amid this headwind that companies with innovative technologies and robust business models are emerging. Notably, eight emerging unicorns (valuation over $1 billion) centered around distributed technology have entered the scene.

These eight companies—Lighter, Tempo, Kalshi, Zama, Sygnum, Nous Research, Flying Tulip, RedotPay—span fields from AI to payments, trading, and privacy, vividly illustrating the direction of “distributed” solutions sought by capital markets in 2025.

The Fusion of AI and Decentralized Intelligence: The Future as Demonstrated by Nous Research

Nous Research specializes in the integration of artificial intelligence and decentralization technologies. Its fully open AI tech stack eliminates central management, enabling anyone to participate in cutting-edge intelligence development within a distributed framework. Through its pre-trained network Psyche, participants can contribute surplus computing power and earn incentives—this model embodies the essence of decentralized AI.

In April 2025, Nous Research completed a $50 million Series A funding round, reaching a valuation of $1 billion. Led by Paradigm, it had previously raised approximately $20 million in seed funding. Large-scale funding during the crypto winter signaled investor confidence in distributed AI infrastructure.

Payment Innovation: RedotPay and Tempo Realize Decentralized Financial Infrastructure

RedotPay, headquartered in Hong Kong, is a payment technology company built on stablecoins. It integrates blockchain with traditional financial infrastructure to provide universal services even to unbanked populations—this distributed financial access is core to its business. Through three funding rounds in March ($40 million), July ($47 million), and December ($107 million), its valuation surpassed $1 billion. It already reports annual payment volume exceeding $10 billion and annual revenue over $150 million, achieving profitability.

Meanwhile, Tempo is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain for payments, developed jointly by Stripe and Paradigm. Supporting all major stablecoins, it offers low-cost, high-throughput global transactions—an infrastructure for decentralized payments. In October 2025, it completed a $500 million funding round and announced the launch of its testnet in December. Traditional financial giants like Kalshi, Klarna, and UBS are among its partners.

Evolution of Trading Protocols: Lighter and Flying Tulip Open New Dimensions in Decentralized Markets

Lighter is a decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol that combines on-chain verification with a high-throughput matching engine, maintaining full decentralization while delivering performance comparable to centralized exchanges. Layer 2 infrastructure reduces gas costs and provides auditable proofs for each transaction—an ideal distributed trading system. In November 2025, it raised $68 million, reaching a valuation of $1.5 billion, and by year-end, its token LIT was listed. Its current FDV stands at $1.6 billion, and it has been listed on major exchanges including Robinhood.

Flying Tulip, founded by DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje, is a smart trading protocol that consolidates spot, derivatives, lending, money markets, native stablecoins, and on-chain insurance into a single cross-margin system. This distributed capital efficiency eliminates the need for fund transfers between multiple protocols. In September 2025, it raised $200 million in seed funding, reaching a valuation of $1 billion. An innovative feature is the on-chain redemption rights granted to all investors (private and public), allowing them to withdraw their principal at any time.

The Risk Market and Crypto Privacy: Companies Capturing Institutional Demand

Kalshi operates a regulated prediction market that allows for probability pricing of macroeconomic and political events. Unlike many decentralized prediction markets, it has chosen to operate within regulatory frameworks since inception, ensuring trustworthiness as a financial tool. In 2025, it raised a total of $185 million, $300 million, and $1 billion across three rounds, reaching a peak valuation of $11 billion. Top-tier VCs like Sequoia Capital, a16z, and Paradigm participated. Its trading volume in 2025 was $23.8 billion, a 1108% YoY growth—evidence of institutional investors flocking to distributed prediction markets.

Zama is a cryptographic protocol adding privacy to public blockchains, utilizing FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) to process data without decrypting it. It offers a distributed solution that balances privacy protection with smart contract functionality. In June 2025, it raised $57 million, reaching a valuation of $1 billion. In the second half of the year, it launched testnet and mainnet phases, and on January 21, 2026, began on-chain token sales via CoinList. It has a minimum FDV of $55 million, with a total supply of 1.1 billion tokens, of which 12% are allocated. It employs a Dutch auction method.

Gaining Institutional Trust: A Model of Regulatory Compliance and Decentralization

Sygnum, a Swiss regulated crypto bank, offers digital asset custody, trading, staking, and structured products to institutional and high-net-worth clients. It functions as a compliance gateway for traditional finance clients entering the crypto space—this distributed access point is a key differentiator. In January 2025, it raised $58 million in a strategic round, reaching a valuation over $1 billion. Notably, former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo joined as a senior policy advisor, strengthening regulatory credibility.

The recognition of these eight companies as new unicorns in 2025 signifies more than just valuation milestones; it indicates a profound shift in the capital markets. The industry is transitioning from traditional centralized models to distributed infrastructure, reconciling with regulators, and expanding across multiple domains—these trends are fundamental changes shaping the crypto industry beyond 2026. Amid a harsh market, only companies with genuine innovation and practicality are surviving, setting the standards for a new era.