By: Hu Tao, ChianCatcher

In 2025, the primary market of the crypto industry experienced its harshest downturn in years. Although the total fundraising amount showed growth, influenced by the concentration effect of a few giants like Binance, the number of funded projects declined for the fifth consecutive year, dropping 41% to only 902 projects.

Nevertheless, in such a market environment, several crypto companies still managed to become new crypto unicorns (with valuations reaching $1 billion) thanks to their outstanding products and technologies. These eight companies—Lighter, Tempo, Kalshi, Zama, Sygnum, Nous Research, Flying Tulip, and RedotPay—form the most representative group of "new unicorn samples" in the 2025 crypto industry, reflecting the latest preferences and trends in the capital markets.

Nous Research

Nous Research is a research-focused company dedicated to exploring the combination of artificial intelligence and decentralized technology, aiming to develop mechanisms for large model training, inference, and collaboration in decentralized environments. 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. RedotPay is committed to enabling the use of crypto assets in real-world consumption and payment scenarios. Its product suite revolves around the exchange, clearing, and payment experience between crypto assets and fiat currencies.

In 2025, RedotPay completed three funding rounds: $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, with current annualized revenue exceeding $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 events, political outcomes, and real-world results. Unlike most decentralized prediction markets, Kalshi has chosen to operate within a regulatory framework since its inception, building prediction markets as compliant financial instruments.

In 2025, Kalshi completed three funding rounds of $185 million, $300 million, and $1 billion, reaching a peak valuation of $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 the performance of centralized exchanges 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. By the end of the year, Lighter officially launched its token, LIT, which was subsequently listed on mainstream exchanges such as Robinhood and Coinbase. Its current FDV is $1.6 billion. Lighter has also introduced spot trading functionality.

Flying Tulip

Flying Tulip is a smart 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, and Susquehanna Crypto.

Compared to all other funding projects, Flying Tulip established redemption terms 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 the principal of their invested assets (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 institutional and high-net-worth clients with services such as digital asset custody, trading, staking, and structured financial products. 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 such as 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 decryption. This can be used to create private smart contracts on top of public, permissionless blockchains, where transaction data and contract state are visible only to specific users.

In June 2025, Zama announced a $57 million funding round at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange. In the latter half of the year, Zama successively launched its testnet and mainnet. On January 21, 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, allocating 12% of its total token supply of 11 billion tokens.