Solidus Labs

In 2018, three engineers at Goldman Sachs kept running into the same wall. Crypto was exploding, institutions were curious, and yet the market had almost none of the guardrails that traditional finance took for granted - no trade surveillance, thin transaction monitoring, and manipulation that went largely unwatched. Asaf Meir, Chen Arad and Praveen Kumar left to build the missing layer. They called the company Solidus Labs, after a Roman gold coin that held its value for centuries because people trusted it.

Solidus Labs sells software that watches markets. Its systems ingest trading and blockchain data, then flag the patterns that signal wrongdoing - wash trading, spoofing, pump-and-dumps, insider trading, rug pulls and money laundering. In the company's own early shorthand, it plays the role of a "bomb-sniffing dog" for crypto: not the thing that stops every threat, but the thing that finds them first.

The customers are the venues and institutions that need to prove their markets are clean: digital-asset exchanges, broker-dealers, market makers, custodians, stablecoin issuers, OTC desks - and, increasingly, the regulators themselves.

Who uses it. Named customers and partners include FalconX, HashKey, BitMEX, Luno, Amber Group, EDX Markets, One Trading, Oasis Pro Markets and CoinDCX - a roster that reads like a map of institutional crypto's maturing infrastructure.

Where the team sits. Headquartered on Wall Street in New York, Solidus Labs runs offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Tel Aviv and London, with roughly 84 employees blending traditional-finance rigor, crypto-native building and cybersecurity.

The unusual part. Most startups pick a side - builders or watchdogs. Solidus Labs sells to both, which is why its advisory bench has included a former CFTC Chairman and a former SEC Commissioner.