bitcoin
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Fedi puts Bitcoin in the hands of people you know
A wallet, a chat app, and a rather unfashionable idea: trust people you can actually reach. Fedi is betting that community custody can make Bitcoin useful beyond the technically fearless.
Hiro’s big Bitcoin bet: make the plumbing boring
A missed blockchain event can ruin an otherwise clever app. Hiro builds the tools behind Stacks applications - and its latest changes show why dependable infrastructure sometimes means a shorter product menu.
Exodus made crypto feel simple. Now comes the hard part: spending it.
A free wallet became a $121.6 million business by making crypto easier to handle. Its next wager is that digital dollars belong at the checkout, not just in a portfolio.
Lava and the Strange Luxury of Never Selling
Bitcoin holders have a peculiar problem: their savings can buy a house, but selling them means surrendering the bet. Lava sells a way around that dilemma - with interest, a card, and collateral rules worth reading twice.
The Hidden Toll Booth on Bitcoin’s Fast Lane
Lightning Labs helped make bitcoin payments fast. Then it met the less glamorous problem: someone has to keep the channels funded, balanced, and usable.
The Crypto App That Learned to Love the Paperwork
Abra once promised to make crypto feel effortless. After a costly collision with regulators, it is selling something less glamorous and more useful: named accounts, visible controls and a person who can explain the risk.
The Small Firm Translating Bitcoin and AI for Wall Street
OG Advisory Group found a lucrative gap between fast-moving technology and slow-moving investor language. Its answer is a compact, specialist team that turns miners, data centers and digital-asset platforms into stories the public markets can follow.
Blockchain.com sold financial freedom. Then came a $270 million lesson.
A Bitcoin search tool grew into a wallet, a trading business and an institutional lender. Its journey toward a proposed IPO reveals how much changes when a company built around holding your own keys starts extending credit.
The Exchange That Ripped Its Own Name Off the Wall
It dropped the "E," paid the fine, opened in San Jose, and put its reserves on a Merkle tree. Inside OKX's bet that self-custody - not the exchange - is the actual product.
The Bitcoin Miner That Decided It Was Really an Energy Company
MARA runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts of computing across four continents, holds more than 50,000 bitcoin, and now wants to sell you the cooling tanks and energy software behind it all.
The Firm That Turned Bitcoin Into a Ticker Symbol
Grayscale spent a decade building the plumbing that lets ordinary investors own crypto without touching a wallet - then went to court to prove the SEC had to allow it.
DCG Built a Crypto Empire. Now It Has to Prove the Model Still Works.
Barry Silbert designed DCG to hold crypto businesses for the long haul, not flip them on a fund's timetable. A decade later, its mix of asset management, mining, consumer finance and decentralized AI is both its edge and its hardest governance test.
The Company Betting the Future of Finance Runs on Bitcoin
Adam Back's hashcash sits inside the Bitcoin whitepaper. A decade later, the company he co-founded is trying to build the rails everyone else runs on - sidechains, Lightning nodes, hardware wallets, and a satellite that beams the blockchain to Earth.
Bitcoin’s Fast Lane Is Getting a Finance Department
Voltage began by putting Lightning nodes in the cloud. Now it is selling something more ambitious: instant payment rails that engineers can call by API and finance teams can settle in dollars.
CoinFlip
It started with one machine in a Chicago restaurant and no outside money. A decade later CoinFlip runs the world's largest crypto ATM network - and it built the whole thing before anyone offered to fund it.
Unchained
The Austin company is betting that the people with the most bitcoin want to keep holding their own keys - and still borrow, retire, trade, and pass it on like everyone else.
Coinbase
How a Y Combinator startup that let people buy $5 of Bitcoin became the first crypto company in the S&P 500 - and why it now wants to be the exchange for everything.
Babel Finance
The Hong Kong lender wanted to be the JP Morgan of crypto. It reached a $2 billion valuation in May 2022 - then froze withdrawals a month later after an unhedged trading bet lost roughly $280 million of client money.
Reku
Reku is an Indonesian investment platform that lets everyday users buy, sell and trade cryptocurrency alongside US stocks and ETFs from a single app. Founded in 2017 as Rekeningku.com and rebranded to Reku in 2022, the company positions itself as a low-fee, education-first exchange licensed by Indonesian regulators. It offers spot crypto, crypto futures, staking, OTC services and curated Reku Packs, and turned profitable in 2024 while serving hundreds of thousands of customers.
CryptoQuant
CryptoQuant is a crypto on-chain and market data analytics platform founded by Ki Young Ju that collects raw blockchain data, enriches it with exchange and entity labels, and delivers it as actionable metrics, charts, alerts and APIs. Often called 'the Bloomberg of crypto,' it serves professional traders, researchers and 200-plus institutional clients, and was the first on-chain data provider listed on CME Group's DataMine marketplace.
Eaglebrook
Eaglebrook is a New York-based crypto investment platform built for wealth managers. It gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) and their clients direct, tax-optimized exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets through separately managed accounts (SMAs) held at institutional qualified custodians. As an SEC-registered investment advisor, Eaglebrook operates one of the largest crypto SMA platforms in the market, integrating with advisors' existing portfolio-management and reporting systems so they can offer, trade, bill, and report on digital assets inside their normal workflow.
Block
Block, Inc. is a global financial technology company that builds tools for economic empowerment. Founded in 2009 as Square by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, it renamed itself Block in 2021 to reflect a broader mission spanning commerce, consumer finance and bitcoin. The company operates a portfolio of ecosystems - Square for sellers, Cash App for individuals, Afterpay for buy-now-pay-later, plus TIDAL, Bitkey and Proto - and trades on the NYSE under the ticker XYZ.
Prepaid2Cash
Prepaid2Cash is a Birmingham, Alabama fintech that turns network-branded prepaid cards and store gift cards into spendable cash. Users scan a card in the mobile app or online and receive funds by direct deposit, instant debit transfer, PayPal, Venmo, or Bitcoin, often within minutes. Founded in 2016 by Peter Vogt and John Gushman, the company set out to unlock the billions of dollars that sit trapped on plastic every year because prepaid and gift cards can't be deposited into a bank account.
Thesis*
Thesis* is a Bitcoin-focused venture production studio founded in 2014 that builds companies and protocols in-house rather than investing in outside teams. Operating under the banner "Money is power, Bitcoin is empowerment," it has incubated a portfolio spanning Bitcoin infrastructure and consumer finance - including tBTC (a decentralized, trust-minimized bridge that tokenizes Bitcoin on Ethereum), Mezo (an on-chain Bitcoin banking layer backed by the MUSD stablecoin), Fold (a Bitcoin rewards app), Acre (Bitcoin staking), and Taho (a community-owned web3 wallet). Led by CEO Matt Luongo, Thesis raised a $21 million Series A in 2021 and has become one of the most prolific studios building Bitcoin-native financial products.
Alpen Labs
Alpen Labs is a Bitcoin infrastructure company building Strata, a zero-knowledge (ZK) validity rollup and bridge that lets people borrow, earn, and transact in dollars directly on Bitcoin - without wrapped tokens or custodians. Founded in 2022 by a team of MIT alumni, the company uses ZK cryptography to bring programmable smart contracts and DeFi-style financial products to Bitcoin while preserving its security and decentralization.
Edge
Edge is a San Diego company building a self-custody, privacy-first mobile wallet for buying, storing, swapping and spending more than 120 cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2014 as Airbitz and rebranded to Edge in 2018, it pioneered a username-and-password login model backed by client-side encryption and a zero-knowledge architecture, so private keys and account data never leave a user's device unencrypted. The same security layer is offered to developers as the Edge Login SDK.
OpenNode
OpenNode is a Bitcoin payment processor and infrastructure provider that lets businesses accept Bitcoin and send payouts globally, settling instantly over the Lightning Network with automatic conversion to local currencies. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the company powers checkout, payouts, in-person payments and a developer API for merchants ranging from McDonald's El Salvador to Substack, charging a flat 1% fee with built-in chargeback protection.
Kraken
Kraken is one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, founded in 2011 and launched in 2013 by Jesse Powell after the Mt. Gox security failures convinced him crypto needed an exchange built on trust. Operated by parent company Payward, Inc., Kraken lets retail and institutional clients buy, sell, trade, stake, and self-custody dozens of digital assets, alongside crypto futures, margin, and index products. By late 2025 it served over 5 million funded accounts, held tens of billions in client assets, and was preparing for a public listing.
River
River is a San Francisco-based, bitcoin-only financial services company offering brokerage, custody, mining, and Lightning Network infrastructure. Founded in 2019 by Alex Leishman and Andrew Benson, River serves individuals and businesses who want to buy, hold, earn yield on, and transact with bitcoin from a US-regulated, transparent, full-reserve institution.