crypto-infrastructure
(21)
Michael Shaulov and the problem with money that moves
A South Korean exchange-hack investigation sent Michael Shaulov down an unexpected path. The Fireblocks co-founder has spent the years since trying to make digital money safe enough to use, and ordinary enough to disappear into everyday business.
Pengyu Wang and the price of one extra click
The Particle Network co-founder brought a casual-game builder’s eye to crypto’s awkward front door. His work now stretches from familiar logins to accounts that can move across blockchains without making the user manage every step.
Coinbase Developer Platform wants crypto to lose its entrance exam
A wallet should not require a conversion experience. Coinbase Developer Platform turns crypto’s awkward preliminaries into infrastructure for apps, payments and machines with money to spend.
VALR: The exchange that wants to be everyone’s plumbing
A Johannesburg crypto exchange won customers at the front door. Its more revealing ambition lies behind the walls: the trading, payments and account infrastructure other financial businesses can build upon.
Mark Daly Is Building the Plumbing for Money That Never Sleeps
From a Cork asset-management classroom to Chicago’s institutional crypto rails, zerohash Chief Business Officer Mark Daly has spent a decade making the exotic feel operational.
WhiteBIT Wants a Place in Your Wallet - and on Your Football Shirt
The Ukrainian-founded crypto exchange is pairing trading infrastructure with debit-card spending and football fandom. Its wager: people will use digital assets more often when they have somewhere familiar to spend them.
Sentora Built the Risk Desk That Lets Institutions Touch DeFi Without Going Native
A merger, a $25 million Series A and one hard lesson from crypto's downturn produced a company that sells the least glamorous - and most necessary - part of on-chain finance: disciplined risk.
Third Prime Is Betting the Next Big Software Company Wears Work Boots
The New York and Nashville venture firm hunts for software in places where clipboards, compliance binders and fragmented workflows still run the day. Its portfolio shows a consistent wager: overlooked industries can become unusually durable technology markets.
The Company That Locked Up the Keys - Then Let Anyone Prove It
Two ex-Coinbase engineers got tired of fighting key-management software, so they built the plumbing that now signs millions of crypto transactions a week - and made it verifiable, not just trusted.
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.
Riot Platforms, Inc.
Riot spent years turning cheap electricity into Bitcoin. Now the same land, substations and cooling know-how are being repackaged for AI - a pivot that could make the power connection more valuable than the mine.
Consensys
It gave the world MetaMask, wired thousands of apps to Ethereum through Infura, and now wants to make the blockchain cheap enough to actually use. Meet the company Ethereum's co-founder built to onboard the rest of us.
Bitfury
For over a decade Bitfury built the picks and shovels of the Bitcoin economy - the chips, the cooling, the code. Now it is spending its winnings on the next wave of computing.
Timothy Chung
Timothy Chung is the co-founder and CEO of Unifold (YC W26), a New York based startup building multi-chain crypto and stablecoin deposit and payment infrastructure that lets any app accept on-chain deposits in under ten lines of code. He studied computer science at Columbia and Cambridge, was an early engineer at Instabase, worked on Polymarket, and co-led a central bank digital currency initiative for the Marshall Islands out of MIT. Before Unifold he co-founded Streambird, a wallet-as-a-service platform acquired by MoonPay that became MoonPay Wallets and helped onboard tens of millions of users to apps like Phantom and Polymarket.
Jack Chong
Jack Chong is the co-founder and CEO of Checker, a New York fintech that gives banks and payment companies a single API to reach the world's stablecoin and digital-asset liquidity. An Oxford PPE graduate who once trained to be a Chinese diplomat in the Arab world, he co-wrote one of the industry's first rigorous primers on real-world-asset tokenization before building Checker, which moved more than $3 billion in volume in under a year and raised $8M led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures and Framework Ventures.
Edward Woodford
Edward Woodford is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Hash, the Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company that quietly powers digital-asset features inside Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Shift4. A Goldman Sachs commodities alum who bought his first Bitcoin from an ATM as an MIT grad student, he built and sold a regulated derivatives venue before turning Zero Hash into a billion-dollar 'plumbing' business that has settled more than $45 billion in volume and onboarded over five million people to crypto.
Verbwire
Verbwire was a Web3 infrastructure company that collapsed the entire smart-contract stack into a single REST API. Founded by two former Wall Street quants, it let developers in any language - Python, Java, JavaScript, C++ - deploy contracts, mint NFTs, manage wallets, store files on IPFS and query on-chain data without ever touching Solidity or Hardhat. With 60+ endpoints across 10+ EVM blockchains, it served tens of thousands of developers and processed millions of API calls before the founders wound it down, noting that AI had begun to close the very complexity gap they were built to bridge.
Zerohash
Zerohash is a Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider that lets banks, brokerages, fintechs and marketplaces embed digital-asset products - trading, payments, stablecoins and tokenization - through a single regulated API. Rather than building blockchain rails, custody and compliance themselves, clients like Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Morgan Stanley and Franklin Templeton plug into Zerohash's licensed, end-to-end platform. Founded in 2017 by Edward Woodford, the company reached unicorn status in 2025 and has settled tens of billions of dollars in volume for millions of end users across nearly 200 jurisdictions.
Ethan Chan
Ethan Chan is the co-founder and CEO of Allium, a New York and Singapore based company building the system of record for onchain finance. After leading machine learning and data engineering teams at Primer and lecturing at Stanford, he turned to the unglamorous work of cleaning up blockchain data, translating raw events from 150+ chains and 10,000 protocols into standardized, finance-ready datasets used by Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, Uniswap and Phantom. He cheerfully calls himself the Chief Data Plumber.
0x
0x is the open exchange infrastructure powering token swaps for many of crypto's largest apps - Coinbase, Robinhood, Phantom, MetaMask, Matcha and more. Through its Swap API, gasless transactions, and the underlying 0x Protocol, the company aggregates liquidity from hundreds of sources across the major chains so developers can ship trading experiences without building order routing themselves.
Alexander Pack
Alexander Pack is a crypto venture capitalist who co-founded Hack VC and Dragonfly Capital, pioneering early-stage Web3 investments across the U.S. and Asia. A former Bain Capital Ventures director who launched their crypto practice, he's been the first institutional investor in three unicorns and has seeded hundreds of Web3 startups. Pack manages over $425 million in crypto-focused venture funds and co-founded Imperii Partners, a global crypto-native investment bank.