ethereum
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ProperT wants your crypto to go shopping
A 5% token-back reward is the hook. The more interesting story is how ProperT uses payment processing and gift cards to give a digital token somewhere to go.
Offchain makes room for Ethereum
The team behind Arbitrum began by moving computation off Ethereum. Its next challenge is moving complexity out of the way of the people using it.
Sushi learned to share the trade.
It began by paying people to leave a rival exchange. Today, Sushi searches across rivals to execute a swap. The distance between those two ideas is the story.
Cointelegraph sells the speed. Trust pays the bill.
A crypto newsroom became a business in attention, analysis and access. Its most revealing story is what happens when a headline outruns the checks.
MetaMask puts the keys in your hands.
A browser extension helped millions enter crypto. Now MetaMask wants to handle everyday money, without taking custody of it. The hard part is making that freedom easy to use.
Harmony made blockchains fast. Trust took longer.
Two-second transactions were the easy part. A $100 million bridge theft, a bruising recovery debate and a proposed move into AI video reveal what speed alone cannot solve.
Monad wants your code. It would rather skip the queue.
The blockchain built by trading engineers keeps Ethereum’s familiar contracts and rearranges the machinery beneath them. Its next test is whether faster settlement makes money more useful.
Uniswap made a market out of a formula
A laid-off engineer turned a coding exercise into a way to trade without handing over your coins. Uniswap’s next experiment is making that open market pay for its own upkeep.
Superstate wants Wall Street to keep its shares - and change its clock
A Treasury fund was the rehearsal. Superstate is now building the ownership records and payment rails that let funds and public-company shares move through crypto markets.
Polymer Labs wants your money to arrive whole
Nearly $2 billion moved through its USDC bridge in nine months, the company says. Behind the tidy transfers is a more interesting idea: let applications prove what happened elsewhere, then get on with business.
Alchemy and the art of disappearing
A blockchain app needs someone to do the unglamorous work. Alchemy turned that chore into a business, then discovered that even an infrastructure company must choose what to leave to somebody else.
Zerion and the ten-cent theory of crypto
A wallet company discovered that the cheapest route can be the wrong route. Its larger wager is that making crypto understandable is a business of its own.
The Company That Lets Blockchains Rehearse
Tenderly began by explaining failed smart contracts. Now it gives developers, treasuries and risk teams a private dress rehearsal for decisions that would be expensive to discover in public.
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 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.
The VC That Writes the Code It Bets On
Most venture firms wire the money and wait. Paradigm wires the money and then builds the developer tools its founders use to ship.
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.
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.
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.
Spring in Africa
Spring in Africa is a Nigerian-rooted fintech that lets people and small businesses send, receive, and hold money across borders in both fiat and crypto. It began as Wallet.ng, grew into Wallets Africa, and in 2023 launched Spring, a multi-currency wallet that pairs an instant account number, cashback, and payment links with Ethereum and stablecoin transactions shown in plain USD. Backed by Y Combinator (W19), Michael Seibel, Microtraction, Samurai Incubate, and Mozilla, the company has processed millions of dollars a month for tens of thousands of consumer and business accounts.
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.
SettleMint
SettleMint is a Belgium-founded blockchain-platform-as-a-service company that helps banks, governments and large enterprises build, deploy and operate blockchain and tokenization applications without assembling infrastructure from scratch. Its Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform combines multi-chain infrastructure, smart-contract tooling, middleware and low-code application kits so teams can move from pilot to production across issuance, compliance, custody, settlement and servicing. Founded in 2016 by Matthew Van Niekerk and Roderik van der Veer, the company serves over 80 customers worldwide and powers national-scale deployments including Saudi Arabia's real-estate registration blockchain.
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.
OP Labs PBC
OP Labs PBC is the core software development company behind Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, and the OP Stack, the open-source framework that powers the Superchain - a network of blockchains including chains launched by Sony, Uniswap, Kraken and (until 2026) Coinbase's Base. Founded in 2019 out of the nonprofit Plasma Group, OP Labs raised $178.5M from Paradigm and a16z at a $1.65B valuation and structures itself as a Public Benefit Corporation committed to scaling Ethereum's technology and values, including funding open-source public goods.
DELV
DELV, formerly Element Finance, was a research-driven DeFi company that called itself 'the factory for DeFi.' Founded in 2020 by Will Villanueva and Jonny Rhea, it built open-source infrastructure for fixed- and variable-rate yield - most notably the Element Protocol, the Hyperdrive AMM, and the Council on-chain governance framework. Backed by a16z, Placeholder, and Polychain Capital with about $36.4M raised, the team pursued the idea that reliable fixed rates were essential to mainstream DeFi adoption. After a March 2025 Hyperdrive vulnerability and a conclusion that the product had not found market fit, DELV wound down operations in June 2025 with no reported loss of user funds.
Futureswap
Futureswap is a decentralized, non-custodial protocol for leveraged perpetual trading, letting users take long or short positions on crypto assets with leverage while liquidity providers earn fees and token incentives. Built by a small San Francisco team led by founder Derek Alia, it launched on Ethereum in 2020, later moved to Arbitrum and Avalanche for lower-cost transactions, and pioneered an AMM-based design that plugs into pools like Uniswap and Trader Joe. Backed by roughly $13.5M from investors including Ribbit Capital, Framework Ventures, True Ventures and Placeholder, it was governed by the community via its FST token.
Slingshot
Slingshot is a San Francisco-based crypto trading app that lets people buy, sell, and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains from a single USDC balance - hiding the usual friction of wallets, bridges, and gas fees behind a clean consumer interface. Founded in 2020 by Coinbase alum Clinton Bembry, it raised roughly $18M through a Ribbit Capital-led Series A and was acquired by NFT marketplace Magic Eden in April 2025.