institutional-crypto
(23)
Finality Capital
A Santa Monica firm that has been quietly backing blockchain builders since 2018 - before it had a fund - now runs venture, liquid, and credit strategies on a single conviction: the next internet gets settled onchain.
Fireblocks
Fireblocks began with a $200 million crypto heist and a stubborn question: how do you move digital money without handing attackers the keys? Eight years later, its answer has become an operating system for institutions moving value onchain.
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.
Aspen Digital
Aspen Digital is an ADGM-regulated digital asset management platform built for private wealth. Founded in 2021 and co-incubated by Everest Ventures Group and TTB Partners, it gives family offices, external asset managers and ultra-high-net-worth investors a single regulated account to trade, custody, earn yield on and report across crypto - plus a white-label infrastructure stack that lets other wealth managers offer the same. It is backed by RIT Capital Partners (the Rothschild investment trust) and Liberty City Ventures.
Fuze
Fuze is a Dubai-based digital asset infrastructure company that lets banks, fintechs, and enterprises across MENA and Turkey offer regulated crypto and stablecoin services through a single API. Its stack spans Digital Assets-as-a-Service, an OTC trading desk, stablecoin payment rails, embedded trading, and custody, all built on regulated, compliant infrastructure. Licensed by Dubai's VARA and holding a Retail Payment Services license from the UAE Central Bank, Fuze has onboarded hundreds of institutions and processed billions in digital asset volume since its 2023 launch.
RockX
RockX is a Singapore-based Web3 infrastructure company that runs institutional-grade staking, validator, and RPC/node-API services across major proof-of-stake blockchains. Founded in 2019 by veterans of Zilliqa and RockMiner and led by CEO Zhuling Chen, it operates 13,000+ validators and has secured more than US$1.5B in staked assets. RockX is also an early contributor to Bedrock, the multi-asset liquid restaking protocol behind uniETH, uniBTC and the BR token, positioning the company at the center of institutional staking and Bitcoin-based DeFi in Asia.
Christopher King
Christopher King is the founder and CEO of Eaglebrook, a crypto investment platform that gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) direct access to bitcoin and digital assets through tax-optimized separately managed accounts (SMAs). A Penn State finance graduate who began investing in digital assets in 2014, King started his career in crypto-focused venture capital at Morgan Creek Capital Management before launching Eaglebrook in 2019. The New York and Miami-based company has grown into one of the largest crypto SMA platforms serving wealth managers, backed by investors including Castle Island Ventures, Brewer Lane Ventures, and Franklin Templeton.
Chris Yu
Chris Yu is the co-founder and CEO of SignalPlus, a Hong Kong-based software firm building institutional-grade trading and risk-management infrastructure for crypto options and derivatives. A former macro trader at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, he spotted that crypto options represented less than half a percent of perpetual-contract volume and set out to close that gap. Since founding SignalPlus with James Shan in 2021, Yu has grown the platform into a tool used by firms including Cumberland, FalconX, Galaxy, and Goldman Sachs, and helped expand the crypto options market several times over.
August Digital
August Digital is a New York-based institutional crypto company building on-chain prime brokerage infrastructure. Its platform gives trading desks, funds, protocols and treasuries secure smart-contract accounts, real-time risk and pricing engines, cross-margining, lending, and structured products so they can borrow, lend, trade and settle across DeFi and CeFi with any liquid collateral - all with on-chain auditability. August also operates Upshift, a vault product that opens institutional-grade yield strategies to a wider set of users. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Dragonfly in March 2025 and reports having processed roughly $45B in cumulative volume.
Crossover Markets
Crossover Markets is a New York-based institutional trading technology firm behind CROSSx, one of the first execution-only cryptocurrency electronic communication networks (ECN). Founded in 2022 by former FX prime brokerage executives, it decouples trade execution from custody and brokerage to remove the conflicts of interest common on crypto exchanges. CROSSx pairs sub-20 microsecond matching with smart order routing and custom dark and lit liquidity pools, and has matched more than $50 billion in notional volume across 12 million trades for nearly 100 institutional participants.
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.
David Wells
David Wells is the CEO of Ondo Perps, the equity-perpetuals trading arm of Ondo Finance, where he leads the push to bring leveraged trading of U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodities onchain with tokenized shares usable as collateral. He founded and ran Enclave Markets, the first Fully Encrypted Exchange, incubated within Ava Labs, after earlier roles at Two Sigma and Paxos. A Harvard Business School graduate and long-time markets operator, Wells has spent his career building institutional-grade trading infrastructure and arguing that crypto markets still hold real inefficiencies for those who can build fair, private, and efficient venues.
SignalPlus
SignalPlus is a Hong Kong-based, venture-backed technology company building institutional-grade infrastructure for digital asset derivatives. Its software sits on top of exchanges like Deribit, Binance, Bybit, OKX and Coincall, giving professional traders, market makers and institutions a free, Wall Street-grade options terminal with pricing, analytics, execution algorithms, automated delta hedging and, increasingly, agentic AI - all aimed at democratizing options for crypto markets.
The Tie
The Tie is a New York-based information services company for institutional digital asset markets. Founded in 2017, it built the Crypto SigDev Terminal - a Bloomberg-style workstation that combines real-time news, sentiment analytics, market data, and on-chain data - and has since expanded into staking infrastructure, corporate access and advisory, and compliant institutional messaging. Its clients include hedge funds, market makers, banks, trading venues, and crypto protocols.
Joshua Frank
Joshua Frank is the co-founder and CEO of The Tie, a New York-based data and analytics company that has become a core information provider for institutional crypto investors. The Tie's SigDev Terminal and APIs deliver real-time sentiment, news, and market data to hedge funds, trading desks, banks, and exchanges. Frank left a post-trade consulting role at SS&C Technologies in 2018 to build the company full time, and has since grown it into one of the most widely used data platforms serving the professional side of digital assets.
Ki Young Ju
Ki Young Ju is the founder and CEO of CryptoQuant, a blockchain analytics firm that turns raw on-chain data into market intelligence used by traders, funds, and institutions. A South Korean engineer who started the company in 2018 after stints in cybersecurity and the ICON blockchain project, he built CryptoQuant into one of the most cited sources for Bitcoin exchange flows, miner activity, and whale tracking. He is widely followed on X for data-driven market commentary, and became a talking point across crypto media in 2025 when he publicly reversed his earlier 'bull cycle is over' call and declared that the traditional Bitcoin cycle theory no longer holds in an ETF- and institution-driven market.
Hashdex
Hashdex is a crypto-focused asset manager that packages digital assets into regulated index funds and ETFs so ordinary investors can buy crypto through a brokerage account. Founded in Brazil in 2018 and now headquartered in the New York area, it co-developed the Nasdaq Crypto Index, launched the world's first crypto index ETF in 2021, and brought the first multi-asset spot crypto ETF (NCIQ) to US investors in 2025. The firm manages roughly $1 billion across products in nine countries.
Cubist
Cubist is a security-first Web3 infrastructure company that builds hardware-backed key management and confidential compute for digital assets. Its flagship platform, CubeSigner, keeps cryptographic keys sealed inside secure hardware (HSMs and AWS Nitro Enclaves) while giving developers low-latency signing through revocable sessions and a programmable policy engine - resolving the old tradeoff between cold-wallet security and hot-wallet speed. Founded by applied cryptographers and security researchers from Carnegie Mellon and UC San Diego who designed primitives underlying Ethereum and Avalanche, Cubist serves staking providers, DeFi protocols, bridges, and institutions building on internet capital markets.
Soter Insure
Soter Insure is an institutional-grade insurer built for the digital asset economy. Licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, it writes policies denominated in native crypto - Bitcoin and Ethereum - alongside fiat, covering risks like asset loss, crime, smart contract failure, directors & officers liability, and Ethereum staking slashing. Founded by Henson Orser and incubated by Further Ventures and WebN Group, Soter aims to close the insurance gap that has held institutional capital back from Web3.
Kaiko
Kaiko is a global provider of cryptocurrency and digital asset market data, analytics, indices, and surveillance built for institutions. Founded in Paris in 2014 and led by CEO Ambre Soubiran since 2016, the company turns raw data from 200+ exchanges, 20+ blockchains, and 20,000+ digital assets into clean, regulated, institutional-grade feeds used by banks, asset managers, exchanges, and regulators. After acquiring Amberdata in June 2026, Kaiko positions itself as the only independent, globally regulated data and analytics company spanning crypto and tokenized assets.
VersiFi
VersiFi is a New York-based institutional digital asset trading and lending firm that pairs a low-latency, plug-and-trade platform with high-touch service. It gives institutions a single point of access to OTC and algorithmic trading, direct market access, borrowing, lending, and third-party custody - all wrapped in TradFi-grade compliance and risk controls.
Ambre Soubiran
Ambre Soubiran is the CEO and chairman of Kaiko, the independent provider of institutional-grade, regulatory-compliant cryptocurrency market data and indices. After a decade structuring equity derivatives at HSBC in London and Paris, she walked away from traditional finance in 2016 to buy control of Kaiko - then a bright idea with no revenue and no staff - and built it into a global data business with roughly 130 people across New York, London, Paris and Singapore. She has raised over $80M and positions Kaiko as the trusted, neutral source of truth for crypto markets used by exchanges, asset managers and regulators.
Jeremy Verba
Jeremy Verba is the CEO of CoinCover, a Cardiff-based digital asset disaster recovery and wallet protection company that has safeguarded 600+ businesses and 22+ million wallets since 2018. A Silicon Valley veteran with 30+ years scaling fast-growth businesses from $10M to $250M, Verba previously led VUDU at Walmart, served as CEO of eHarmony across 18 countries, founded Zynga's Treasure Isle studio (the fastest-growing Facebook game at launch), and built Piczo into one of the world's largest teen social platforms. He holds a B.S. in Architecture from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and joined CoinCover in February 2026 to drive its transition from category creation to institutional-scale growth.