UDHC is betting that decentralized finance will not replace the old system. It will quietly connect to it - with better plumbing, clearer rules and products ordinary customers can use.
A pair of security engineers turned crypto custody into a federally chartered bank. Now Anchorage Digital wants to supply the vaults, settlement rails and stablecoins for an always-on financial system.
A smart contract can execute perfectly and still act on a bad answer. Space and Time is building the database layer that sends the answer with its receipt.
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.
Startale Group is a Singapore-headquartered Web3 infrastructure company building the onchain stack for finance, entertainment, and consumer applications. Led by founder and CEO Sota Watanabe - who also created Astar Network - Startale operates a vertically integrated portfolio spanning the Sony-backed Ethereum Layer 2 Soneium, the Astar Network, the Strium blockchain for tokenized securities and real-world assets, the JPYSC and USDSC stablecoins, and a consumer Startale App. Backed by Sony and SBI, the company aims to bring Web3 to billions by bridging traditional finance with onchain systems.
N1 (formerly Layer N) is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for onchain finance at scale. Founded by DeFi veterans Dima Romanov, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz, N1 pairs an ultra-low-latency, congestion-free execution layer with native financial primitives - an onchain orderbook, atomic transaction bundles, unified margining, and RFQ - so that trading applications that previously had to run offchain can run natively onchain. Every app runs in its own isolated environment with no state congestion, and developers can write smart contracts in TypeScript (with Python and other languages on the way). Backed by Founders Fund, Multicoin Capital, dao5, Kraken Ventures, and Arthur Hayes, the New York-based team is targeting the performance ceiling that has kept serious finance from moving onchain.
Allium is a New York and Singapore based blockchain data infrastructure company that turns raw, messy on-chain activity from 150+ chains and thousands of protocols into clean, query-ready data. Through APIs, real-time streams, data shares, and an analytics terminal, it serves as a system of record for on-chain finance, powering institutions like Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and Phantom. The company raised a $16.5M Series A in July 2024 led by Theory Ventures.