Behind a blockchain’s promise of independence sits a surprisingly ordinary job: keeping computers running. InfStones built a business around taking that job off other people’s hands.
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.
BitGo made an unfashionable wager: digital money would need locks, rules and adults in the room. A broken $1.2 billion sale only made the wager more interesting.
Most people will never hear of Blockdaemon. The institutions moving billions on-chain can't operate without it.
A nonprofit built around a Turing Award winner's cryptography is doing something most crypto projects only talk about: giving up control on purpose.
Galaxy spent years building institutional rails for digital assets. Its second act is more physical: turning Texas land and power into AI infrastructure, while bringing the same machinery to banks, funds and individual investors.
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.
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.
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.
Hata is a Malaysian dual-licensed digital asset exchange that lets people buy, sell, store and stake cryptocurrencies using local fiat. Founded in 2023 and launched in May of that year, it holds licences from both the Securities Commission Malaysia and the Labuan Financial Services Authority - a rare dual-regulated footprint that keeps customer assets custodied inside the country. Led by ex-Luno APAC general manager David Low, Hata grew to more than 209,000 registered users by the end of 2025 and closed an US$8 million Series A led by Bybit in April 2026.
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.
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.
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.
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.