2025 NEWLY ENCRYPTED UNICORNS: DISTRIBUTED IN AREAS SUCH AS PAYMENTS, AI, ETC., TOTALLING 8

by Hu Hu, ChianCatcher

 

In 2025, the encryption industry-level market experienced the harshest winter in many years, and despite the growth of cumulative financing under the influence of the head effects of a few giants, such as Bian, the number of cumulative financing projects declined for the fifth consecutive year, with only 902 projects, which fell by 41 per cent。

However, in such a market environment, many encryption companies have been promoted to new encrypted unicorns (valued at $1 billion) with outstanding products and technologies, namely Lighter, Tempo, Kalshi, Zama, Sygnum, Nous Research, Flying Tulip and RedotPay, which constitute the most representative group of “new unicorn samples” in the encryption industry in 2025, reflecting the latest preferences and trends in capital markets。

Nous Research

Nous Research is a research company that focuses on the combination of artificial intelligence and decentrization techniques and works to explore large model training, reasoning and collaborative mechanisms in a decentrized environment. Nous is building a fully open artificial intelligent technology warehouse, through its pre-training network, Psyche, to enable anyone to participate meaningfully in the development of front-line intelligence and to contribute to their idle computing capabilities。

In April 2025, Nous Research announced that $50 million in financing would be financed with a $1 billion valuation, with Paradigm taking the lead. Before that, Nos had raised some $20 million in seed wheel money from investors such as Distributed Global, North Island Ventures and Delphi Ventures。

RedotPay

RedotPay, a Hong Kong-based paid technology company based on a stable currency, integrates block-chain solutions with traditional banking and financial infrastructure, with the aim of providing inclusive finance to people without bank accounts. RedotPay works to use encrypted assets for consumption and payment scenarios in the real world, and its product system revolves around the experience of exchange, clearing and payment between encrypted assets and French currency。

RedotPay completed three rounds of financing in 2025: $40 million, $47 million and $107 million, of which the second and third rounds were valued at over $1.0 billion. RedotPay also stated that its annualized payments had exceeded $10 billion and that it now had an annualized revenue of over $150 million and had a profitable operation。

Kalshi

Kalshi is a compliance-oriented forecast market company that allows users to price probabilities and hedge risks around macroeconomic, political events and real world outcomes. Unlike most decentrized forecast markets, Kalshi has chosen to operate within a regulatory framework since its inception, building the forecast market as a compliance financial instrument。

In 2025, Kalshi completed three successive rounds of financing, amounting to $185 million, $300 million and $1.0 billion, valued at up to $11 billion, with investments including Sequoia Capital, a16z and Paradigm. In 2025, Kalshi traded $23.8 billion, an increase of 1108 per cent over the same period, one of the fastest growing companies in the industry。

Lighter

Lighter is a de-centre durability contract trading platform, which is designed to provide the performance of the centralized exchange while maintaining complete decentrization by combining chain certification with high-volume-matching engines. The agreement uses its own Layer 2 infrastructure to minimize gas costs, achieve immediate settlement and provide auditable certificates for each transaction。

In November 2025, Lighter announced the completion of $68 million in financing, valued at $1.5 billion, with the participation of Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital. At the end of the year, Lighter officially launched the LIT, and since then the main exchange, such as Robinwood and Coinbase, has been connected to it, currently FDV is $1.6 billion. Lighter also introduced spot trading。

Flying Tulip

Flying Tulip is a smart trade agreement created by the DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje, which consolidates spot transactions, derivatives, borrowings, currency markets, original stability currency (ftUSD) and chain insurance into a single cross-guarantee system, without transferring funds across different agreements。

In September 2025, Flying Tulip announced the completion of $200 million in seed ship finance, valued at $1 billion, with participants including Brevan Howard Digital, CoinFund, DWF Labs, FalconX, Hypersphere, Lemniscap, Nascent, Republic Digital, Selini, Susquehanna Crypto, etc。

Compared to all other financing projects, Flying Tulip has set up foreclosure clauses for its investors: all first-level market participants (including private and public) have the right of foreclosure on the chain and are ready to destroy $FT and redeem the principal of their input assets (e.g. ETH). Foreclosures will be automatically settled through the process, and funds will come from the isolation chain established by the collected funds to redeem reserves。

Sygnum

Sygnum, a regulated Swiss encrypted bank, provides services such as digital asset hosting, transactions, pledge and structured financial products to institutions and high net worth clients, with a central position to provide compliance channels for traditional financial customers to enter the encrypted market。

In January 2025, Sygnum raised $58 million in a round of strategic financing, valued at over $1 billion, to join the unicorn. Last May, former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo joined Sygnum as Senior Policy Adviser。

Tempo

Tempo is a high-performance Layer 1 block chain designed for the payment scene, developed by Stripe and Paradigm in mid-2025. Tempo supports all mainstream stabilization currencies and can provide high-volume, low-cost global transactions for any business example。

In October 2025, Tempo announced the completion of $500 million in financing, with the participation of Thive Capital and Greenoaks. In December, Stripe and Paradigm announced their partnership with a number of traditional financial giants, including Kalshi, Klarna and UBS, to launch the Tempo district testing network。

Zama 

Zama is an encrypted privacy agreement that adds a layer of confidentiality to the public block chain. The same-state encryption (FHE) it develops is a technology that can process data without decryption. This can be used to create privacy smart contracts over public, non-licensed block chains, and only specific users can see transaction data and contractual status。

In June 2025, Zama announced the completion of $57 million in financing, valued at more than $1 billion, with Pantera Capital and Blockchange leading the way. In the second half of the year, Zama went back on-line with the main network. On 21 January, Zama initiated a chain-based sale of coins through the CoinList and its own auction application, with a minimum total diluted valuation (FDV) of $55 million and a Dutch-type auction structure with sealed bids, allocating 12 per cent of its total supply of 11.1 billion tokens。