Startups Directory

Bain Capital Crypto is a $560M venture investment fund dedicated exclusively to crypto infrastructure and protocols. Co-led by Stefan Cohen and Alex Evans, the firm provides technical and economic research alongside capital deployment across Layer 1 scaling, privacy, middleware, and storage solutions. The fund combines deep crypto expertise with institutional backing from Bain Capital LP, positioning itself as more specialized than generalist venture firms in supporting next-generation internet infrastructure projects.

⚠️ DEFUNCT COMPANY - FTX was a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange founded in 2019 that collapsed in November 2022. Prior to collapse, it was the second-to-third largest crypto exchange by volume with over 1 million users, offering spot and derivatives trading with native token (FTT) incentives. The company imploded due to misuse of customer funds by sister company Alameda Research, revealing severe internal control failures. This profile is provided for historical reference only.

Anchorage Digital is a global institutional crypto platform providing custody, trading, staking, governance, and settlement infrastructure for digital assets. As the first federally chartered crypto bank in the US (OCC-chartered in January 2021), it serves financial institutions, governments, and enterprises with institutional-grade security built by former security leaders from Square and Docker. The company differentiates through regulatory compliance, patent-holding security infrastructure, and Atlas—its proprietary settlement network that minimizes friction in crypto transactions.

Ripple operates the XRP Ledger, a decentralized blockchain enabling cross-border payments that settle in 3-5 seconds with near-zero fees. The platform serves financial institutions, payment providers, and digital asset custodians seeking faster, cheaper alternatives to traditional settlement networks. Ripple's differentiator is its energy-efficient consensus protocol, institutional-grade custody solutions, and direct integration with legacy banking infrastructure through products like xCurrent and on-demand liquidity (ODL).

Rain is a full-stack fintech infrastructure platform that enables developers, fintechs, and financial services firms to embed stablecoin payments into their products through a unified API. The platform handles money-in, storage, spending, and money-out across multiple blockchains while managing complex back-end operations like tokenization, compliance, and settlement. Rain's proprietary settlement stack allows Visa card transactions to interoperate with stablecoins, making them practical for everyday purchases. The company pioneered the ability to settle Visa transactions using stablecoins seven days a week, reducing working capital requirements and enabling near-instant liquidity.

ConsenSys is a global blockchain infrastructure and software company founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin that builds developer tools, enterprise applications, and scaling solutions powered by Ethereum. Its flagship products—MetaMask (self-custodial wallet securing $60B in assets) and Infura (node infrastructure serving millions of transactions)—serve as critical infrastructure for the Web3 ecosystem. The company also develops Linea (Layer 2 scaling), Quorum (enterprise blockchain platform acquired from JPMorgan), and provides smart contract auditing and staking services to enterprises and developers.

Digital Asset builds Daml, a smart contract language and distributed ledger platform that enables developers to code multi-party agreements across blockchains, DLTs, and databases. Daml 2.0 includes Canton, a privacy-enabled distributed ledger supporting cross-blockchain atomic transactions. The platform serves financial services, healthcare, and insurance organizations—including 5 of the top 10 stock exchanges—to eliminate reconciliation delays, reduce settlement risk, and enable real-time capital markets infrastructure. The core differentiation is cross-blockchain interoperability: a single transaction can execute an asset transfer on Hyperledger Besu while a payment settles on Hyperledger Fabric.

Blockstream provides interoperable blockchain infrastructure and Bitcoin layer-2 solutions, including the Liquid Network sidechain, Core Lightning implementation, and Blockstream Satellite for global Bitcoin access. The company serves financial institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, and developers building Bitcoin-native applications. Their integrated approach uniquely combines asset issuance, confidential transactions, and Lightning Network payments in a single platform, differentiating them from competitors focused on single-layer solutions.

RedotPay is a stablecoin-based fintech platform that combines crypto payment cards, cross-border payout rails, and multi-currency accounts into a unified financial app. It serves consumers in emerging markets facing currency instability and limited banking infrastructure by enabling global spending and transfers using cryptocurrencies without fiat conversion. With 6+ million users across 100+ countries and $10B+ annualized payment volume, RedotPay has achieved unicorn status ($1B+ valuation) in under 3 years, backed by tier-one investors including Lightspeed, Coinbase Ventures, and Goodwater Capital.

Celestia is a modular data availability layer that decouples consensus and data availability from execution, allowing rollups and app-chains to scale without running their own blockchain infrastructure. Built on Data Availability Sampling (DAS), it enables light nodes to verify data availability without downloading full blocks, reducing costs by ~95% compared to monolithic blockchains. Over 56 live rollups use Celestia for DeFi, AI applications, and infrastructure services, positioning it as foundational infrastructure for the modular blockchain stack.

⚠️ INACTIVE: Prime Trust was a technology-driven trust company that provided API-based financial infrastructure for fintech and digital asset companies, offering custody, funds processing, compliance, and transaction settlement services. The company served nearly 700 B2B clients including Swan, Abra, Dapper Labs, and Binance US. Prime Trust filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2023 and is no longer operating.

Stronghold creates virtual payment networks that instantly settle transactions and enable interoperability between legacy banking systems and blockchain-based payment rails. The platform offers card processing, ACH transfers, merchant financing, and checkout services, with the unique ability to bridge traditional and modern payment infrastructure. They specifically serve high-compliance industries like gambling and alcohol that struggle to access financial services, rewarding transaction volume with SHx tokens that offset fees.

BitGo is the largest independent digital asset custodian, securing approximately 20% of all on-chain Bitcoin transactions and holding over $100 billion in digital assets. The company provides a full-stack platform combining multisignature wallet technology, regulated custody, and prime brokerage services for institutions including banks, fintechs, hedge funds, and asset managers. BitGo pioneered multi-sig architecture that eliminates single points of failure, differentiating it from competitors by providing insurance-grade security with clear legal title to custodied assets.