The Future of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: 2022 Forbes Fintech 50

Crypto enthusiasts are adjusting to the realities of a bear market, but they shouldn't lose their recent wins.

A record nine cryptocurrency-focused companies made this year's Forbes FinTech 50 list -- an honor roll of the most innovative private companies in fintech. Together, the nine Trailblazers have raised $6.5 billion in venture capital, most of it in the past 12 months.

Leading the way is billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which raised $1.5 billion in private funding last year alone, rocketing its valuation from $1.2 billion to $25 billion. It raised $500 million in January, valuing it at $32 billion, making it the third-most valuable private fintech company headquartered or with operations in the United States. The Bahamas-based company's rapidly growing U.S. operations, FTX US (valued at $8 billion each), are catching up with the client bases of its predecessors, Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini.

Another major beneficiary of last year's bull run and a newcomer to the list is OpenSea, an NFT marketplace where users can buy and sell digital collectibles of all kinds, whether it's art, music or games. In January, the startup was valued at $13.3 billion, making its founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah thefirst billionaires of the NFT craze.

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Alchemy, whose developer suite has helped build nearly every major NFT platform, including OpenSea, jumped to $10.2 billion in valuation from $505 million last year (its first year on the list). Likewise, list veteran Chainalysis, which helps governments and corporations in 70 countries analyze blockchain data to investigate illicit transactions, has quadrupled its valuation to $8.6 billion since its debut last year.

Only two crypto companies on the 2022 list have yet to reach unicorn status — Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain, and Chainalysis competitor TRM Labs. As venture capitalists continue to raise billions of dollars in funding, Forbes is keeping a close eye on these companies to see if they hit the milestone even as the rest of the market adjusts to a new “crypto winter.”

Here is the full list of the most innovative companies in the crypto space:

Alchemy

San Francisco, California

Alchemy's infrastructure software, sometimes referred to as the Amazon Web Services of the crypto industry, organizes blockchain data and makes it more accessible. OpenSea, the dominant NFT marketplace, uses Alchemy to display information on its website, such as who created and owns a particular piece of digital art. Alchemy's other notable clients include Adobe, DraftKings, and Shopify.

Funding: $413 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Lightspeed Venture Partners and more

Latest valuation: $10.2 billion

Reality:Alchemy's software is key to the explosive growth of NFTs. From October 2021 to February 2022, annualized on-chain transaction volume powered by Alchemy grows from $45 billion to $105 billion.

Co-founders: CEO Nikil Viswanathan, 34, and CTO Joseph Lau, 32. They previously co-founded the popular party app Down to Lunch.

Ava Labs

New York

Creator of Avalanche, a competitor to Ethereum, the most popular decentralized blockchain platform on which applications can run. Over the past year, more than 500 decentralized finance applications have been built on Avalanche, which can handle 4,500 transactions per second, compared to Ethereum's 14 transactions per second.

Funding: $6M from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Initialized Capital, and more

Reality: Over 2.4 million users; Avalanche's token, AVAX, has a market cap of $8.5 billion.

Co-founders: CEO Emin Gün Sirer, 50, a former Cornell computer science professor known for his distributed systems research; COO Kevin Sekniqi, 28; chief protocol architect Ted Yin, 27.

Chainalysis

New York

The company's data platform has been used to solve some of the world's most high-profile criminal cases involving digital assets, including the seizure of $3.5 billion in cryptocurrency by the IRS Criminal Investigations Division announced in November, and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. Chainalysis now screens $1 trillion in transaction value across all crypto assets every month.

Funding: $535 million from Coatue, Paradigm, Accel and others

Latest valuation: $8.6 billion

Reality: Over the past year, Chainalysis has grown its client base by 75% and now has over 750 clients in 70 countries.

Co-founders: CEO Michael Gronager, 51, Ph.D. in quantum mechanics, who co-founded cryptocurrency exchangeKrakenand left in 2015 to startChainalysis; chief strategy officerJonathan Levin, 32.

circle

Boston, MA

Creator and co-issuer of USDC Coin (USDC), the second largest dollar-pegged token or "stablecoin" in the world. USDC is available on eight blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche, is used on top decentralized finance platforms, is accepted at auction house Sotheby's, and has been integrated into Visa's payments network. Circle generates income primarily from interest earned on its cash deposits and Treasury bills, which brought in $85 million in 2021. The company plans to go public via a SPAC in late 2022, valuing it at $9 billion.

Funding: $1.5 billion from Marshall Wace, Fidelity, and others

Latest valuation: $9 billion

Reality: Its USDC stablecoin has a market cap of $49 billion.

Co-founders: CEO and Chairman Jeremy Allaire and Board Member Sean Neville. Prior to founding Circle, Allaire co-founded and led two global Internet technology companies, online video platform Brightcove and software development company Macromedia, which were successfully listed on NASDAQ.

Fireblocks

New York

Institution-focused cryptocurrency custodian serving BNY Mellon and popular decentralized finance apps Compound Treasury and Aave Arc. In April 2022, Fireblocks partnered with payment giant FIS to provide crypto trading and lending services to its more than 6,000 capital market clients.

Funding: $1.2 billion from BNY Mellon, Coatue, Ribbit and more

Most recent valuation: $8 billion

Reality: From 100 customers in January 2021 to over 1,200 today. Assets worth more than $260 billion are transferred every month.

Co-founders: CEO Michael Shaulov, 39, and CTO Idan Ofrat, 40. Before entering the private sector, Shaulov worked in the field of mobile security in Unit 8200, the elite intelligence service of the Israel Defense Forces, and was awarded the Medal of Honor by His Excellency the President of Israel for his contributions.

FTX

Nassau, Bahamas

As one of the largest crypto trading exchanges in the world, it handles about 11% of the $2.4 trillion in derivatives traded each month. The company raised $1.5 billion in private funding last year, boosting its valuation from $1.2 billion to $25 billion. It raised $500 million in January, bringing its valuation to $32 billion. Aspiring to become a household name, FTX is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, signing celebrity brand ambassadors including Tom Brady, David Ortiz and Kevin O'Leary.

Funding: $1.8 billion from Sequoia, Temasek, Thoma Bravo and others

Most recent valuation: $32 billion

Reality: About $1 billion in revenue in 2021; its customer base grows from 246,000 in 2020 to 3.1 million in 2021.

Co-founders: CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, the world's second richest cryptocurrency billionaire, and CTO Gary Wang, 28.

OpenSea

New York

Founded nearly five years ago, the startup was an early player in the NFT market, starting in 2021. It operates as a peer-to-peer platform where users can create, buy and sell various NFTs in exchange for a2.5%cut of each transaction. While OpenSea faces stiff competition, including from cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, which launched its own NFT marketplace in May, it continues to dominate the NFT market, with more than 1.5 million accounts trading on the platform.

Funding: $423 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Haun Ventures and more

Latest valuation: $13.3 billion

Reality: Processing about $3 billion in NFT transactions per month, with monthly revenue of about $75 million.

Co-founders: CEO Devin Finzer, 31, and CTO Alex Atallah, 30. They became the first NFT billionaires in January 2021.

Paxos

New York

Founded in 2012 as a cryptocurrency exchange (itBit), the blockchain infrastructure provider built the backbone for PayPal and Venmo's cryptocurrency brokerage services, allowing its customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies . Societe Generale, Credit Suisse and Nomura Instinet already use Paxos' software to settle trades directly with each other. Paxos now wants to be licensed as a clearing organization by the SEC. The company also issued a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin called Pax Dollar (USDP).

Funding: $540 million from Oak HC/FT, Declaration Partners, Founders Fund and others

Last valuation: $2.4 billion.

Reality: More than 100 institutional clients.

Co-founders: CEO Charles Cascarilla, 45, who co-founded institutional asset management complex Cedar Hill Capital Partners in 2005 and its venture arm Liberty City Ventures in 2012; Asia CEO Rich Teo, 42 years old.

TRM Labs

San Francisco, California

Help financial institutions and government agencies like the IRS investigate money laundering, cryptocurrency fraud, and other financial crimes by analyzing blockchain data. Its tools allow clients to monitor transactions of more than 1 million assets across 26 different blockchains.

Funding: $80 million from Blockchain Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tiger Global and more

Latest valuation: $600 million

What really happened: FTX and Circle are its clients; its 90-person team includes threat finance veterans from the FBI, US Secret Service, and Europol, as well as data scientists from Apple, Amazon, and Google.

Co-founders: CEO Esteban Castaño, 31, a former McKinsey analyst; CTO Rahul Raina, 28, a former Amazon software engineer and one of the Forbes 30 Under 30.