Blockchain has certainly evolved in a way beyond our expectations. It is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies and the crypto industry. Although still at its early stage, undeniable, it has disrupted a large number of industries and has spanned to the real world with its use cases. With its use cases, blockchain has found its way to major industries like healthcare, security, tourism, media, social platforms, gaming, and even governments.
Blockchain companies have also grown over the past few years with most of them set to pave the way for the future. Let’s begin our round-up of the top 10 blockchain companies. We will also give a brief overview of what they do and their respective revenues.
Chainalysis
A New York-based company founded on Oct. 1, 2014, by Michael Gronager, Jonathan Levin, and Jan Moller. It provides services for cryptocurrency exchanges, international law enforcement agencies, and other clients with blockchain transaction analysis software to help them comply with regulations, assess risk, and identify illicit activity.
Although it is a start-up project, the company has already doubled its valuation to $2 billion in March after a new investment round led by Paradigm and with additional backing from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
Chainalysis has an estimated annual revenue of $42.9M and has a total of 361 employees to date as stated in the company’s Linkedin profile. It has been providing its services to a total of 50 countries including the United States. The number is expected to grow with the increasing demand for compliance by regulatory bodies around the globe.
Ripple Labs Inc.
An American technology company that is behind the development of the Ripple payment protocol and an exchange network. Previously known as Opencoin and but was later renamed Ripple Labs in 2015. The company is based in San Francisco, California and it was founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb in 2012.
XRP (Ripple) is the native token of products developed by Ripple Labs which are used for payment, asset exchange, and remittance systems that work more like SWIFT, a service for international money and security transfers used by a network of banks and financial intermediaries. It has partnered with the following banking institutions and remittance companies worldwide to further expand its services to consumers worldwide.
- Bank of America
- American Express and Santander
- SBI Holdings
- National Bank of Fujairah PJSC (NBF)
- MoneyMatch
- Standard Chartered Bank (SCB)
- Westpac Institutional Bank and Bank of Australia
- Royal Bank of Canada
- UniCredit
- Reisebank
- UBS Group AG
- Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
- Alberta Treasury Branches (ATB Financial)
- National Bank of Abu Dhabi
- MUFG Bank
- DBS Bank of Singapore
Ripple Labs lost its partnership with Moneygram in March after the remittance company suspended trading on Ripple’s platform citing the legal battle of Ripple against the US SEC as the reason. Ripple’s XRP was also faced with a massive delisting from major exchanges and crypto businesses. The altcoin also suffered a massive blow after its price plummeted to $0.171 in December, a week after the filing of the lawsuit by the SEC.
To counter the damage caused by the lawsuit, Ripple Labs expanded its services to the Asia market. With its effort, it has gained a handful of partnerships which include Tranglo. Today, XRP (Ripple) remains one of the top cryptocurrencies with a total market cap of $54,356,326,600 with its current price at $1.16 in recent data by Crypto.co.
Ripple Labs’s annual revenue is between $100-$500 million and has 100-500 employees. What makes Ripple attractive to users and investors? XRP (Ripple), the company’s digital asset used for its cross-border payment system “consistently handles 1,500 transactions per second.” Also, it only takes an average ledger settlement (approval time) of 3-5 seconds.
Paxful
It is a leading peer-to-peer finance platform for trading cryptocurrencies. Previously named as EasyBitz, it was founded by Ray Youssef and Artur Schaback in 2014. It was later renamed Paxful derived from the Latin word for “peace” The founders share the same goal in mind when they created the company: to make Bitcoin accessible for everyone from businesses to merchants.
Paxful offers 300 payment methods and has an escrow system and dedicated 24/7 customer support. It also boasts being extremely secure but should be coupled with the customers’ knowledge on how to minimize the risk and know how to secure their account.
Currently, it has an estimated revenue of $54.3M per year with 400 dedicated employees.
Binance
It is the world’s largest crypto exchange with a daily average trading volume of $2B. It was founded by Changpeng Zhao a.k.a as “CZ” in 2017. BNB (Binance Coin), the native token of the platform was initially created as a utility token for discounted trading fees in 2017. But with the growth of the exchange, its uses have expanded to numerous applications. The altcoin was adopted by other businesses as payment worldwide with the likes of Crypto.com, Monetha, and HTC. It can also be used as payment for travel bookings, entertainment, online services, and financial services.
BNB (Binance Coin) is now one of the top cryptocurrencies in the industry with a market cap of $64,369,581,205.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC), an alternative to Ethereum and other leading DeFi platforms, was launched by Binance in September 2020. Currently, out of the 244 DeFi projects in the crypto space today, 41 of these were built on BSC. It has an average block time of around 3 seconds with approximately 62.4 transactions per second (TPS).
Binance has an estimated annual revenue of $178.9M and 1376 employees. Binance’s founder and CEO CZ has a total net worth of $1.9B and has claimed the 22nd spot in Forbes list of Singapore’s 50 Richest in 2021.
Despite a massive crackdown by regulatory bodies in various parts of the world, the growth of the crypto exchange remains unfazed. In a report by the Insider, the exchange’s spot trading volume surged from $454B in July to $789B in September. Its derivatives volumes have also increased by nearly 25% to $1.7T. The exchange has a total of 13.5M active users.
Coinbase
One of the world’s leading crypto exchanges next to Binance. Currently, it supports 50 different digital assets including leading cryptocurrencies like BTC (bitcoin), ETH (ethereum), DOGE (dogecoin), and LTC (litecoin). The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam.
In April, the cryptocurrency exchange went public in a direct listing. Coinbase’s stocks opened at $381 and immediately surged at $429.54. It closed to $328.28 giving it a valuation of $85.8B.
For Q1 of 2021, Coinbase estimated revenue has reached $1.8B recording an increase of more than 200% from its $585 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. But the company’s performance is highly dependent on the price of BTC (bitcoin), the most cryptocurrency. The exchange has more than 68M active users. With 2,100 full-time employees, the company operates in more than 100 countries.
Recently, Coinbase was included in companies under threat by the US SEC along with Ripple, Uniswap, and other crypto businesses.
TQ Tezos
According to Wikipedia, Tezos is a decentralized, open-source proof of stake blockchain network that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts.
Tezos was founded by Kathleen Breitman and her husband Arthur in 2014. It was popular for NFT platforms because of its energy-efficient liquid proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. In a recent report, projects built on the Tezos ecosystem have grown to 135. Its top users include:
- Elevated Returns (ER)
- Banco BTG Pactual S.A. and partner Dalma Capital
- Logical Pictures
- Action
- Groupe Casino
- Société Générale
- Ubisoft
- OneOf backed by Quincy Jones
- Hic Et Nunc
- Interpop
- McLaren Racing
- Red Bull Racing Honda F1
XTZ (Tezos), the native token of the platform has a market cap of $ 6,252,563,732. It is now ranked at #33 by Coinmarketcap among other digital assets.
Intellectsoft
Established in 2007, it is a company that offers full-service software development company of engineers, designers, and developers. The company is based in Palo Alto, California but has branch offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Belarus, and Ukraine. The company builds mobile apps and custom software for its clients.
The company has received awards and recognition for its exemplary services. In May 2018, it won the most coveted Stevie Award in the category “New Service or Product” for a mobile app created for EuroAccident. In March, the company was recognized as one of the highly-rated software development B2B companies for 2021. In a press release published on Oct. 5, the company announced its inclusion in two of the world’s renowned IT evaluation and ranking platforms, Clutch and The Manifest.
Intellectsoft has an annual revenue of $9.79M and operates with a total of 120 employees for all its offices.
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is one of the leading American computer manufacturers, with a major share of the market both in the United States and abroad. It was founded by Charles Ranlett Flint in 1911 as the Computing, Tabulating & Recording Company (C-T-R).
The company utilizes the Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain protocol developed by the Linux Foundation-hosted Hyperledger consortium in 2015, as the base layer of its blockchains. In 2017, the company was ranked as the number one among blockchain technology providers in a survey conducted by Juniper, a European-based provider of business intelligence.
In its annual report, the company declared an annual revenue of $73.6 billion for 2020. The company has more than 345,000 employees worldwide.
Gemini
A privately-owned cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to buy, sell, trade, and securely store their digital assets. Founded by the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler in 2015. The exchange has its own stablecoin, the Gemini dollar. Currently, it supports 40 cryptocurrencies like BTC (bitcoin), ETH (ethereum), and DOGE (dogecoin) along with other digital assets.
The payment app Gemini Pay enables users to make purchases at 30,000 retail facilities across the US. The crypto exchange started offering the “Gemini Earn” in February. With the Gemini Earn, customers can receive up to 8.05% APY on your cryptocurrency and stablecoins.
Gemini has an average daily trading volume of $200M and with 13.6M active users which is even bigger than that of Binance. It is also ranked as #33 among trading platforms worldwide.
Robinhood
A fintech company that operates an online discount brokerage offering commission-free trading. Using the platform, users can buy and sell stocks and follow any of their preferred investing strategies. The company was founded in 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt. It offers services like trade stocks investment, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), options, and American depositary receipts (ADRs). The platform is available both on the web and mobile.
On July 28, it sold its share at $38 raising close to $2 billion. On July 29, the company went public with NASDAQ under the ticker name “HOOD”.
Robinhood has a total of 22.5M users in 2021 recording an increase of 73% compared to only 13M in 2020. Its revenue has also increased by 131% to $565 million in the second quarter of 2021 according to a blog written on the company’s website.
That concludes our top 10 blockchain companies. Next time we will be featuring stories of these companies. How they started and what motivated the founders to launch these companies.
