This year was marked by a $1.4 trillion drop in the market value of cryptocurrencies amid the collapse of FTX last November. Also this year, several other major players have declared bankruptcy – cryptocurrency lenders Genesis and BlockFi, as well as multi-billion dollar hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Nine cryptocurrency and blockchain companies, including FTX, were on the Fintech 50 list last year, but the number has now been reduced to five.<br
Firms on the 2023 list include development platform Web3 Alchemy, analytics platform Chainalysis, cryptocurrency storage technology provider Fireblocks, blockchain infrastructure provider Paxos and tax compliance company TaxBit. This shows that there is still strong demand, including from governments, for infrastructure, cryptoanalytics and service providers in the crypto industry, Forbes says.
In fact, these firms raised a total of $3.1 billion in 2023. Alchemy provides more than $150 billion in annual cryptocurrency turnover. Chainalysis, which was launched back in 2014, has become a major mechanism in crypto investigations by both the government and the private sector. And Fireblocks has evolved from a cryptocurrency storage technology provider to a full-service platform that supports about 130 million cryptocurrency wallets.
This year’s newcomer, TaxBit, which is based in Utah, has already become a key partner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The firm, which is valued at $1.3 billion, is also partnering with TurboTax to help users easily add cryptocurrency gains and losses to their tax returns.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently took strong action against the nation’s leading crypto exchanges. The SEC sued Coinbase on Tuesday, accusing the company of acting as an unregistered broker and exchange. The Commission also accused the largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, and its founder of creating a “deceptive network,” inflating trading volume, diverting customer assets, and trading in unregistered securities.<br