​Forbes includes four crypto projects in the top 10 fintech companies in the US

What’s new? Forbes magazine has published a ranking of the 10 largest fintech companies in the United States in 2023. The first place went to Stripe, which develops solutions for electronic payment processing. In addition, the list includes four crypto projects with a total capitalization of $52,5 billion.

Material on the Forbes website

What companies made the list? The third place was taken by the payment protocol Ripple with a capitalization of $15 billion. The California-based company works on tools to integrate cryptocurrencies into existing financial transactions. The Ripple protocol makes cross-border payments faster and cheaper. Since 2020, the company has been in a legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accuses Ripple of engaging in unregistered securities transactions.

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Fourth place went to Blockchain.com, a blockchain explorer and crypto wallet service. The company is capitalized at $14 billion. In March, Blochchain.com converted its wallet to an app that allows customers to access their custodial exchange accounts and non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets from the same location. Blockchain.com wallet is available in 25 languages and supports customers in more than 200 countries.

OpenSea, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, ranked sixth at $13,3 billion. The project allows customers to create, buy and sell NFTs on multiple blockchains. In January 2022, OpenSea was valued at $13,3 billion, making its founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah the first NFT billionaires. In 2022, OpenSea generated $472 million in revenue.

Last place on Forbes’ list went to Alchemy, a project with a $10,2 billion capitalization. Alchemy is a platform that allows developers to create decentralized applications (dApps). The company connects developer apps to existing blockchains to exchange data between them. Alchemy is often compared to Amazon’s cloud service, but in the cryptocurrency sector, it provides the data infrastructure for OpenSea, the dYdX exchange, and the Aave protocol. Alchemy processes more than $150 billion in transactions a year and has received funding totaling $529 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Coatue.

In 2022, nine crypto projects at once made Forbes magazine’s ranking of the top 50 innovative companies of the year. The leader was now bankrupt exchange FTX, its evaluation was $32 billion. Next was OpenSea with a valuation of $13,3 billion, while Alchemy rounded out the top three with $10,2 billion. The rating also included Circle (the issuer of the USDC stablecoin), analytics companies Chainalysis and TRM Labs, custodial service Fireblocks, developer of the Avalanche Ava Labs decentralized platform, and blockchain startup Paxos.