Lion City Pride: Here’s A Look At 5 Promising Crypto Startups Based In Singapore

Daryl Loh
March 25, 2022
10 mins read

The Lion City Singapore is on its way to be a cryptocurrency hub in the region, and we have many promising startups here to show for it.

Today, we’re featuring a list of five startups from various areas of crypto: We have Play-to-Earn startups, Analytics, Marketplaces and more.

Fun exercise: How many of these startups did you not know were based in Singapore?

Ethlas

Riding on the emerging GameFi sector, Ethlas is a Singapore-based gaming platform that aims to onboard the next billion users.

This is done through lowering the overall barrier to entry to crypto and play-to-earn (P2E) decentralised apps.

The Ethlas team found that the current GameFi space typically had complex games that were tough to understand. They sometimes even require a financial commitment upfront that might exclude groups of potential users.

Ethlas is a platform aimed at levelling the playing field. This is achieved through a few key features:

First, Ethlas offers casual arcade games that are easy to play and have a huge nostalgic appeal for most players.

Ethlas is also free-to-play, removing the capital barrier for anyone to get started with the platform.

These features have allowed the startup to gain over 100,000 active players and 3,000,000 gameplays in the last 15 weeks.

The rapid growth of the startup has also seen it raise US$2.7 million seed funding from investors such as Sequoia India, Yield Guild Games South East Asia, and Venturra Capital.

Treehouse Finance

Treehouse Finance is a platform aiming to build the most comprehensive dashboard in Decentralised Finance (DeFi).

This would include features like Portfolio Dashboard, Risk Analytics and Risk management solutions. For example, users would be able to have a multi chain view of all wallets, track historical DeFi returns and activities.

Their analytics app is currently whitelist-only.

The startup is also backed by many leading institutions in the space, including Bybit, Coinhako and CRC Capital.

With a current team size of 58 employees, they are also growing strong, hiring for 15 open positions.

Mintable

Launched in 2018, Mintable is a Singapore-based NFT marketplace and minting platform.

Since its launch, Mintable has helped over 200,000 creators monetize their work via NFTs.

One unique feature that they have is gasless minting, removing a huge headache for most users that are new to NFTs.

In 2021, Mintable already had over 700,000 items minted on its platform, and this impressive number is likely much higher today.

Mintable has worked with various high profile brands, celebrities, and artists new to NFTs as well. Some examples include Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence, streetwear fashion brand BAPE, and American business broadcaster CNBC.

The platform also raised a $13 million funding round in 2021, and is backed by a group of high profile investors including billionaire celebrity Mark Cuban, Ripple, Animoca Brands and more.

Nansen

For readers who are deep into crypto, the name Nansen should ring a bell.

Nansen is a Singapore-based blockchain analytics platform that combines on-chain data with a massive database containing millions of wallet labels.

Both individual and institutional investors use Nansen to track and gain access to on-chain data, wallet labels and entities on blockchains.

For example, users can track data from decentralised finance (DeFi) projects and non-fungible token (NFT) trades.

Some of their institutional investors include DeFiance Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, Polygon and the team behind Axie Infinity.

In December 2021, Nansen announced their US$75 million Series B funding, led by U.S. venture capital company Accel. They are also backed by a list of strong investors, including A16z, GIC and Coinbase Ventures, among others.

Hodlnaut

Hodlnaut is a crypto borrowing and lending platform based in Singapore.

They offer an easy way for investors to earn interest of up to 12.73% APY on their cryptocurrencies, such as BTC, ETH, and stablecoins like USDC and USDT.

The platform currently has over US$650 million of Digital Assets under Management, and over 10,000 users onboard.

Its appeal to users is obvious: Users can just deposit their money into their Hodlnaut account and start earning interest, without jumping through the usual crypto hoops of setting up wallets, interacting with decentralised apps and more.

They have also launched their Android and iOS Mobile apps late last year, providing ease of use and accessibility to their users.

They are building for the future, with sponsorships of events like Bitcoin 2022 and more upcoming features like Portfolio Management.

They are also growing their team, with 11 open roles (on top of their current team size of 39).