Two significant funding rounds announced this week highlight the continued maturation of blockchain infrastructure for real-world financial applications. Corastone, a platform for private markets, and the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), focused on privacy, collectively underscore a shift towards building scalable, practical solutions.
Corastone, which describes itself as a "hyperscaler for private-market investing," has secured backing from new investors including Fidelity Investments, Future Standard, and Hamilton Lane. They join existing backers Apollo, Franklin Templeton, KKR, and Morgan Stanley. The company operates a private, permissioned blockchain designed as shared infrastructure to standardize and digitize workflows in private markets, moving away from legacy file-based processes.
Hamid Gayibov, co-founder and president of Corastone, stated the platform aims to serve as a "common operating layer" to let "investors of all sizes access private market assets as efficiently and reliably as public markets." Future Standard's CTO Hari Moorthy echoed this, citing a need for infrastructure that connects disparate systems and enables true straight-through processing of transactions.
Separately, the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) has raised over $25 million in a seed funding round. The lab was founded by former Electric Coin Company (ECC) CEO Josh Swihart after the ECC engineering team resigned due to a governance dispute. The funding round was led by prominent crypto venture firms including Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, and Coinbase Ventures, with a $5 million investment from Cypherpunk Technologies.
ZODL's key product is the Zodl wallet (rebranded from Zashi), a self-custodial mobile wallet that simplifies sending shielded transactions using Zcash's zero-knowledge cryptography. Since its 2024 launch, the wallet has helped grow the Zcash Orchard shielded pool from about 1 million ZEC to roughly 4 million ZEC, a more than 400% increase, and has processed over $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025.
The new capital will be used to hire engineers and expand development of the Zcash protocol and user-friendly privacy products. At the time of the announcements, ZEC was trading near $240.98, up approximately 3.8% over 24 hours.
