This week, two major blockchain projects announced significant progress, both pointing to a common trend: blockchain technology is shifting from conceptual hype to the reconstruction of actual financial infrastructure. In New York, Corastone, a platform focused on private market investments, announced that it has received investment support from top institutions such as Fidelity Investments, Future Standard, and Hamilton Lane. Apollo, Franklin Templeton, KKR, and Morgan Stanley have also joined its ranks of investors. Corastone has built a private, permissioned blockchain network to serve as a shared infrastructure and data standard for private market processes, completely replacing the inefficient model that traditionally relies on file transfers and enabling end-to-end automated processing between asset managers, distributors, and custodians.
In the field of privacy technology, the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) disclosed that it has completed a seed round financing of over $25 million, with investors including well-known institutions such as Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. Founded by former Electric Coin Company CEO Josh Swihart, the organization currently leads the core technology research and development of the Zcash ecosystem. Its Zashi wallet has been upgraded to Zodl, significantly optimizing the user experience for privacy operations. In 2025, driven by this tool, Zcash's Orchard shielded pool transaction volume jumped from approximately 1 million ZEC to nearly 4 million ZEC. Cypherpunk Technologies, in participating in the investment, stated that this move allows it to deploy "cutting-edge enterprises building the underlying privacy infrastructure of the Internet" and aligns with its core mission of "ensuring digital privacy for all of humanity."