The topsy-turvy world of blockchains, bitcoin and distributed ledgers ignited a gold rush of companies working on a variety of disruptive products and services in Fintech. After 2015 s funding boom, here are 5 companies that have emerged as players Hub Culture is watching.

Credits: Founders Eric Benz and Nick Williamson building enterprise blockchains, on the concept of Platform-as-a-Service, with the goal of creating enterprise level functionality.

Gem: Los Angeles based Gem is building private blockchains for a growing list of private clients and acting as a middleman between core blockchain services and front end applications.

Enigma : Emerging out of MIT s Connection Science and Bitcoin group, Enigma is a decentralised cloud platform designed to offer data privacy in the cloud. Previously the ability to store data in the cloud and keep it entirely private has not been possible - to do so relies on homomorphic encryption - basically a way to perform computations on encrypted data without decrypting it.

Colony : Ethereum based Colony picks up where the DAO died, with a new approach to distributed collaboration. The system allows groups of people to assemble around tasks and projects, earning or generating tokens for their activity.

Steemit : This new crypto coin merges social networks and payments with a digital currency that pays users based on up votes and attention. It both gamifies and monetises social sharing.