Rain Brings Sunshine to Empire State Realty’s Scholastic Bet at 555-557 Broadway

Rain, a cryptocurrency and stablecoin startup, is leasing 38,034 square feet at Empire State Realty Trust’s newly acquired 555-557 Broadway, Commercial Observer has learned.

The property is known as the Scholastic Building, and the textbook publisher sold it in December as a sale-leaseback to ESRT, which made a $386 million bet on the building. 555-557 Broadway sits between Prince and Spring streets in SoHo, and has a separate entrance at 120-130 Mercer Street.

Along with the 222,000-square-foot lease by Scholastic to consolidate into six floors and maintain its headquarters in the 355,942-square-foot building, Anthony Malkin’s real estate investment trust (REIT) — which also owns the Empire State Building — obtained three available floors, one of which Rain has now agreed to lease. ESRT also created an amenity space for the property.

“We are pleased to welcome Scholastic to our roster of great companies who are our tenants and look forward to our new relationship with them,” Malkin said in a statement in December following the purchase. “We are excited to bring this combination of contractual revenue, embedded growth and significant value-creation potential from our ability to market the three uniquely large floors in a more than 110,000-square-foot block.”

The length of Rain’s new lease was unclear, but the asking rent was $99 per square foot. Rain was represented by Sam Einhorn and Eric Ferriello of Colliers, while ESRT was represented in-house by Kerry Lavelle and a Newmark team of Peter Shimkin, Dylan Weisman, Danny Levine and David Falk. The parties declined to comment.

The stablecoin startup, founded in 2021 by Farooq Malik and Charles Yoo-Naut, was valued in January at $1.95 billion, and is working with both Visa and MasterCard to offer credit cards. Rain’s new deal represents a relocation, as it will move from its current offices at 11 East 26th Street in NoMad once the buildout of its new 555-557 Broadway office is complete.

Rain will join Capital One Cafe and makeup store Sephora, which occupy the building’s retail space, and global hospitality company Convene, which leases office space on the second floor.

But Rain isn’t the only tech tenant signing big leases in Manhattan, as the borough’s tech sector notched a record number of such lease deals in 2025 — 6.54 million square feet, in fact — and has already secured 1.89 million square feet during the first quarter of 2026, according to a new report from Colliers.

That tech leasing success also already carried over into April, with the biggest lease so far being a 125,733-square-foot deal for health care tech platform Tennr at 345 Hudson Street.

Another major tech lease signed in April was by Synthesia, an AI-powered video generation platform, at GFP Real Estate’s 675 Avenue of the Americas. Synthesia took 50,000 square feet at the Flatiron District building, according to a new office report from CBRE.

The terms of the lease and the brokers involved were unclear. It’s also unclear whether the deal represents a new location or a relocation for Synthesia, which signed a five-year lease for 13,600 square feet at 245 Fifth Avenue in August 2025, as CO previously reported.