Blockworks Acquires Messari

Blockworks acquired Messari and announced the deal on a Thursday, breaking from the Empire podcast's normal schedule. Blockworks was founded in December 2017 and has operated for roughly eight and a half years. Messari spent eight years building broad data coverage across 40,000 assets, including APIs for markets, exchange information, on-chain and off-chain events, research, stablecoins, protocol data, token unlocks, fundraising, social sentiment, and event monitoring. Blockworks took the opposite approach, going very deep on a narrow set of protocols rather than pursuing breadth. The acquisition is framed as combining Messari's breadth with Blockworks' depth to create what Blockworks claims is the largest dataset in crypto by a wide margin.

Blockworks describes the deal as the capstone of a four-year transition from a media and events business to a data business. The combined entity is building a three-layer stack of disclosures, standardized data, and workflow tools designed to help financial institutions comply, monitor, and conduct diligence. Blockworks serves two primary customer groups, issuers of on-chain assets and underwriters of on-chain assets, and positions itself as the center of gravity connecting exchanges, token issuers, and regulators.

The hosts identify tokenization as the most important trend in crypto right now, with stablecoins, treasuries, bonds, and stocks moving on-chain. Companies including Stripe, BlackRock, Robinhood, the SEC, and the CFTC are described as beginning to operate on-chain. The hosts argue these institutions are currently blocked from full participation because they cannot monitor assets, track users on-chain, or understand protocol financials, and that closing this gap is the core commercial opportunity Blockworks is targeting.

Data integrity in crypto is described as having failed because there are no punitive consequences for misrepresenting information. Jason noted that he personally does not buy tokens when he cannot verify where their metrics come from or trust that incentive campaigns will not cause the token to dump 90 percent. The hosts compare the situation to public company accounting, arguing that a CEO overstating revenue publicly would be criminal and the same standard should apply in crypto. Founders regularly overstating revenue by 10x is described as a serious and unacceptable problem that the combined data business is positioned to address.

Blockworks is using a TTF framework to help token issuers make disclosures and submit information to US regulatory agencies, with the TTF eventually expected to cover on-chain stocks and real-world assets. The GENIUS Act is described as being in late stages. The hosts note that US regulators are now trying to foster the crypto industry rather than ban it, which they treat as a meaningful shift in the operating environment. AI agents are described as the fastest growing customer segment of Messari at the time of recording, and the hosts argue that exchanges building AI agents and regulators building monitoring tools all depend on the same foundational underlying data, making the data layer a shared infrastructure play.

The hosts reference Moody's at approximately 80 billion dollars and S&P at approximately 120 billion dollars as valuation comparables, arguing that traditional ratings businesses required enormous headcount that crypto and AI can eliminate. Their reasoning is that crypto data is already digital, structured, real-time, transparent, and public, removing the manual collection costs that constrained legacy data businesses. They explicitly reject the Bloomberg-for-crypto analogy as outdated. They predict that fragmented capital markets data businesses in traditional finance will consolidate driven by crypto data dynamics and AI leverage, and they describe crypto data as a winner-take-all dynamic, implying that scale and data breadth compound in ways that make it difficult for smaller competitors to remain relevant.