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 spent roughly four years transitioning from a media and events business into a data business, with the Messari acquisition described as the capstone of that evolution. Messari spent eight years focused on providing better data and increasing transparency in crypto markets, passing through several leaders before Ran took over most recently.

The two companies previously competed directly, winning and losing deals against each other. Messari pursued a broad Bloomberg-for-crypto aggregator approach covering 40,000 assets across markets, exchange data, on-chain and off-chain events, research, stablecoins, protocol data, network data, token unlocks, fundraising, social sentiment, and event monitoring. Blockworks counter-positioned by going deep on a narrow set of protocols using exclusively on-chain data. The acquisition combines Messari's breadth with Blockworks' depth, and the hosts claim Blockworks now has the largest crypto dataset by a wide margin.

Blockworks is building a three-layer stack consisting of a disclosure layer, a standardized data layer, and a compliance and monitoring layer aimed at financial institutions. The firm identifies two primary customer types: issuers of on-chain assets, which include protocols, chains, foundations, stablecoins, and RWA issuers, and underwriters of on-chain assets, which include investors, regulators, exchanges, custodians, fintechs, and brokerages. AI agents are described as the fastest-growing customer segment inherited from Messari. The stated strategy is land and expand, beginning with deep data mapping of token issuers and extending into monitoring and diligence workflows.

The hosts identify the tokenization of real-world assets, including stablecoins, treasuries, bonds, and stocks on public blockchains, as the clearest working use case in crypto and the most important trend in the industry. They argue that companies including Stripe, BlackRock, Robinhood, the SEC, and the CFTC are beginning to operate on-chain but are blocked by an inability to monitor assets, track users on-chain, and understand on-chain financials. Blockworks is building a Token Taxonomy Framework to establish disclosure standards for on-chain assets including RWAs, positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for that transition.

The hosts argue that crypto markets suffer from a severe trust deficit because founders routinely overstate revenue by roughly 10x, conduct they describe as analogous to criminal behavior for public company CEOs, and that a decade of calling out bad behavior without legal consequences has failed as a strategy. A decentralized exchange showing 10x volume growth is cited as more likely running an undisclosed incentive campaign than achieving genuine product-market fit. The hosts argue incentive campaigns are legitimate but must be disclosed in a manner analogous to S-1 filings, and that standardized disclosures are a prerequisite for broader industry progress.

The hosts compare the opportunity to Moody's, described as an 80 billion dollar business, and S&P, described as a 120 billion dollar business. They argue that because all crypto data is already digital, structured, real-time, transparent, and public, a large language model could score bond issuances or similar disclosures at roughly 10 percent of the cost of a traditional credit ratings agency. They predict that fragmented capital markets data businesses in traditional finance will be consolidated driven by crypto data and AI, and that many traditional capital markets firms will be disrupted rather than simply adopting crypto.

Both hosts describe themselves as more optimistic about Blockworks and the broader industry than at any prior point, citing a US regulatory environment now oriented toward fostering rather than banning crypto as a key enabling condition for the strategy they are pursuing.