Blockworks Acquires Messari

Blockworks acquired Messari, announced on a Thursday outside the normal Empire podcast release schedule. Blockworks has operated since December 2017, starting as a media and events business before moving toward data, and the acquisition is described as the capstone of that evolution. Messari spent eight years building crypto market data infrastructure, covering 40,000 assets with an API spanning markets, exchange data, on-chain and off-chain events, research, stablecoins, protocol data, token unlocks, fundraising, social sentiment, and more. The combined entity is described as holding the largest crypto data set by a wide margin, and media and events is not described as a major focus going forward.

The two companies pursued different initial strategies that the acquisition now reconciles. Messari took a broad Bloomberg-for-crypto aggregator approach that potentially sacrificed depth, while Blockworks counter-positioned by going deep on a narrow set of protocols within specific verticals, such as lending with Aave and Morpho. Messari started with quantitative information while Blockworks started with qualitative. Blockworks recognized it needed greater breadth to expand its product and improve investor relations, which the Messari acquisition directly addresses.

The speakers identify the most important trend in crypto as tokenizing assets, including stablecoins and real-world assets, and rebuilding capital markets on-chain across stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. Companies including Stripe, BlackRock, Robinhood, the SEC, and the CFTC are described as now doing things on-chain but blocked by an inability to monitor assets, track users on-chain, and understand on-chain financials. A money market fund being rebuilt on Morpho is cited as a concrete example of this infrastructure emerging. GENIUS Act clarity is described as in late stages, and US regulators are now described as trying to foster the crypto industry rather than ban it.

The combined business is organized around two customer types: issuers of on-chain assets, which include protocols, chains, foundations, and stablecoin and RWA issuers, and underwriters of on-chain assets, which include investors, regulators, exchanges, custodians, fintechs, and brokerages. The three-layer stack being built consists of a disclosure layer, a standardized data layer, and a compliance and monitoring layer. The Token Taxonomy Framework is being built as the disclosure layer for on-chain assets including real-world assets, and Blockworks uses it to help token issuers with disclosures to US regulatory agencies. AI agents are described as the fastest growing customer segment of Messari.

A central problem the combined entity aims to solve is the trust deficit in crypto markets. Founders regularly post revenue figures overstated by ten times, which one speaker describes as unacceptable and analogous to criminal conduct for public company CEOs. There are currently no enforceable standards governing how protocol revenue and margin are described and no punitive consequences for misrepresentation. One speaker states he personally does not buy tokens when he cannot verify where metrics come from or trust that incentive campaigns will not cause the token to dump ninety percent. Incentive campaigns are described as a legitimate strategy that should simply require disclosure so markets can decide, analogous to S-1 disclosures in traditional finance.

The speakers draw comparisons to traditional capital markets information businesses, noting Moody's is approximately an eighty billion dollar business and S&P approximately one hundred twenty billion dollars, with ratings, research, and diligence requiring enormous headcount. In crypto, data is already digital, structured, real-time, transparent, and public, reducing that burden substantially. One speaker argues LLMs could score bond issuances at ten percent of the cost of a credit ratings agency if information lived on-chain, and that combining on-chain crypto data with AI should allow live-streamed queryable data sets replacing manual analyst work reconciling footnotes across 10-Qs. The speakers predict fragmented capital markets information businesses in traditional finance will be consolidated by crypto data and AI leverage, and that an AI-native, on-chain-native platform could outcompete legacy incumbents despite their head start.

The speakers describe crypto as undergoing an ideological shift toward recognizing it improves the existing financial stack rather than replacing it. Tokens being down while AI stocks are up is described as hurting industry perception, and fixing tokens is described as existential because the industry does not work without them. Many early ideologues are described as churning out of crypto as compromises were made to go mainstream, and some early participants are migrating to AI and robotics as the next high-momentum space. One speaker acknowledges it will take ten years to know whether the land-and-expand data strategy has panned out, yet both speakers describe themselves as the most optimistic they have ever been about Blockworks and the industry.