The Blockworks Vision

Blockworks rebranded in the week of April 20th, framing the moment as a line in the sand for the company and for crypto broadly in 2025. The company was founded in December 2017 on the thesis that crypto would transition from a retail-driven to an institutional asset class requiring a trusted information platform comparable to the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg. After launching a news business in January 2021, raising its first outside round in 2022 led by 10T with participation from Santiago and Framework, and entering the data business that same year, Blockworks identified a larger strategic opportunity approximately one year ago and is now repositioning around it.

The core diagnosis of the current crypto market is an asset problem and a trust problem, not a capital access problem. The median net return of a token over the last five years is down 80 percent, the number of tokens has grown from approximately two million to just over 35 million, and on a normalized per-token basis adjusted for supply, the average token sits at essentially the same level as July 2020, before two full bull markets. In 2021 token prices and on-chain fee revenue tracked each other closely, but in 2025 on-chain fees are high while prices have not moved, pointing to a structural trust problem rather than a product or revenue failure. Token investors have been harmed in ways equity investors would not tolerate, including project teams buying out IP and leaving token holders with nothing. The prediction is that ten to fifteen tokens beginning to compound and return value to holders would be sufficient to trigger a flywheel effect across the broader market.

The macro thesis driving the rebrand is that capital markets are being rebuilt on-chain, described as the mega trend of the next five to ten years. Blockworks positions itself as connective tissue powering on-chain capital markets through standardized disclosures and standardized data connecting investors with on-chain businesses. The current state of token disclosures is described as broken, lacking ownership structure, emissions schedules, insider identity, and sales disclosure. The CLARITY Act is cited as already jumpstarting a disclosure layer that will either pass through the legislature or be mandated by the SEC via rulemaking, and the prediction is that the era of tokens launching as liquid instruments without defining what they are or providing disclosures is ending.

On top of the disclosure layer sits an intelligence layer using data to inform enterprise workflows such as exchange listings, earn program integrations, stablecoin issuance at banks, and investor relations, with the stack powered by AI enabling real-time analysis. Blockworks describes itself as currently operating at one out of ten compared to traditional finance but argues it should be operating at fifteen out of ten given the transparency and real-time data advantages of on-chain information. Figure is cited as a concrete example, with its stock not moving significantly on earnings days because analysts can already see approximately 90 percent of its business through on-chain data on Provenance. Coinbase is noted as a company that gets consistently punished by market volatility because analysts miss on the cyclical nature of its transaction-based revenue, a problem that real-time on-chain data displayed at the right level of abstraction could reduce. The 12-to-18-month focus is building the disclosure layer and the intelligence layer that plugs into investor and enterprise workflows, with media and events assets used as a competitive edge to grow the platform faster.

The long-term strategic ambition is to become the single consolidated winner in crypto capital markets data, analogous to how Moody's dominates bond ratings and Morningstar dominates fund rankings in traditional finance. The on-chain RWA space adds further complexity because instruments like treasury funds or shares of private and public companies differ materially due to SPV structures and built-in liquidity sleeves, meaning all data and disclosure frameworks built for tokens will need to be rebuilt from scratch for RWAs, vaults, and yield products. Building crypto data is described as approximately a hundred times harder than most people expect.

On market structure, the four-year crypto cycle is described as clearly intact, with business sentiment and activity lagging price by approximately six months. The speaker draws parallels to 2019, when Bitcoin doubled yet the year felt deeply depressing, and to 2023, which followed a similar pattern. The prediction is that general market sentiment will begin to align positively toward the tail end of the current year. Roughly ten tokens are expected to ultimately win across approximately five categories with one or two winners each, with Polymarket and Kalshi cited as a category already effectively closed to new competitors. Long-term dispersion is expected to favor compounding winners over a broad-based recovery.

Blockworks completed the rebrand entirely in-house, led by team member Reed along with Zach, Crystal, and others, and noted that a comparable company spent 850,000 dollars and took a full year using an outside agency. The new visual identity uses imagery of stone, solidity, caves, and echolocation rather than space-themed visuals, while retaining the company's signature purple color. The speaker describes this moment, approximately eight and a half years into the company's existence, as definitively the most excited they have ever felt about Blockworks, while attributing part of the positioning to luck rather than skill.