The Breakdown - Blockworks Acquires Messari

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In this special episode, Blockworks announces its acquisition of Messari and unpacks what it means for crypto’s next phase. Michael and Jason explore why Messari’s breadth of data, APIs, and research complement Blockworks’ deep on-chain analytics, investor relations, and disclosure products. They also address crypto’s trust problem, the need for standardized data and disclosures, and how Blockworks aims to become the trusted data layer connecting issuers, investors, exchanges, regulators, and AI agents in on-chain markets. Learn more: https://blockworks.com/insights/blockworks-acquires-messari Follow Blockworks on X: https://x.com/Blockworks Follow Messari on X: https://x.com/MessariCrypto Follow Michael on X: https://x.com/MikeIppolito_ Follow Jason on X: https://x.com/JasonYanowitz

All right, buddy. Partner, let's go. Big day. Big day. Special pod. Special pod. Empire, at least. Doesn't usually release on a Thursday.

So you know we got it. Wow. Yeah, big. Huge deal. Everyone's wondering, what made Empire release off schedule? And we got you in New York. That's true. That's true.

I know. Big city, lots of sounds. Used to my Montana lifestyle now. Yeah, yeah. Very overwhelming day for Mike. Country bumpkin. Exciting. Well, hopefully folks saw the announcement.

Hopefully we were loud enough on social, but we have a big announcement, which is today we acquired Masari. So we wanted to spend some time talking about, I think, three things right now, which is one, why Masari? There's a lot of great data platforms in crypto. Why is Masari such a perfect fit for Blockworks? Number two, kind of what is, I think, maybe how are Mike and I seeing like this moment in time right now in crypto? I think it's a pretty interesting time in crypto, maybe institutional bull, crypto token bear. How do we see what's happening right now playing out? And then maybe the third is where does Blockworks come into this?

Yeah, right? Blockworks, this is year nine for the business. We've evolved a lot. Yeah, I know. Nine years. I know. I've got some grays going on up here. You do.

I do. I do. It's not good. Got to get the, what's the, you know, four men, the little comb with the anti-grain? We don't need to make this a grooming episode. All right, fine, fine, fine. All right. So let's get into, maybe let's start with why I'm sorry.

So, first of all, I think you and I just have a ton of respect for Misari. Blockworks and Misari kind of grew up, I feel like opposite one another, and we kind of like had two different parts of the infinity gauntlet, which was Misari started from day one, focused on this mission of increasing transparency for investors and promoting fundamental-based decision-making in crypto. Blockworks has had that mission as well. Our mission is increasing trust in on-chain markets. We started a little bit more from the side of media, distribution, access to investors, and we've been moving into investor relations. But Masari, it's just extremely, that mission is extremely similar, and we have a ton of respect for what they've been doing. And as we think about what the industry needs at this particular moment in time is kind of a mix of being extremely complimentary with one another and solving the core problem, which is eliminating information asymmetry, providing good information for investors and institutions, and then a focus on standardized data and disclosures. So really, it's kind of a match made in heaven, I think, for us. Yeah, actually, if you go back and listen, so I'm sorry, I was founded by two folks, Ryan and Dan, and then, you know, past the torch to Eric. And then now, Rand has been running the company. They've all been, all four of them have been singularly focused on one thing, which is providing better data in crypto markets for eight years, right? And actually, they got into crypto data way before we did, right? We started more from the top of the funnel media distribution information for folks. And they started with kind of the hard assets, right? The quantitative information.

information whereas we started more qualitative. You know, they started maybe bottoms up. We started top down and we've ended at a very similar place. And so I think we've just seen, yeah, look, they've been our rival and our, you know, we've competed against them and we've won deals against them. We've lost deals against them. And I think the, I think you said it right. We have an enormous amount of respect for what they've been doing.

Yeah. You got to help me out with a sports analogy here. But who are two respected athletes? Well, you used a Marvel analogy with the, you know, Mike's the movie guy on the sports guy. I'm not coming off very cool in this podcast already. So maybe let's talk about the product decisions that Masari chose. Because I think we both attacked crypto data, but we attacked it maybe from one direction. They attacked it from the other.

Okay, so here's a little bit of a history lesson too on Blockworks and our strategy. Blockworks has always been focused on. We really like to start with a very narrow use case or niche, use it as a beachhead, and then expand out from there. So when we started, obviously, as a media business, we kind of built the distribution in audience first. And then when we thought about research, we actually, we looked at the scene and we actually saw Masari. Masari was building, you know, they had started building this Bloomberg for crypto, which means you need to be an aggregator. You need to have all of these different types of data.

So they went very broad at the potential, maybe sacrificing a little bit on the depth side of things. We decided to counterposition. So we started, we, in the same way that you might set up and, equity research shop at a bank. We had a smaller number of analysts, but they only covered, you know, if you were in a lending, you did AVE, morpho, et cetera. So we went very, very, very deep. And when we started into the data space, we focused only in on-chain data and we went really deep on the protocols that we covered. Over the last couple of years, though, in order to expand our product offering, do better on investor relations, provide more data for investors

and institutions, we've recognized the need for a greater breadth of data. And Misari has been doing this longer than anyone. They have one of the best data warehouses, most comprehensive data sets in the entire industry. So from a product complementarity standpoint, it really, really matches up for us. Yeah. To get more specific on just the breadth, because I think people don't, people underestimate just the breadth of Masari's data. They cover 40,000 assets.

Their API, it's probably the strongest API in the industry for a cryptocurrency. data, right? It's got, you know, data for assets, markets, exchange information, news, on-chain events, off-chain events, research, stable coins, protocol data, network data, token unlocks, fundraising, social sentiment, event monitoring, watch list, and a whole bunch more. So what's happened over the last couple of years for Masari is actually their, you know, their best customer for many years was the investor, right? Maybe it's a crypto fund or maybe it's a Tradfif fund getting into crypto, they've done extremely well. And I think we've been very impressed by how well they've been able to do it over the last two years is push into the enterprise. Well, I was going to say this is

something that I think we have felt internally. And Masari's strategies reflected this as well, which Masari's done a really good job of expanding more into the enterprise. So this is something that we should talk about about, where are we at this particular moment in time? Like, what is happening in crypto? You know, people talk about the idea of like an institutional bull market, but a bare market for tokens. Let's abstract away from some of this language, the current moment. In 2017, when we were first getting into this piece, people talked about this Cambrian explosion of different ideas. We've had a bunch of different experiments run, a bunch of capital poured in, and now almost 10 years later, we're figuring out what stuff worked and what stuff

hasn't worked, at least hasn't worked yet. The most important trend within crypto is tokenizing assets. So bringing on dollars in the form of stable coins, RWAs, etc. And rebuilding capital markets on chain. That means a huge opportunity for fintechs, crypto exchanges, banks. They need to move a bunch of their existing infrastructure onto these rails. That is what's happening in crypto right now. Here is the problem. So crypto is used to being a fringe, outsider, unregulated kind of industry. That's been really good for innovation. That is no longer the problem. We know what we need to build. Now we need to change a couple of things. One, we need scaling, as opposed to very far out of the box thinking. But we also, we need to grow up as an industry. And, you know, people used to talk about,

do we need to be regulated? Do we not need to be regulated? The answer is very clear that we do need, we do need regulation. And we do need just leaving it up to the industry to solve all these problems has not worked thus far. So one of the big changes that's happening this year, we've already had genius. Clarity is in the works and in pretty late stages. But we need to solve some stuff that I think people felt were nice to have disclosures, right? At this point, even just speaking personally, like zooming out, I'm not buying any tokens that I don't know if their metrics are actually coming from incentive campaigns and the token's going to dump 90%. Right now, I just can't trust anything, even when I do see it on shame. Yeah, let me put that in different terms. It's hard to

underwrite the industry. If you're an think about listing a token, it's hard to underwrite it. If you're an investor thinking about buying the token, it's hard to underwrite it. If you're a regulator, right, and you're looking at a token or you're looking at on-chain markets, it's just hard to underwrite the whole space. All right, so where are we at this moment in time? First of all, let's talk about what's working, and then let's talk about what's broken. So back in 2017, when you and I were getting into this industry, people talked about it

as a Cambrian explosion. And that's largely what we've seen for the last almost decade. People tried a bunch of different stuff. And now, almost 10 years later, we basically have our answer. The thing that is working at this moment in time is tokenization and bringing all of these different assets that exist and trad by on chain. Dollars in the form of stable coins, treasuries, more esoteric, you know, kind of bonds and stocks now. Stocks. Yeah, yeah.

So all of that stuff is moving on chain and it's going to create a huge amount of opportunity and onboard investors. All that stuff is great. So that's what's working. Here's what's not working. People do not trust these markets anymore. I don't trust these markets anymore. It's hard to believe what we're seeing. And here's the part that's been broken.

And it's part of why we're really, really excited to onboard Massari because they've had this mission from the very beginning. Part of this is standardizing data, right? So we are still at a point where founders will regularly post revenue, which is overstated by 10x. That is crazy. It's not good. That's really. And, you know, we used to just kind of laugh it off. It matters.

Yeah. It matters. And here's the reason actually what I should have started with. The reason it matters is crypto used to have a boogeyman. We used to be able to say Gary Gensler is out to get us or yada yada. There's no boogeyman guys. We're just losing. We haven't produced competitive assets that people want to buy.

So we should all be really incentivized. We all should really care about this. But here are the layers to the problem. One part is just standardized data. This is something that we've been building. Masari has been building. And this is going to get a lot better with the depth of blockworks and the breadth of Misari. So one is just standardized data and accounting that everyone

agrees on. Here's the other thing, though, that's actually more foundational to trust is disclosures. So right now, even if you had perfect insight into, let's say, on-chain data or markets data, you see some, you know, dexx that you've never heard of and the volume is pumping 10x. Is that because they've actually nailed something on the product, or much more likely in crypto, is it that they're running some incentive campaign and everything's going to dump. By the way, incentive campaigns are a perfectly legitimate strategy. You should just have to disclose this stuff because the net effect of it is right now, if I'm not involved in playing these pump, but I just don't trust it. And if you and I don't trust

this stuff, then no one else is going to trust this stuff either. So what we really need is a set of disclosures. This activity is okay. Running an incentive campaign is okay. Insider selling is okay. You should just have to disclose. And let the market decide. And let the market decide. Yeah. Which, by the way, is how it works in TradFi. You can actually put kind of whatever you want in the S-1. You can do crazy stuff in your business. You can do some maybe not-so-great stuff in your business, but you just have to put it in your S-1 and you let the market decide. Exactly. Okay. So the layers to this that we need to fix the problem are we need a disclosure layer. And so that's what we're building with the TTF. So, but eventually it's going to be the TTF. We're going to do the same thing for on-chain stocks, RWAs. But all of these assets that are coming on-chain, if you're an issuer, you should have to. to make standards such a disclosures, just to avoid bad behavior. The next is a standardized layer of data. Right now, I don't think people are aware of this.

There's a huge amount of flexibility, just like there is an accounting of how people describe things like protocol revenue, margin, et cetera. There's a degree of flexibility in accounting always, but there should be standards. You should not be able to. In fact, if you were a public company CEO, you overstated your revenue publicly, that is a, that's criminal. You can't do that. And we should not accept that you can do that.

crypto either. So there should be standardized data. And then really the layer that I think we're excited to move into as well is making things better on the market side for things like exchanges, financial institutions that want to onboard into crypto. Right now you can think of it like a seam, right? You kind of have everything on chain that works pretty well together. And then you kind of have the TradFi L1. And the Tradfai L1 is very interested in merging or using crypto as a back end. But there's a ton of stuff like compliance, monitoring, integrating with policymakers, all that stuff, diligently different types of assets. And so that's kind of the three-layer cake that we're building. Disclosures, standardized data, working with financial institutions

to comply, monitor, diligence, all that stuff. I wouldn't just say financial institutions, too. I think there's a, what's happening right now is, okay, the winning use case of crypto is we are rebuilding capital markets on chain. Yes. Right. And I think, something that Mike and I and all of Blockworks really strongly believes is that stocks, bonds, currencies, and we also believe in tokens, are going to get rebuilt on public blockchains. And if that happens, you have to say there's going to be all of these businesses that get rebuilt and run their business on chain. So obviously the first bucket here were the crypto-native folks, Uniswap, Ave, Morpho, Solana,

Ethereum, right? You have the crypto-native. But you also have Stripe, right? You have BlackRock. You have Robin Hood. You have the regulators, the SEC, the CFTC. You have all these folks. You have thousands of companies that are now starting to do things on chain.

What we hear from them is that all of their ability to do things on chain is blocked. It's blocked by an inability to monitor the assets, an inability to track their users on chain, an inability to actually understand their financials when they run things on chain. And so I think if you think about our third layer of the stack for Blockworks, that's what we're trying to solve. We're building and, you know, an exchange might want to build agents. The agent needs underlying data. An exchange might need to monitor the assets that they list on the exchange. That's what they need.

The regulators need to monitor. All those things can be built, but they rely on this underlying data. Yeah. The way that we think about it is you kind of divide the world up or the opportunity set up here into what is crypto actually need right now, right? There's kind of just 80-20 disclosures, standardized data onboarding RWAs. In the future state where this gets really exciting is obviously AI is one of the most transformative technology waves that we've ever seen. And when you combine on-chain crypto data and AI, what you actually, I think one of the

mental models that people got wrong is that we were going to blow up finance instead of making finance just work way better. So I'll give you an example of what that could mean. an investor relations standpoint. So right now, if you are trying to diligence a public company, you'd say, oh, there's really good transparency. I can go to their website, their IR section of their site, and I can look at any 10K, you know, their quarterly results for the last, however many years they've been public. But really what that should look like is all of that data should be streamed live, should be on-chain data that you can just hit whenever. And using

LLMs, you should just be able to ask it any question that you want. Instead of, you know, I used to be an analyst. So I know the pain of like trying to match up different footnotes from different 10 Qs, get them all the match, put it in your Excel spreadsheet. You know, really what investor relation should be in the future is, you know, a data set that you can query super easily, answer any question that an analyst possibly might want. And then, you know, you stream that live and leverage social media, things like that. You know, in addition to, if you think about something like we're kind of rebuilding money market funds on morpho with bolts, right now you'd have to go to someone like a credit ratings agency, right, to, like, score those different,

I mean, maybe not for a money market fund, but if you're doing like a bond issuance or something like that, if all that information just lived on chain, you know, you did your disclosure, so you represented that all the information was real, and LLM should be able to, it's not rocket science that people are doing, that should be able to get scored at 10% of the cost instantly. So I think that's the mental model that people didn't fully have, right? We built all these things that feel like weird protocols, we're changing everything. I think right now, part of the ideological shift that crypto is going through is what we're, what we're realizing is that we're actually making the existing finance just stack,

just operate way, way better. And that's what the opportunity is. And I also, if I think there will be some financial firms that come in and they've got a lot of, you know, they've got great businesses and they're going to innovate and leverage crypto and generate a lot of shareholder value. I would also, I think that if you've been building in crypto for the last eight years, this is going to be highly disruptive to many of these firms as well. And I don't think it's some foregone conclusion that banks are going to come in here and run everyone's show and, you know, generate all the value.

There's a ton of opportunity for startups right now to come in and win some of these processes. Like just look at the entire ecosystem of capital markets, all the different players. Some of these will make great transition. Some of them are going to get disrupted here. And that's our view, right? That's the market that we're playing to win. Yeah, I agree. When you think about what Blockworks has been.

business looks like over the next couple years. Because, you know, it's funny. So this is year nine of Blockworks. We've been doing this for eight and a half years. Started December, December 2017. Yeah. I think a lot of people knew us as a media and events business. Got into data, you know, been building in the data space for, you know, about four years now.

And I think a lot of people are kind of like, all right, you guys put out great data. I see your dashboards. I use your API. Yeah. But maybe they haven't actually heard what Blockworks's business is. Yeah. Who our customers are and what the products are. Yeah.

Maybe if you want to walk through that as a first step and then I can jump on to. Yeah. So Blockworks has transitioned from, and Misari is kind of the capstone and completion of this evolution, but we transitioned from a media business to a data business. So the three, you know, the three primary services that we have are, again, disclosures, standardized data. And then we're focused on a couple of workflows within financial institutions like monitoring, diligence, and piping in data, like selling data to these, these institutions.

institutions. And maybe it would be helpful as well to think of kind of who our customers are and what we do for them. So if you are a token issuer, we help you with two things. We help you do investor relations. We create very comprehensive data sets and we help connect you to investors. And we also help you with disclosures. So we have a TTF framework that you can use to disclose all this stuff. And we're going to help productize that so it's easier for you guys to do in the future and submit your information to the relevant regulatory agencies in the U.S. So that's layer one. The second is just standardizing data sets. So the acquisition of Masari, we started with on-chain data, you know, but we now have really active footholds in all different types of data, market,

fundraising, et cetera. So we have the largest data set in crypto by really wide margin now, and we're just standardizing that, and we license that out. And then we also work with exchanges, one, to help them monitor assets, make sure that they're within compliance, do diligence on assets, and make disclosures. Yeah. So that's what the current business looks like today. Yeah, to summarize that, here's how I think of it. We have two customers. We have the issuers of on-chain assets, and we have the people who need to underwrite those on-chain assets, right? So the asset issuers are the protocols, the chains, the foundations, applications, increasingly stable coins and RWA issuers, prediction markets.

Any on-chain business, really, that needs to earn trust, disclose information, explain their performance of their business, and manage their investors, right? So those are the issuers. We also have another set of customers, which are the underwriters of the on-chain assets, And those would be investors, increasingly regulators right now, and any platform that needs to kind of underwrite, review, maybe list those assets. Yeah. So those are like, you know, funds, policymakers, exchanges, custodians, fintechs, increasingly payment providers, brokerages. And actually, I think the fastest growing customer base of Masari right now are the AI agents as well, which is one of the other reasons we're so excited about Masari. Blockworks is the center of gravity in between liquidity hubs like exchanges, token issuers and regulators.

That's right. That's the center of gravity and crypto that matters. So what we want to do with this Missouri acquisition is just better data, better APIs, stronger disclosures, more complete investor relations, better monitoring and compliance tools, and more useful research and, you know, eventually ratings as well. So, you know, you ask, what does the future of this business look like? There is a large ecosystem, which is pretty fragmented in Tradfai, around different data providers, ratings agencies, and kind of workflow services like trading, order settlement, all of that stuff. Big businesses, Moody's $80 billion business, S&P, $120 billion business. Ratings, Morning Star, et cetera. For a whole bunch of reasons, these areas are really fragmented within crypto.

Our observation is, once you control the data, it allows you to unlock all. of these different use cases. And people still underestimate how difficult it is to get this data and put it into usable form. So if you start with the on-chain data and we're working with, you know, a token issuer on, you know, creating viable investor relations. We have to map your entire protocol. We under have basically understand the entire operations of the business. What that allows us to do if we're already working with you in that deep capacity, you know, we can expand And it's a land and expand strategy into other areas like monitoring, diligence, whatever you might need help with. So, I mean, it sounds really basic to say we'll see in 10 years of the strategy has panned out.

But the lock-in really exists at that data layer. And then it helps you win use cases on top of that. But we see it as a, I think a lot of the different fragmented businesses that exist that facilitate capital markets in traditional finance are going to get consolidated. And the two driving forces there are crypto data. winner-take-all dynamic in crypto data and then AI. Like, fortunately, we are bigger now than we used to be, but we're still a nimble startup. Yeah.

We're going to be able to leverage AI much, much faster than our- Well, I mentioned, I mentioned Moody's, right, $80 billion business, S&P, $120 billion business. In legacy capital markets, the information platforms are oftentimes bigger than most of the actual businesses that operate on, you know, that run on NASDAQ and ISI and stuff like that. Right. The problem with those businesses is, is raising. ratings, research, diligence, investor relations, data businesses, they've required enormous headcount,

enormous headcount to run those businesses. And in crypto, all of the data is already digital, structured, and real time, right? And transparent and public, right? And now there's a little bit of structuring work that has to be done and cleaning up the data from the blockchains and all that kind of stuff. But we think that, hey, I mean, we're recording this on the back of Anthropic releasing Fable, right? It's unbelievable what you can do with this stuff. Yeah. And I think we're going to have a huge, you know, they have a little bit of a head start, maybe a hundred year head start on us. But I think it'll be really fun to see what an AI native, on-chain native information platform can look like. So people used to ask, I mean, why hasn't there been like a Bloomberg

of crypto, which by the way, we don't think there's ever going to be a Bloomberg of crypto. That's like the Uber of X. There haven't been any other Uber's. That was a, you know, that's a business model from a different time. But part of the reason why we still have struggled to get standardized, accurate information in this space is because there were never any punitive consequences for representing false information. And we used to say stuff like, we just need to call out this bad behavior as 2026. We've had 10 years to understand if that strategy is going to work. It's as bad as it's ever been. That's not going to work. There need to be consequences for if you represent false information, you're going to get sued or you're going to go to jail. So that's been the

missing link, but once we have assurances that that information is correct and again, standardized through disclosures, then we can finally start to progress as an industry. I think there's a lot of just maybe angst or despair or just concern about what's going to happen with the future of our industry, right? And you know, you and I have dedicated nine years, going to dedicate another nine years and then probably another nine years after that and keep going, I think you and I are probably the most optimistic we've ever been on both Blockworks and the industry. That's not the sentiment of most. So maybe we should end with talking a little bit about why we feel that way.

Well, on paper, we're getting everything that we wanted. The industry's been accepted. No one's trying to ban it. Actually, regulators and policymakers in the U.S. are trying to foster it. It's like wildest dream stuff. The issue, I think there's a couple of different issues here, which is, you know that analogy of everyone's touching an elephant, you know, a bunch of blind men touch an elephant,

one touches the trunk, and, you know, they're all describing different things. I think there were a lot of reasons why people might have gotten involved in this crypto windows in a very early stage. And some people were ideologues. These are the cypher punks. It's like, I want anarchism state free money. Okay.

Then when you had tokens trading, you actually had a bunch of degenerate gamblers. They're like, I just want to hit a button with a 1,000x chance that you know, or like a chance that I make $1,000 my money. Right. And then you had some people who had a slightly different vision, which, and I think this was more of our vision, which is this is going to be a really interesting industry that's going to solve some important problems and you can get in at the ground floor.

And I would say that, you know, part of what's causing distress is a lot of, we had to make compromises on the ideology to go mainstream. So a lot of the early idea logs you see churning. Then you're starting to see other technologies like AI. robotics become the flashy thing and like you know these people are right they were the pico bull posters in 2021 and now they're doing robotic stuff right so a lot of the early degenerate gamblers like maybe i don't love crypto maybe i just want to be in the frothiest you know most hypey space that possibly could be in but then that leaves the group of people that you actually need to usher usher us into

the next phase which is hey we are rebuilding finance globally that's freaking cool if we only have by way, I don't think it's only going to be that. But even if it was only that, that's going to be a huge multi, multi-billion or trillion dollar industry. So let's just freaking... Rebuilding finance is not a billion dollar industry, my front. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, but that's, that's, and then the tokens are down. And so to go all the way back, that's the main thing. The tokens are down while the AI stonks are up. But... And that's, that's hurting people's perception of what this industry can do. Right. So, so I don't want to overstate Blockworks's role in this, but we need to fix the tokens, guys. This industry,

doesn't work without the tokens. They're not separate. Fixing tokens are existential. And these are the building blocks. Like you need a couple of things. You need these standard disclosures, data that everyone can access so that we can start to allocate capital to the right founders who can actually take us out of this. That's right. Blockworks in Masari together. Maybe we should end on what this actually gives you. Here's my thought. You have a system of record for all on-chain businesses. Once you have that system of record, you're able to build a trusted data layer that investors, regulators, platforms can plug into. When you have the trusted data layer, you get an API.

The API is what developers, exchanges, AI agents, increasingly, people who are just using Claudec can build on top of. Then you get this workflow layer, right, with the, on top of the API, where you can actually build software and UIs. You get a workflow layer for issuers, exchanges, brokerages, regulators, asset managers. And then finally, on top of all that, we haven't even really really. really talked about our media and events business because it's not a huge focus of ours, but you do need this distribution layer. You need a distribution layer to connect people

and specifically to connect the companies issuing the assets with the market participants who underwrite them. And so if we zoom all the way out to what you and I have spent almost nine years doing is we're trying. Our mission is super simple, right? We want to bring transparency and trust to on-chain markets as the institutions come on-chain. And we've been doing that for a long time and we're going to keep doing it so yeah we're excited about this um you know we're very excited to welcome all the missari customers many folks on the missari team and yeah masari accelerates this mission and vision that we've been on for a while and yeah onwards my friend onwards thanks folks all right this will be a fun while we'll check back in cheers folks