On June 12, Blockworks, a leading platform in crypto data and capital markets, announced its acquisition of its long-time competitor Messari for a deal value exceeding $10 million. Messari had reached a valuation of approximately $300 million in 2022. The significant discount in this transaction price highlights the survival pressure faced by high-valuation startups in a deep bear market and the consolidation wave within the data infrastructure sector.
In the official announcement, Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, stated, "For eight years, Messari has provided the industry with transparency, market intelligence, and comprehensive data coverage for every crypto asset, building the industry's most comprehensive dataset.
This integration will combine Blockworks' strengths in issuer disclosure, investor relations, and compliance workflows with Messari's strengths in data breadth and API capabilities, jointly building a 'single source of truth' for the on-chain market."
Transaction Details
According to Blockworks' official announcement and confirmation by multiple media outlets, upon completion of the acquisition, Messari CEO Diran Li will join Blockworks in a senior leadership role.
Messari's core assets, including its data platform and its API, will be integrated into the Blockworks ecosystem. This API supports multi-dimensional data including assets, markets, exchanges, news, research, stablecoins, protocols, networks, token unlocks, fundraising, social sentiment, event monitoring, watchlists, and more, and is already used by funds, exchanges, developers, and various market participants.
Blockworks indicated that this transaction is its first major acquisition following its Series A extension financing completed several weeks ago. That funding round, valued at approximately $192 million and co-led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, explicitly aimed to consolidate the fragmented data and information landscape in the crypto space.
Blockworks and Messari
Founded in 2018 by Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito and headquartered in New York, Blockworks initially focused on media and events. It built significant influence among crypto practitioners and investors through podcasts (such as Empire), research reports, and offline summits.
As the industry matured, the company gradually shifted from content production to an on-chain capital markets intelligence platform, focusing on building institutional-grade data, investor relations, and compliance tools.
Around October 2025, Blockworks shuttered its news department to concentrate resources on data, investor relations, and compliance services, with its Blockworks Intelligence business line becoming a key growth focus.
The Series A extension financing completed this April was precisely to fuel this transition and subsequent acquisitions. Yanowitz publicly stated that the company's revenue is scaling rapidly, with this funding round clearly targeting the "consolidation of crypto's fragmented data and information landscape."
Blockworks' strength lies in its issuer-side capabilities: helping on-chain asset issuers (protocols, chains, foundations, applications, stablecoin & RWA issuers, prediction markets, etc.) establish standardized disclosure frameworks, investor relations processes, and compliance workflows. Its products already serve institutions looking to enter the on-chain market, providing end-to-end support from due diligence to continuous monitoring.
Messari, also founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York, was established by Ryan Selkis and Dan McArdle. The company initially focused on professional-grade crypto research and data analysis, quickly becoming the go-to platform for institutional and retail investors seeking reliable information.
In September 2022, Messari completed a $35 million Series B funding round, led by the crypto arm of Brevan Howard with participation from Point72 Ventures and others, valuing the company at approximately $300 million. This funding round occurred near the peak of the bull market, reflecting the strong demand for high-quality data infrastructure at the time. However, the prolonged bear market post-2022, with tightening crypto project funding and pressure on trading volumes, presented real challenges for Messari. After co-founder and former CEO Ryan Selkis departed in 2024, the company underwent personnel optimization. In a bear market environment, high-valuation data companies struggled to maintain previous growth expectations, increasing survival pressure.
Behind the Acquisition
According to Architect Partners data, there have been 144 M&A transactions totaling $11.8 billion year-to-date in 2026, an increase of about 3.5% compared to the same period last year. Against a backdrop of pressured trading volumes and token prices, some high-valuation startups are opting for mergers and acquisitions to achieve resource consolidation or exit.
Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, pointed out that the industry is in a phase of differentiation, where pressure may lead to more distressed sales. Messari's fall from a $300 million valuation to a transaction price in the tens of millions is a microcosm of this phenomenon—valuations based on early growth narratives are being recalibrated in the face of fundamentals and capital efficiency.
Yanowitz emphasized in the announcement: "This acquisition connects the two sides of the market—issuers maintaining the trusted record of their business, and investors, exchanges, and regulators consuming those records through research, APIs, and automated workflows."
The core data foundation provided by Messari is precisely the prerequisite for AI agents to function: an agent's capability depends on the data it can access and the APIs it can call.
The crypto industry is currently at a critical inflection point: institutions are accelerating on-chain adoption, sectors like stablecoins, RWA, and prediction markets continue to expand, and demand for standardized disclosure, compliance monitoring, real-time data, and programmable access is surging.
In traditional financial markets, platforms like Bloomberg, FactSet, and S&P Global have built data moats through long-term consolidation. The crypto field similarly requires such infrastructure but must adapt to the characteristics of on-chain native, real-time, structured data.
Blockworks aims to build a full-cycle ecosystem, from data collection and verification to analysis, distribution, and compliance, using Messari's massive dataset as a foundation and overlaying its own issuer-side disclosure and IR capabilities.
The introduction of AI will further accelerate this process, as high-quality, structured data is the core fuel for training and running on-chain agents. For the Messari team, joining a platform with greater resources and strategic clarity will help its data assets create value within a larger ecosystem, rather than continuing to contract under the pressure of independent operation.
The crypto data and research landscape is transitioning from a flourishing diversity to consolidation by the fittest. Amidst cyclical fluctuations, data and trust are long-term moats, and consolidation is often one of the optimal paths to navigate through the cycles.
