In 2022, Messari was valued at $300 million.
Written by: Mahe, Foresight News
On June 12, Blockworks, a leading platform for encrypted data and capital markets, announced the acquisition of its long-time rival Messari for over $10 million. Messari was valued at approximately $300 million in 2022; this transaction represents a significant discount, highlighting the survival pressures faced by highly valued startups in a bear market and the consolidation wave in the data infrastructure sector.
In an official announcement, Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz 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 to jointly build a 'single record system' for the on-chain market."
Transaction details
According to an official announcement from Blockworks and confirmation from multiple media outlets, following the acquisition, Messari CEO Diran Li will join Blockworks in a senior leadership role.
Diran Li
Messari's core assets, including its data platform and API, will be integrated into the Blockworks ecosystem. This API supports multi-dimensional data including assets, markets, exchanges, news, research, stablecoins, protocols, networks, token unlocking, fundraising, social sentiment, event monitoring, and watchlists, and is already being used by funds, exchanges, developers, and various market participants.
Blockworks stated that this transaction is its first major acquisition since completing its Series A extended funding round a few weeks ago. The funding round, valued at approximately $192 million, was co-led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others. Its explicit purpose is to consolidate fragmented data and information within the crypto space.
Blockworks and Messari
Founded in 2018 by Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito, Blockworks is headquartered in New York. Initially focused on media and events, it amassed a significant influence among crypto professionals and investors through podcasts (such as Empire), research reports, and offline summits.
Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito
As the industry matures, the company is gradually shifting from content production to an on-chain capital market intelligence platform, focusing on building institutional-grade data, investor relations, and compliance tools.
Around October 2025, Blockworks shut down its news division, focusing resources on data, investor relations, and compliance services, with its Blockworks Intelligence business line becoming a key growth driver. The Series A extended funding round completed this April is precisely to prepare for this transformation and subsequent acquisitions. Yanowitz has publicly stated that the company's revenue is rapidly scaling, and this funding round clearly targets "integrating the fragmented crypto data and information space."
Blockworks' strength lies in its issuer capabilities: helping on-chain asset issuers (protocols, chains, foundations, applications, stablecoin and 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 ongoing 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 preferred platform for institutional and retail investors to access reliable information.
Ryan Selkis
In September 2022, Messari completed a $35 million Series B funding round, led by Brevan Howard's crypto division, with participation from Point72 Ventures and others, valuing the company at approximately $300 million. This funding round occurred at the tail end of a bull market, reflecting the strong market demand for high-quality data infrastructure at the time. However, the bear market that followed 2022 brought tighter funding for crypto projects and pressure on trading volumes, posing a real challenge to Messari. Following the departure of co-founder and former CEO Ryan Selkis in 2024, the company underwent personnel optimization. In a bear market environment, highly valued data companies struggle to maintain previous growth expectations, facing increased pressure to survive.
Behind the acquisition
According to data from Architect Partners, there have been 144 mergers and acquisitions to date in 2026, totaling $11.8 billion, an increase of approximately 3.5% compared to the same period last year. Amidst pressure on transaction volume and token prices, some highly valued startups have chosen to consolidate resources or exit through mergers and acquisitions.
Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, points out that the industry is undergoing a process of differentiation, and pressure may lead to more distressed sales. The drop in Messari's valuation from $300 million to a sale price of just over ten million dollars is a microcosm of this phenomenon—early valuations based on growth narratives are being recalibrated in the face of fundamentals and capital efficiency.
In its announcement, Yanowitz emphasized, "This acquisition connects two sides of the market—issuers maintain the credit history of their businesses, and investors, exchanges, and regulators consume these history through research, APIs, and automated workflows." The core data foundation provided by Messari is the prerequisite for the AI agent to function: the agent's capabilities depend on the data it can access and the APIs it can invoke.
The crypto industry is currently at a critical inflection point: institutions are accelerating their move to blockchain, stablecoins, RWA, prediction markets, and other sectors are expanding rapidly, leading to a surge in demand for standardized disclosure, compliance monitoring, real-time data, and programmable access. In traditional financial markets, platforms like Bloomberg, FactSet, and S&P Global have built data moats through long-term integration; the crypto space also needs similar infrastructure, but it must adapt to the characteristics of native, real-time, and structured on-chain data.
Blockworks leverages Messari's massive datasets, combined with its own disclosure and IR capabilities on the issuer side, to form a complete closed loop from data collection, verification, analysis to distribution and compliance. The introduction of AI will further accelerate this process. High-quality, structured data is the core fuel for training and operating on-chain agents. For the Messari team, joining a platform with greater resource and strategic clarity will help its data assets realize their value within a larger ecosystem, rather than continuing to shrink under the pressure of independent operation.
The field of encrypted data and research is moving from a period of diverse development to a process of consolidation and integration. In the midst of cyclical fluctuations, data and trust are long-term moats, and consolidation is often one of the optimal paths to navigate through cycles.
