3 Billion to 10 Million: Messari Still Sold at a Bargain Price

Original Author: Mahe, Foresight News

On June 12, Blockworks, a leading platform at the intersection of crypto data and capital markets, announced the acquisition of its long-time competitor Messari for over $10 million. Messari, which was valued at approximately $300 million in 2022, sold at a significant discount, highlighting the survival pressures faced by high-valuation startups and the consolidation wave in the data infrastructure sector during a prolonged bear market.

Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz stated in the official announcement, "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 advantages in data breadth and API capabilities to build a 'single source of truth' for the on-chain market."

Deal Details

According to Blockworks' official announcement 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 Blockworks' ecosystem. The API supports multidimensional data covering 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 stated that this transaction is its first major acquisition since completing a Series A extension funding round several weeks ago. That round valued the company at approximately $192 million, was co-led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, and was explicitly earmarked for consolidating the fragmented data and information sectors within 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. Through podcasts (like Empire), research reports, and in-person summits, it built significant influence among crypto professionals and investors.

Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito

As the industry matured, the company transitioned 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 shut down its news division to concentrate resources on data, investor relations, and compliance services. The Blockworks Intelligence business line became a key growth area. The Series A extension funding completed in April was intended to provide ammunition for this transformation and subsequent acquisitions. Yanowitz publicly stated that the company's revenue was scaling rapidly, and the specific goal of this funding round was "consolidating the fragmented crypto data and information sector."

Blockworks' strength lies in its issuer-side 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 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 created by Ryan Selkis and Dan McArdle. The company initially focused on professional-grade crypto research and data analysis, quickly becoming a go-to platform for reliable information for both institutional and retail investors.

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, valuing the company at approximately $300 million. This round occurred near the tail end 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 fundraising and trading volume pressure, presented real challenges for Messari. Following the departure of co-founder and former CEO Ryan Selkis in 2024, the company underwent personnel optimization. In the bear market environment, high-valuation data companies struggled to maintain previous growth expectations, increasing survival pressure.

Behind the Acquisition

According to data from Architect Partners, there have been 144 M&A deals year-to-date in 2026, totaling $11.8 billion, an increase of approximately 3.5% compared to the same period last year. Against a backdrop of pressure on trading volumes and token prices, some high-valuation startups are opting for M&A to achieve resource integration or exit.

Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, noted that the industry is in a phase of divergence, with pressure potentially leading to more distressed sales. The gap between Messari's $300 million valuation and its acquisition price of over $10 million epitomizes this phenomenon—valuations based on earlier growth narratives are being recalibrated against fundamentals and capital efficiency.

Yanowitz emphasized in the announcement: "This acquisition connects two sides of the market—issuers maintaining their track records of business activity, 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 capabilities depend 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 their on-chain presence, sectors like stablecoins, RWAs, and prediction markets are expanding, driving surging demand for standardized disclosures, 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 consolidation; the crypto space similarly requires analogous infrastructure, but it must adapt to the native, real-time, and structured characteristics of on-chain data.

By leveraging Messari's vast dataset and combining it with its own issuer-side disclosure and IR capabilities, Blockworks forms a closed loop spanning data collection, verification, analysis, distribution, and compliance. 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 allow its data assets to generate value within a larger ecosystem, rather than continuing to contract under the pressure of independent operations.

The crypto data and research landscape is shifting from a flourishing of diverse players to a phase of survival and consolidation. Amid cyclical volatility, data and trust serve as long-term moats, and consolidation often represents one of the optimal paths to navigate the cycles.