Blockworks, a crypto data and media company, has acquired Messari in a deal valued at more than $10 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The transaction comes at a steep discount to Messari’s prior valuation and highlights how weaker market conditions have reshaped the cryptocurrency research and analytics space.
Messari, which is backed by investors including Brevan Howard Digital and Point72 Ventures, previously raised $35 million in a Series B funding round in 2022 that valued the firm at roughly $300 million. The Wall Street Journal said the purchase price reflects both Messari’s recent operational challenges and broader weakness across the crypto sector.
Key takeaways
- Blockworks acquired Messari for more than $10 million, a figure framed by the Wall Street Journal as a major discount.
- Messari’s earlier $300 million valuation from its 2022 Series B contrasts sharply with the reported deal size.
- The acquisition is intended to expand Blockworks’ combined data, research, compliance, and investor-relations offerings.
- Blockworks says Messari’s existing enterprise users and APIs will continue to operate without interruption after the deal.
- The deal fits a wider pattern of consolidation across crypto market data and research platforms.
Why Blockworks is buying Messari
Blockworks said in a blog post announcing the acquisition that Messari supplies data coverage for more than 40,000 digital assets and operates an API used by investors, exchanges, and developers. Blockworks also positioned the merger as a way to broaden the scope of its market data and research products, while strengthening adjacent areas such as compliance support and investor communications.
For customers, an important practical detail is continuity. In a post on X, Messari said existing users would continue to receive uninterrupted access to its enterprise services and APIs following the acquisition. That matters in a sector where data feeds and analytics workflows are often integrated into institutional dashboards, compliance routines, and trading-related research systems.
A discount tied to shifting company strategy
While the Wall Street Journal attributed the steep discount to Messari’s struggles, the company’s internal changes also point to a strategic pivot. Earlier this year, Messari replaced CEO Eric Turner with Diran Li and reduced headcount as part of a broader transition toward an “AI-first” approach. In a LinkedIn post announcing the leadership change, Li said the company had “parted ways with many teammates” while moving toward an AI-first model.
Messari was founded in 2018 and began as a crypto research and analytics firm, later expanding its footprint across enterprise-grade data and research use cases. The reported acquisition price—over $10 million—therefore suggests that Messari’s ability to maintain growth and market momentum deteriorated after its 2022 fundraising at a much higher valuation.
Consolidation accelerates across crypto intelligence
The Blockworks-Messari deal is part of a larger wave of consolidation among firms that sell crypto market data, research, and analytics to institutional users.
Earlier this month, Paris-based crypto data provider Kaiko acquired Amberdata, a US-focused digital asset data company. Kaiko said the move would expand its derivatives analytics, onchain data coverage, and AI-powered research tools, while strengthening service offerings for institutional clients such as banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and exchanges. Amberdata’s derivatives analytics and options data products were expected to complement Kaiko’s platform.
In January, oracle provider RedStone acquired Security Token Market and its TokenizeThis conference, adding a dataset covering more than 800 tokenized assets across categories including equities, real estate, debt, and funds as RedStone extended its institutional data business.
More recently, the Jito Foundation acquired SolanaFloor, a Solana-focused news, research, and analytics platform, after it shut down following a $40 million treasury wallet breach at parent company Step Finance. The deal reportedly revived the publication and kept its editorial team in place.
Together, these transactions underscore a sector-level dynamic: as budgets tighten and competition for institutional attention grows, scale and integrated data offerings increasingly determine which platforms can stay independent. Even when editorial teams or specialized datasets survive, buyers can consolidate distribution, infrastructure, and product roadmaps under a single umbrella.
What to watch after the deal
For market participants relying on Messari’s enterprise services, the immediate watch item is how Blockworks integrates Messari’s coverage—especially the breadth of its dataset across thousands of assets—and how it aligns that with Blockworks’ research and compliance positioning. More broadly, investors and developers should monitor whether the “AI-first” transition that Messari pursued earlier translates into new product capabilities or remains largely a cost-and-operations realignment under a larger data provider.
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