Data and analytics platform Blockworks has acquired crypto analytics firm Messari – a move that combines two of the industry's largest market intelligence platforms as the race to provide the data infrastructure powering AI applications in crypto heats up.
Blockworks Acquires Messari as Crypto Data Race Shifts Towards AI
12 June 2026 - 21:26 CEST
By Jona Jaupi
The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, though The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Blockworks paid more than $10mn for Messari. The figure implies a steep discount to the roughly $300mn valuation the company achieved in a 2022 funding round led by hedge fund Brevan Howard Digital.
The acquisition brings together Messari's data platform, which covers more than 40,000 digital assets, with Blockworks' analytics, research and investor relations businesses.
The deal aims to "build AI workflows for onchain markets," according to the official blog post. "An agent is only as good as the data it can reach and the API it can call," Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz wrote in the post. "That is why Messari matters."
The acquisition marks the latest step in Blockworks' transformation from a crypto media company into a data and software provider. In October 2025, the firm shut down its news division and laid off journalists as it shifted resources towards analytics and investor-facing products.
It also comes just weeks after Blockworks said it had raised a Series A extension that valued the company at $192mn. The funding was part of what it described as a plan to roll up crypto's "fragmented" data, according to an official blog post.
The AI infrastructure bet
The deal highlights that, despite the broader market's decline, firms are still investing in data and AI tools – like AI agents – that they believe could shape the industry's next phase of growth.
A report from crypto trading firm Keyrock estimated that AI agents settled more than $73mn across 176mn blockchain transactions between May 2025 and April 2026. The report said 76% of those payments were below the $0.30 fixed-fee floor common in card payments, making stablecoin payments on blockchain networks more practical for small automated transactions.
Goldman Sachs Research also recently found a growing demand for AI agents, forecasting that the token consumption needed to support agents could increase 24-fold by 2030 as businesses and consumers adopt the technology. The bank also said enterprise adoption is expected to outpace consumer use.
AI within and beyond digital assets
The trend has also extended beyond digital assets, according to Stanford University's 2026 AI Index, which found that global corporate investment in AI more than doubled in 2025.
Private investment rose 127.5% from a year earlier, while generative AI accounted for nearly half of all private AI funding. The number of newly funded AI companies also increased by 71%.
Meanwhile, investor interest in AI-related cryptocurrencies has cooled from the highs seen in early 2025, but the sector remains sizeable.
According to CoinGecko data, AI-linked cryptocurrencies had a combined market capitalization of about $21.9bn as of 12 Jun. AI agents remained the largest category at roughly $3.2bn, followed by AI applications at about $2.2bn and AI frameworks at around $1.8bn.
