'Dark' Domination - Solana ‘dark’ exchange HumidiFi dominates trading with record $34bn volume.
Filing First - VanEck files for first Lido staked ETH ETF.
Open For Business - 21Shares, Bitwise and WisdomTree open UK retail access to Bitcoin and Ethereum ETPs following FCA approval.
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Messari's protocol reports give you a deep dive on the foundation and state of top crypto protocols, including key metrics and notable events. See the complete list of protocol reports here and get a preview of our latest report below.
Fifth-largest DeFi network by TVL ($6.2B)
TRON hit all-time highs in Q3 2025, with market cap up 19% QoQ to $31.6B and revenue up 30.5% QoQ to $1.2B
Major integrations with MetaMask, Chainlink, Graph Protocol, and deBridge enhanced interoperability
TRON was selected by the U.S. Department of Commerce to record GDP data and sponsored major global blockchain events
Stacks extends Bitcoin’s functionality, enabling smart contracts and DeFi secured by Bitcoin’s base layer
Despite market headwinds, Stacks saw rising DeFi TVL (+97.6% Q1, +9.2% Q2), more transactions (+68% Q2), and growing STX locked (+8.6% Q2)
Jump Crypto, BitGo, Hex Trust, Copper, and others integrated or supported sBTC and STX—strengthening compliance and liquidity
Withdrawal functionality launched in April 2025; deposit caps repeatedly filled within hours, showing strong demand for Bitcoin-native DeFi
Stellar has been a leading network for real-world asset (RWA) issuance since 2021
Over $533M in RWAs (excl. stablecoins) now live on Stellar, up 25% YoY; total RWA access (including stablecoins) exceeds $3B
RWAs on Stellar include Franklin Templeton (BENJI), WisdomTree, Ondo Finance (USDY), Mercado Bitcoin, Centrifuge, RedSwan, and Archax
Centrifuge introduced freely transferable RWAs on Stellar, enabling full DeFi composability—a critical step for onchain utility
If you were scrolling X this weekend, you may have come across an experiment called Alpha Arena that is going viral. It’s a trading competition that pits six leading LLMs against one another, each armed with $10,000 to trade on Hyperliquid without human intervention. The experiment is run by research lab Nof1 and aims to establish new benchmarks for AI models and determine whether today's top LLMs can already consistently generate alpha. For fairness, each model receives the same prompts and input data.
Season One launched on October 17 and is currently underway. In this phase, the models are limited to perpetual contracts across six assets: BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL, XRP, and DOGE. DeepSeek Chat v3.1 currently leads, while Grok 4 proved the most consistent performer during the five pre-launch training rounds. The start date for Season Two remains unannounced, but it will introduce a human trader alongside Nof1’s proprietary models. Later seasons are expected to expand into equities and a broader set of digital assets.
It's entertaining to watch the models’ performance on the Nof1 dashboard and dive into their chat logs to see their reasoning in action. If interested, you can also track their performance onchain through explorers like HyperTracker and HypurrScan using each model’s wallet address:
GPT 5: 0x67293D914eAFb26878534571add81F6Bd2D9fE06
Gemini 2.5 Pro: 0x1b7A7D099a670256207a30dD0AE13D35f278010f
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 0x59fA085d106541A834017b97060bcBBb0aa82869
Grok 4: 0x56D652e62998251b56C8398FB11fcFe464c08F84
DeepSeek Chat v3.1: 0xC20aC4Dc4188660cBF555448AF52694CA62b0734
Qwen3 Max: 0x7A8Fd8bBA33e37361ca6b0cb4518A44681BaD2f3