Today's News Recap
Derivatives Debut - Russian central bank approves crypto derivatives for qualified investors, excluding direct crypto purchases.
Expiry Approaches - Bitcoin's $95K-$105K Range in Focus as $10B BTC Options Expiry Looms.
IBIT Inflows - BlackRock’s IBIT leads US Bitcoin ETF inflows totaling $4.2 billion over 10 days.
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Top Assets
Messari Protocol Reporting
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.
Multichain smart contract platform
Supports high-performance dApps
Growing multi-sector ecosystem
Modular & scalable layer-1 architecture
Limited mainnet beta launch on Polygon
Privacy + compliance via VASP-managed zones
Validated through extensive 171-day audit
Open-sourced infrastructure with DAO governance
Modular L2 with institutional ambitions
Core yield engines: mETH & function (FBTC)
Sustained activity through incentives and innovation
Evolving into a vertically integrated finance platform
Two Bits
Machine Money: The rise of agentic payments
By: Youssef Haidar
A funny thing happened on the road to Superintelligence: AI agents got digital wallets.
When Coinbase rolled out x402 this spring, it resurrected HTTP’s long-dormant 402 “Payment Required” status code and, in the process, let any API endpoint become a programmable paywall. Now, an AI agent can call an endpoint, receive a 402 quoting USDC, authorize the payment on a fast-finality chain, and resend the request, all within a single HTTP round-trip.
Where traditional rails fall short
Card networks were built for plastic in human hands. Stablecoin wallets are programmable and far more divisible: they clear in seconds for fractions of a cent, respect spending rules baked into the wallet, and work the same in São Paulo or Seoul.
Who’s building the stack?Startups are racing to build agentic payment products and solutions. Skyfire allows AI agents to transact autonomously and access services. Payman AI bridges enterprise treasuries to custodial agent wallets under SOC‑2 guardrails, and Nevermined is building a payment layer where agents transact with other agents. Together, these products and services have the potential to scale the long‑promised machine economy. Money stops being the drag coefficient on innovation and becomes its lubricant.
Messari Research
A primer on BTC execution and trust models
By: Kinji Steimetz
Enterprise Exclusive
In the latest Enterprise report, Kinji provides a structured overview of Bitcoin programmability and the emerging ecosystem of Bitcoin-aligned execution layers. It categorizes current and proposed architectures—including sidechains, externally sequenced systems, rollups, and bridging models—based on how they interact with Bitcoin’s base layer, what trust assumptions they require, and how execution is secured.
The report also evaluates why adoption has remained limited, highlights promising technical paths like BitVM and OP_CAT, and sizes the total addressable market (TAM) for core use cases like collateralized lending and stablecoin swaps. Drawing on Ethereum as a behavioral reference, it estimates how large Bitcoin’s programmable economy could become if trust-minimized infrastructure takes hold.
