Today's News Recap
Community Consensus - World Liberty Financial votes on buyback-and-burn plan using protocol liquidity fees.
Court Request - Coinbase seeks court order over SEC’s alleged deletion of Gensler texts.
Gemini IPO - Gemini banks $425m in IPO as it joins Bullish and Coinbase as a publicly traded crypto exchange.
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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.
Base asset: XTZ: used for gas, staking/delegation, and on-chain governance
Usage shift to L2: Etherlink (EVM L2) drove ~74% of network fees and processed 20.5M txs (+474% QoQ), primary execution layer
Total fees hit an all-time high (+324% QoQ) alongside broad growth in L1 and L2 transactions
Active stake rose ~10%, remaining near the 50% target
Bitcoin sidechain using BTC as its native asset in the form of rBTC (“programmable Bitcoin”)
Daily active addresses jumped 65% QoQ to 420
TVL rose 9.8% to $235.9M, with Uniswap liquidity up 400%
Merged mining participation climbed to an all-time high of 87%, further aligning Rootstock with Bitcoin’s hash power
Bitcoin-adjacent PoW chain using a generalized UTXO Cell Model for state and computation
Introduced CKB-VM v2 and new modular contract tools, improving developer flexibility
Sunset of Godwoken (EVM rollup) and Force Bridge to focus on Bitcoin-native scaling and Lightning integration
Expanded Lightning-compatible payments with multi-asset channels, routing, and invoice support
Two Bits
From Idle Racks to Global Infrastructure: The New Logic of Decentralized Compute
By: Armita
As artificial intelligence reshapes demand across cloud infrastructure, the decentralized compute space is undergoing a quiet but significant transformation. The next phase won’t hinge on idle GPU resales or speculative staking; it will be built around performance, availability, and modular design.
Akash Network’s Starcluster initiative is one example of this shift. Announced in mid-2025, it introduces the idea of protocol-aligned compute: GPUs acquired and deployed in a semi-permanent way under Akash’s direction. This isn’t ownership in the strict sense, but a strategy to stabilize supply, reduce costs, and move toward enterprise-grade, multi-year service guarantees.
Source: Akash Network
The roadmap is staged: starting with data-center grade racks run by independent operators, expanding to telco edge sites to reduce latency, and eventually experimenting with localized infrastructure in homes and schools. The goal isn’t to replicate hyperscalers, but to break their model into components: compute, energy, geography and reassemble them into a distributed, resilient mesh.
To finance the buildout, Akash is introducing Starbonds, tokenized, GPU-backed instruments structured as SEC-compliant securities. Unlike past community incentives, Starbonds bring in outside capital while still rewarding AKT stakers through tiered discounts and potential revenue alignment. Tokenization into NFTs is also under consideration, which could automate GPU lifecycle events and enable secondary market access.
Why Does This Matter?
As demand for inference-grade compute grows, decentralized protocols need to evolve beyond simple marketplaces. The challenge isn’t access; it’s reliability, security, and economic sustainability.
Starcluster is an early attempt to address that, combining:
Physical deployment aligned with local constraints
Secure runtime environments (VMs, confidential computing)
Infrastructure finance that bridges traditional capital with tokenized incentives
If Filecoin is rebuilding the data stack for AI, Akash is testing the same approach for compute, through a mesh of globally distributed, programmable infrastructure. The cloud of the future won’t live in a single data center. It may live in 8,000 of them… everywhere!