Today's News Recap
Korea Pivot - South Korea's new pro-crypto president signals potential for crypto ETFs and KRW stablecoins.
BlackRock Bags - BlackRock's $70bn Bitcoin holdings may surpass Satoshi's, signaling major institutional interest.
Air Drop One - World Liberty Financial airdrops USD1 tokens and sends small stimulus checks to WLFI holders, backed by Trump family.
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In Messari News
New Research Podcast
In this episode, the Enterprise team dives into BitcoinFi scaling experiments (BitVM, OPCAT, and Bitcoin sidechains), debates whether Hyperliquid’s full transparency is a feature or future risk, breaks down tokenized equities and RWAs coming to Solana, and looks at Dripster’s new spin on internet capital markets using GenAI and onchain crowdfunding. Plus: Helium’s growth milestone, market vibes post-ETH/BTC rally, and why token selection is getting harder.
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.
Hong Kong-based venture studio
building crypto and AI infrastructure, including Edgen AI
Edgen AI is a crypto-native market intelligence platform
Proprietary multi-agent system (EDGM) to route user queries
Using an object-based model for parallel transaction processing
Record DEX activity in Q1 2025 with $304M average daily volume
Ecosystem spans DeFi, gaming, NFTs, and AI
Institutional interest is growing: Grayscale adding SUI, ETF filings
Partner with Nebula Block to provide lower cost decentralized AI compute
Purchased 100,000 GPU hours for AI inference and model training
Using Swan Chain cut Nebula’s AI compute costs by ~50-70%
Dynamically allocates workloads across 100+ global providers
Messari Research
Bitcoin 2025 - Las Vegas: The Battle For Bitcoin's Soul (Analyst Takeaways)
By: Dylan Bane, Sam Ruskin, Armita, Mohamed Allam, and Austin Freimuth
The Bitcoin 2025 Las Vegas Analyst Takeaways explores the growing tension at the heart of Bitcoin’s evolution, as it becomes increasingly entangled with politics, institutional finance, and real-world infrastructure. The conference highlighted Bitcoin’s surge past $111,000, strong endorsements from the Trump administration, and global momentum from nation-states like Pakistan. Yet beneath the bullish headlines, analysts wrestled with concerns about ideological drift, financial risk from BTC-backed leverage, and the dominance of political spectacle over technical progress. While Bitcoin is entering the mainstream and being positioned as a strategic a, the report questions whether its foundational principles, decentralization, neutrality, and self-custody, can survive this next phase of adoption.
