Kraken Secures Access to Fed’s Core Payment Systems - Crypto exchange Kraken's banking unit, Kraken Financial, secured approval for a Federal Reserve "master account," granting access to the Fed’s core payment systems.
Bitcoin hits one-month high near $72,000 - Bitcoin reached a one-month high of $71,800, nearing the $72,000 resistance level last tested on February 8.
Ripple expands payments platform - Ripple has expanded its Payments platform into full-stack infrastructure for fiat and stablecoin money movement, allowing businesses to collect, hold, exchange, and pay out via a single provider.
New Webinar Series - A Valuation of RAILGUN
Crypto valuation is still driven by narratives and multiples.
Join our live Messari session as we present a full intrinsic valuation of RAILGUN using observable onchain fee generation and explicit staker mechanics. We will walk from TAM and adoption to cash flow, terminal value, and per token intrinsic value across bear, base, and bull scenarios.
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.
By: Hayden Booms · @0xBoomz · Research Analyst
1inch rebranded to prioritize 1inch Business as institutional infrastructure while positioning 1inch Personal for advanced onchain traders. 1inch’s transition toward API-driven execution infrastructure positions it to power institutional integrations and emerging agentic trading systems.
Fusion execution expanded in Q4, with daily average volume increasing 22.6% QoQ to $82.8 million, while active wallets remained flat (-0.2% QoQ), indicating higher execution intensity rather than broader user growth.
Limit Order activity expanded, with daily average volume rising 19.9% QoQ to $104.4 million and orders increasing 131.4% QoQ to 22,775 per day. Growth was concentrated on BNB Chain, where orders climbed 1,149.9% QoQ, coinciding with new RWA routing activity via the 1inch Swap API.
Aggregation Protocol activity continued to normalize in Q4, with daily average routed volume falling 50.5% QoQ to $244.9 million. BNB Chain volumes fell, while Ethereum remained the most stable liquidity source amid a market slowdown.
1inch introduced Aqua, a shared liquidity architecture that allows the same capital to back multiple strategies without locking assets. The Q4 developer release opened SDKs, contracts, and bounties, with a full frontend launch expected in 2026.
By: Jake Koch-Gallup · @immutablejacob · Research Analyst
USD.AI is an onchain credit structuring and funding protocol that finances GPU-backed, stablecoin-denominated loans for real-world AI infrastructure. Collateral is represented through the CALIBER framework, linking onchain representations to offchain legal claims.
The protocol uses a dual-token structure. USDai is designed for liquidity-sensitive capital, while sUSDai is yield-bearing and backed by longer-dated AI infrastructure loans. Redemption dynamics are managed through a queue-based mechanism.
Our valuation model treats execution as the binding constraint by separating pipeline originations from funded originations using an explicit funding realization rate to reflect hardware delivery, installation, and settlement latency.
CHIP is the governance and risk-policy token. It governs protocol parameters, treasury and capital policy, and insurance design. CHIP currently does not have a mechanically enforced claim on protocol cash flows, so value accrual is modeled as contingent.
Valuation is anchored by two lenses. (1) A buyback-supported pathway (reflecting governance-directed surplus routing) and (2) an insurance-capital-implied solvency threshold (reflecting capital adequacy constraint). Outputs imply buyback-supported FDVs of $46.4M / $329.6M / $1.74B (bear/base/bull) and insurance-implied solvency thresholds of $270.1M / $275.6M / $503.2M.
By: Alice Hou · @FBitach · Research Analyst
Zama is a chain-agnostic confidentiality layer that enables smart contracts on existing blockchains to compute directly on encrypted data using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), without breaking composability.
The Zama Protocol separates execution from encrypted computation via an offchain coprocessor architecture and threshold decryption, allowing confidential applications to scale without impacting host chain performance while preserving public verifiability.
Zama’s launched its utility token through a a sealed-bid Dutch auction, intentionally using the Zama Protocol itself to keep bids confidential, serving as both a fair distribution mechanism and a live stress test of the protocol’s production-grade confidentiality guarantees.
Zama’s roadmap emphasizes scalability and long-term resilience, targeting hardware-accelerated FHE, ZK-rollup-based Gateway, broader operator participation, and post‑quantum cryptography by keeping its FHE and MPC components quantum‑resistant while replacing the current, non‑PQ ZKPoK with a lattice‑based zero‑knowledge scheme.
Uniswap’s Upcoming Fee Switch Could Double Protocol Revenue to $75 Million
Qorban Ferrell, Research Analyst
Tomorrow, Uniswap faces a defining vote. The proposed fee switch would usher in the protocol’s next stage of monetization and could become its most pivotal economic milestone since the launch of v3.
Three weeks ago, BlackRock listed its $2.2 billion tokenized Treasury fund on Uniswap and disclosed an investment in UNI, the first DeFi governance token held on BlackRock’s balance sheet. Now, Uniswap governance is voting to extend the protocol fee switch, first activated on Ethereum mainnet in December, to Arbitrum, Base, Celo, OP Mainnet, Soneium, X Layer, Worldchain, and Zora. The fee switch temperature check passed decisively, and the onchain vote is on track for final approval on March 5th.
The expansion could more than double the value flowing to UNI holders via protocol-driven token burns. Based on annualized 90-day volume by network and the take rates outlined in the governance proposal, our estimates project $42.2 million in new Layer 2 revenue on top of $32.6 million already realized on Ethereum mainnet, a total of $75 million.
Among the L2 networks, revenue distribution is concentrated among Base and Arbitrum. Base contributes $25.8 million (34.6% of total), while Arbitrum adds $15.5 million (20.8%). The remaining networks, including Optimism, Worldchain, Celo, X Layer, Zora, and Soneium, generate less than $1 million in combined revenue.
The expansion of Uniswap’s fee capture aligns with our 2026 thesis, which argues that the combination of stronger fundamental valuations and advancing protocol alignment is creating attractive entry opportunities for long‑term allocators. For further thematic insights, explore Messari Enterprise.