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The Energy Network uses household devices to increase grid capacity. Launched by Fuse, a $400M ARR scale-up. Check out the first live product demo here.
Bitcoin pops then drops - Bitcoin experienced an initial price surge followed by a decline immediately after the Supreme Court's ruling on Trump’s tariffs.
Netherlands Bans Polymarket - The Netherlands Gambling Authority (Ksa) ordered Polymarket to immediately cease offering services, deeming its prediction markets "illegal gambling" under Dutch law.
White House, Banks and Crypto - U.S. officials, banks, and crypto groups met at the White House on Thursday to discuss stablecoin rewards treatment under pending digital-asset market-structure legislation. The core debate centers on structuring stablecoin incentives without forcing issuers to be regulated as deposit-taking institutions.
New Webinar Series - A Valuation of RAILGUN
Crypto valuation is still driven by narratives and multiples.
What if you valued a protocol like a real business with revenue, cash flows, and distributions?
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.
You will leave with a clear intrinsic value range per RAIL and a reusable valuation framework you can apply to other protocols.
Built for institutional investors, research, strategy, and risk teams.
How would you rate your organization’s current ability to translate crypto research into executive level decisions?
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: Whynonah · @whynonah · Research Analyst
Rootstock saw QoQ growth in Q4 in total transactions and merged-mining participation, reflecting slightly higher throughput alongside stronger miner-secured network security.
In contrast, user activity and liquidity softened QoQ in alignment with broader market trends, with declines across average daily transactions, active addresses, new addresses, DeFi TVL (USD and rBTC terms), total protocol TVL, and aggregate stablecoin TVL.
Key technical progress focused on bridge hardening and developer tooling: Reed 8.0 went live on mainnet with SegWit-enabled PowPeg (reducing BTC peg-out costs), Flyover v2.3 introduced improved automation and UX for bridging, and Reed 8.1 advanced testnet scalability work through parallel transaction processing, alongside early-stage post-quantum security research.
Rootstock saw the launch of Rootstock Institutional, a strategic initiative aimed at helping professionals tap into an estimated $260 billion in idle institutional Bitcoin by integrating BTC into DeFi. Additionally, Mercado Bitcoin deployed over $20 million in tokenized private credit on the Rootstock sidechain.
The RootstockCollective DAO scaled its governance stack in Q4 with V7.0, V7.1, V8.0, and V8.1, improving onboarding (fiat-to-RIF onramp + social login), expanding rewards flexibility through USDRIF payouts, adding mobile proposal/voting support, and continuing structured grant execution across tooling, ecosystem growth programs, and delegate compensation.
By: Matthew Nay · @NaytheForceBwU · Research Analyst
The Application Revenue Capture Ratio (Chain GDP divided by Real Economic Value) grew from 262.8% to 375.5%. An increasing App RCR signals that an ecosystem is increasingly monetizing activity occurring on the network.
Stablecoin market cap on Solana grew 5.3% QoQ to an all-time high of $14.9 billion. USDC stayed flat at $10 billion while PYUSD grew 95.5% QoQ to $871 million.
RWA value on Solana grew 58.7% QoQ to $1.1 billion, driven by the growth of products like BlackRock’s BUIDL and Figure’s PRIME.
Validator client diversity advanced as Firedancer surpassed 100 days on mainnet and Frankendancer adoption grew, marking a critical step toward resilience and long-term performance ahead of Alpenglow’s expected launch.
Five new spot SOL ETFs launched and cumulative flows reached $1.0 billion, led by Bitwise’s BSOL and Rex Osprey’s SSK.
By: Youssef Haidar · @0xYoussef_ · Research Analyst
The Pentad alliance established a ₳70.0 million Critical Integrations fund to secure institutional infrastructure. This formal coordination between five core entities focuses on onboarding tier-one stablecoins, oracles, and custodians to expand the network’s institutional footprint.
The Cardano Card launched via Wirex, enabling ADA payments at 100 million merchants in 190 countries. The integration enables consumer payments on the Cardano blockchain, increasing the network's utility. Beyond ADA, the platform supports BTC, ETH, SOL, and various stablecoins.
Average daily NFT trading volume surged 133.4% QoQ, while average daily DEX volume grew 17.3% to $4.4 million. Minswap remains the dominant DEX, capturing 72.4% of the network's volume.
On Nov. 21, 2025, a malformed transaction exploited a 2022 deserialization bug, resulting in a network partition. This caused newer nodes to accept invalid data while older nodes correctly rejected the malformed hash. Within 14.5 hours, the network converged back to a single canonical chain.
A snap election restored the Constitutional Committee following the Cardano Atlantic Council’s resignation. The vote maintained the onchain ratification threshold, demonstrating the resilience of its governance mechanics under pressure.
Messari’s Ethereum Dashboard Is Live
By: AJC · @AvgJoesCrypto · Research Analyst
Your all-in-one destination for Ethereum data has arrived.
Messari’s Ethereum Dashboard brings together the metrics that matter most, across financial and market data, onchain activity, DeFi, stablecoins, and more into a single, streamlined interface built for serious decision-makers.
Whether you’re tracking network fundamentals, monitoring ecosystem growth, or analyzing capital flows, the dashboard centralizes Ethereum’s most important data in one place, eliminating the need to jump between tools.
In addition to comprehensive data coverage, the dashboard features a dedicated “Spotlight” section that curates relevant charts, breaking news, research reports, and analyst insights from Messari’s best-in-class research team. This ensures you’re not just seeing raw data, but also the context that helps you interpret it.
If Ethereum matters to your work, this dashboard was built for you.
Below are the latest analyst insights:
On July 14, 2025, Tom Lee’s BitMine announced its first ETH purchase: 163,142 ETH at an average price of $3,073. In the weeks that followed, ETH rallied on the back of DAT-driven euphoria. Seven months later, that DAT pump has fully retraced, and then some.
ETH now sits just below $2,000, down roughly 33% year-to-date. Open interest has also unwound, falling back to April 2025 levels (~$14.5 billion), driven in part by the combined multi-billion-dollar liquidations of Garret Bullish and Trend Research.
ETH is now on the precipice of its seventh consecutive red monthly candle, a streak not seen since the 2018-2019 bear market. By most measures, crypto, including ETH, is firmly in bear-market territory. While near-term catalysts are scarce, aside from the upcoming CLARITY Act, the recent price compression and unwinding of open interest may ultimately prove constructive in establishing a bottom.
Lending remains the primary driver of DeFi TVL on Ethereum. Specifically, stablecoin loans collateralized by crypto assets, most commonly staked ETH derivatives and wrapped BTC. As a result, Ethereum’s DeFi TVL is highly reflexive of underlying crypto prices. Ethereum’s DeFi TVL has fallen 45%, from a peak of $115.45 billion on September 15, 2025, to $62.97 billion as of February 16, 2026. Over the same period, ETH is down 56%.
Beyond the direct impact of declining prices, the bear market has also reduced users’ willingness to borrow. Active loans on Ethereum have declined to $21.44 billion, down 42% from its September 18, 2025, peak of $37.18 billion.
Active loans and, more broadly, DeFi TVL will remain highly reflexive to crypto prices as long as crypto assets continue to serve as the primary form of collateral. However, this dynamic should gradually wane as more RWAs are not only deployed on Ethereum but also integrated into lending platforms such as Aave, Morpho, and others.
Legislation like the CLARITY Act could help accelerate this shift. As RWAs increasingly become a collateral asset of choice, Ethereum’s DeFi TVL should become structurally less volatile over time.
Despite the decline in prices and DeFi TVL, stablecoin activity on Ethereum has remained resilient. Total stablecoin market cap has fallen only marginally, from a peak of $185.48 billion on November 2, 2025, to $178.22 billion as of February 16, 2026 (down 4%).
Compared to the last bear market, this is a significant improvement. In the 2022-2023 bear market, the stablecoin market cap on Ethereum fell 40% from $111.37 billion to $66.76 billion. This cycle-over-cycle improvement is a testament to the quality of capital Ethereum has attracted over the past few years, as it is not as sensitive to the volatility of broader crypto asset prices.
