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Kraken Embraces Defi - Kraken launched "DeFi Earn," an in-app vault offering up to 8% APY on USDC deposits via onchain lending.
BlackRock EFT #2 - BlackRock filed to launch a second Bitcoin ETF, the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, two years after debuting its successful IBIT product.
Gold Record High - Tether Gold (XAUT) supply grew 38% in the fourth quarter of 2025, outpacing USDT's 7% market cap growth by a factor of five.
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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.
RUNE-denominated TVL increased 22.6% QoQ to 81.6M RUNE, even as RUNE’s price fell 51.1%. This divergence indicates that existing liquidity providers continued to add or maintain positions, despite adverse market conditions.
Total swap volume declined 10.3% QoQ to $4.06B, extending the correction following the Q1 spike caused by the exploit of Bybit, but average daily unique swappers increased 23.6% to 1.6K. This means that while trade sizes fell, the number of users interacting with THORChain continued to grow.
Protocol revenue rose 39.0% QoQ to $5.0M despite declining swap volume, reflecting improved fee capture efficiency. As a result, THORChain exited Q4 with a compressed trailing P/E ratio of 9.8, down from 11.2, driven primarily by lower market capitalization rather than weakening fundamentals.
Affiliate revenue fell 35.1% QoQ to $2.7M even as affiliate swap volume increased 12.2%, indicating that integrators likely reduced fee rates to remain competitive.
The beta release of THORChain’s swap interface established an official direct user-facing entry point for the protocol for the first time.
Rujira launched RUJI Lending, a money market with CDP loans, allowing users to borrow against native BTC in a fully decentralized manner.
Livepeer is repositioning from decentralized video transcoding toward infrastructure optimized for real-time AI video, guided by the Cascade vision.
The shift builds on Livepeer’s core strengths, low-latency video pipelines, distributed GPU operators, and stake-coordinated execution, while expanding supported workloads to continuous AI inference on live video.
Daydream serves as a flagship product and design partner, translating the real-time AI video thesis into developer-facing workflows and early production demand.
Network economics reflect this transition, with ~3× YoY fee growth and over 70% of fees driven by AI inference rather than traditional transcoding.
The roadmap focuses on productizing real-time AI pipelines, improving tooling and performance benchmarks, and scaling use cases across avatars, agents, and interactive video.
Fluid has scaled into a top-tier DeFi protocol, reaching $5.10 billion in total market size across chains, including $1.6 billion via Jupiter Lend on Solana, firmly placing it among the largest crosschain lending platforms.
Fluid ranks 3rd in active loans when accounting for Jupiter Lend, with $2.12 billion borrowed, signaling strong product-market fit and sustained borrowing demand rather than passive deposits driven by incentives.
Fluid DEX finished 2025 as the second-largest DEX on Ethereum by trading volume, processing $156.45 billion in volume during the year, validating its Smart Collateral and Smart Debt model as a scalable alternative to traditional AMMs.
The introduction of the Fluid Reserve in October 2025 marked a transition toward long-term sustainability, with protocol revenue funding onchain FLUID buybacks to support governance, alignment, and resilience as the protocol matures.
The upcoming launch of Fluid DEX V2 represents a structural evolution from a single DEX into a general-purpose liquidity engine, enabling multiple AMM designs, range-based strategies, and permissionless expansion without fragmenting liquidity.
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The most meaningful shifts in onchain adoption are no longer happening solely at the protocol layer. They are happening at the interface where users already transact.
Coinbase’s recent DEX integration on Base is a clear example. By allowing U.S. users to trade Base-native tokens directly inside the Coinbase app, the exchange removed a major behavioral hurdle: the need to consciously “go DeFi.” Since its August 2025 launch, the feature has generated millions in DEX volume on Base and driven the creation of up to 10,000 new Coinbase-linked addresses per day.
Kraken’s approach points in the same direction. With the launch of DeFi Earn, Kraken is embedding onchain yield generation directly into its core app, allowing users to access DeFi returns without leaving a unified interface. User deposits are automatically routed through vault strategies built on Ink, which allocate capital to existing lending protocols such as Aave, Morpho, and Tydro. By abstracting wallets, signatures, and manual execution, the product positions Ink as the execution layer beneath a familiar user experience, making onchain yield feel like a native extension of Kraken’s offerings.
Taken together, these launches highlight a broader pattern. Distribution is becoming the primary bottleneck for onchain liquidity, and large platforms are solving it by embedding DeFi directly into products users already trust and use daily. If this model continues to scale, the chains and applications that win will be those designed to integrate cleanly into dominant consumer platforms, where liquidity, usage, and discovery reinforce each other by default rather than by deliberate migration.
*Base and Ink are both part of the broader Optimism Superchain ecosystem. For deeper insights into Superchain’s progress and recent developments, stay tuned for the upcoming Superchain H2 report.
