NYSE Just Bought Into A Major Crypto Exchange - Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company of the NYSE, invested in crypto exchange OKX at a $25B valuation and secured a board seat.
Bitcoin drops under $71,000, ETH, DOGE slide - Bitcoin retreated to $70,987, down 2.2% in 24 hours, after failing to sustain buying pressure above $74,000.
XRP drops 3% after failing to break $1.45 resistance - XRP dropped 3.3%, falling to $1.4108 after failing to break the $1.43–$1.45 resistance zone.
74% above average during the main price decline.
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. Spaces are filling up fast!
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: Dillon Shirley · @zcb_spec · Research Analyst
U.S. banks capture an 8:1 spread on savings deposits and a 46:1 spread on checking deposits across a $17.50 trillion base.
Net Interest Income from depositor funding accounts for 40-50% of total revenue for the Big 4.
GENIUS blocked direct issuer-paid interest, then exchange and wallet “rewards” emerged as high-yield checking accounts for depositors. Now, Section 404 of the Senate Banking Committee’s revision to the CLARITY bill aims to remove that option.
When banks failed to satisfy depositors last time, Money Market Mutual Funds' AUM increased by over 4600% from $4 billion to $186 billion between 1977 and 1981.
If stablecoin products force deposit pricing toward market rates, banks’ net-interest margins compress first, and any increase in borrowing costs is mainly a repricing of previously subsidized bank margins, not proof that credit itself disappears.
By: Eric Manoukian · @CryptoRick98 · Research Analyst
edgeX's V2 upgrade enables edgeX to expand its product offering into spot and prediction markets. edgeX V2 is built on the EDGE stack, an execution layer optimized for high-performance onchain trading.
By year-end, edgeX reached 181,270 cumulative users and $352.9 million in TVL, indicating sustained platform growth even after the Oct. 10, 2025, crypto crash that liquidated $19 billion in leveraged positions.
Perpetual trading volume increased 174.5% QoQ to $4.5 billion, contributing to a 169.9% QoQ increase in fees, which reached $155.8 million in Q4 2025. Trading activity on edgeX remained resilient even as the broader crypto market declined.
edgeX launched spot trading on Dec. 11, 2025. edgeX attracted early speculative interest through the launch of MARU, a team-sponsored memecoin that reached a $400 million fully diluted valuation (FDV) by year-end.
edgeX will continue its V2 rollout in Q1 2026, adding U.S. equity perpetuals, additional RWA markets, and prediction markets via Polymarket. The launch of edgeX’s EDGE token is expected by the end of Q1 2026.
We Didn’t Set Out to Build an AI x Crypto Company. Here’s How It Happened Anyway.
By: Jimmy Skuros, VP Product
Messari did not start as an AI company. It started as a research firm focused on bringing transparency to crypto. Over seven years, the team built one of the deepest structured datasets in the industry by tracking market data, on-chain metrics, governance activity, fundraising, research, and news across tens of thousands of digital assets. That groundwork created something far more powerful than reports alone. It created the foundation for an intelligence engine. In this piece, our Head of Product explains how that long investment in data, research rigor, and trust naturally evolved into Messari’s AI capabilities.
The article also explores why most AI products in crypto struggle to deliver lasting value. The real advantage is not the model. It is the data, context, and domain expertise behind it. Messari’s intelligence layer now powers tools like Copilot, Deep Research, and new agent integrations that allow institutions, platforms, and AI agents to access structured crypto intelligence in real time. If you want to understand where AI in crypto is actually heading and why the data layer matters more than the model itself, read the full article on Linkedin and X.
Institutions Are Buying Back Into ETH
By: Alexander Beaudry (@ahbeaudry)
ETH is up 13.2% from its February 28 low of $1,840, and the bid is coming from institutions. BitMine Immersion Technologies now holds 4.47 million ETH (3.71% of total supply), after purchasing another 50,928 tokens in late February. Harvard's endowment disclosed an $87 million position in BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) in its Q4 2025 13F, its first-ever allocation to an Ethereum ETF, while simultaneously trimming $72 million in Bitcoin ETF exposure.
A major catalyst behind this shift is Ethereum's development roadmap. Fusaka, which went live on mainnet in December 2025, introduced PeerDAS for data availability scaling and made ZK-proof verification significantly cheaper via EIP-7939. Meanwhile, ERC-8004, an onchain identity and reputation standard for AI agents, went live on mainnet in late January. The Ethereum Foundation's dedicated AI team (dAI), launched in September 2025, is building the payment and coordination rails that allow autonomous agents to transact without intermediaries. Ethereum is making itself an attractive option for institutions evaluating where AI agent activity will ultimately settle.
Furthermore, the ETH/BTC ratio has been in a persistent downtrend, bottoming in a narrow range between 0.02 and 0.03 (levels not seen since early 2021). Ethereum dominance sits at just 10.5% of the total crypto market cap. However, things are starting to shift. The ETH/BTC RSI has crossed above 50, the MACD histogram turned positive, and the 20-day EMA recently crossed above the 50-day. None of this guarantees a sustained reversal, but the combination of extreme relative undervaluation and a structural bid from entities like BitMine and Harvard suggests the ratio may have found a floor. Tom Lee, the chairman of Bitmine, put it bluntly: "The price of ETH is not reflective of the high utility of ETH and its role as the future of finance. Hence, we continue to buy ETH."
The broader takeaway is that Ethereum's investment case is no longer just about DeFi TVL or NFT volume. It's about whether the network can become the institutional-grade infrastructure layer for privacy-preserving computation, scalable rollups, and AI agent coordination. Whether the ETH/BTC ratio confirms a trend reversal over the coming weeks will depend on continued positive sentiment. However, for the first time in months, ETH’s institutional bid is back.