Bitcoin outperforms stocks- Bitcoin surpassed $72,000 on Friday, gaining 2% since midnight UTC and outperforming U.S. equity indexes despite the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) breaking above 100.
XRP jumps 3% - XRP jumped 3% to about $1.41 after decisively breaking a descending resistance trendline that defined its downtrend since early 2026.
Clarity Act unlikely to advance - U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune stated the Clarity Act is unlikely to clear the Senate Banking Committee before April 2026.
CLARITY Act: What It Means for Crypto Market Structure
The CLARITY Act is Congress’s most significant attempt to define a market structure for digital assets in the United States. In this webinar, Messari breaks down the bill’s evolution across House and Senate drafts, the proposed frameworks for asset classification and regulatory oversight, and the key provisions shaping the debate. We also examine the political vote math, contested issues such as stablecoin rewards and DeFi compliance, and the most likely legislative outcomes. Join us for a clear, practical analysis of how the CLARITY Act could reshape crypto markets and institutional participation.
Register here to attend.
x402: How Messari Is Opening Its Data Layer to Autonomous Agents
Payments on the internet were designed for humans, not machines. Credit cards, checkout pages, and merchant processors make small, programmatic payments slow and inefficient. This creates a major barrier for developers and autonomous agents that need to access data services in real time. The x402 protocol changes this model by making payments native to HTTP requests. Instead of accounts, billing dashboards, or payment processors, an application simply sends a request, receives a 402 Payment Required response with pricing, pays instantly in stablecoins such as USDC, and retrieves the data. This unlocks true micropayments and enables software agents to access and pay for digital services autonomously.
Messari is bringing its institutional crypto intelligence layer into this new model by integrating x402 directly into its APIs. Builders, researchers, and autonomous agents can now access Messari’s data across 40,000+ digital assets and pay per request without contracts or accounts. This approach removes friction for developers while expanding the reach of Messari’s research and analytics beyond enterprise customers to the broader agent economy. As autonomous systems increasingly participate in markets, Messari is positioning its data layer as the intelligence infrastructure powering these machine-driven decisions.
Read the full article here.
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: Austin Weiler · @0xWeiler · Research Analyst
Total stablecoin market cap on Algorand grew 27.4% QoQ from $47.5 million to $60.5 million, driven by a 28.9% ($13.1 million) QoQ increase in USDC after crypto payments provider Coinify’s integration with Algorand.
Algorand’s circulating market cap decreased 46.7% QoQ from $1.8 billion to $974.2 million.
Total staked ALGO grew 2.5% QoQ from 1.9 billion at Q3-end to 2.0 billion at Q4-end, while community staked ALGO grew 3.1% QoQ from 1.54 billion to 1.59 billion.
Total daily transactions grew 5.2% QoQ from 1.6 million in Q3 to 1.7 million in Q4, however total fees declined 48.2% QoQ from $54,700 to $31,300.
In Q4, nine infrastructure projects received funding through the Algorand Foundation’s xGov mainnet, a governance tool for submitting and voting on grant proposals.
By: Whynonah· @whynonah · Research Analyst
LayerZero accounts for an estimated 57% of all crosschain volume, peaking at 76% in Q2 2025, with over $100 billion in cumulative value transferred across its rails.
Its three potential revenue lines are messaging fees, activated via the fee switch, Stargate swap fees, and Zero L1 fees.
The valuation methodology applies forward-looking fee projections through 2028, factoring in total crypto spot volume, DEX share, crosschain demand, LayerZero's USDT market share, Stragate fees, Zero L1 fee capture, and the fee switch take rate, among others.
The primary risks are tokenomics and fee switch execution, as ZRO faces approximately 100% inflation from remaining vesting unlocks through 2030.
Based on those assumptions, LayerZero's FDV ranges from $290.27 million in the bear case to $3.00 billion in the base case, with $19.11 billion in the bull case.
Valuation Model: The full valuation model is available here.
By: Evan Zakhary · @ItsEzak · Research Analyst
Three SUI investment products were filed or launched on U.S. public markets in Q4 2025. 21Shares listed TXXS on Nasdaq as the first SUI ETP on a U.S. exchange, while Bitwise and Canary Capital each filed separate spot ETF applications with the SEC.
DeFi TVL across Sui was led by NAVI ($263.2 million) and Suilend ($247.4 million) holding the top two spots. Average daily DEX volume was $405.8 million, and Cetus led with $124.7 million of that total.
Walrus reached general availability on Mainnet in October, and XOCIETY's Epic Games launch drove 15 million+ onchain interactions. The Sui Agent Kit, shipped in November, enables AI agents to interact with onchain protocols, and LayerZero's OFT integration extended Sui's reach to 140+ chains.
Sui's stablecoin market cap grew 30.8% YoY to $485 million. Ethena and SUIG launched suiUSDe and USDi in early October, and xMoney extended its MiCA-compliant payments network to Sui following a $21.5 million raise.
Average daily active addresses on Sui grew 37.5% QoQ to 1.6 million, and daily transactions rose 12.6% QoQ to 5.6 million. Network usage held through the broader market drawdown despite SUI's 57% price decline in Q4.
By: Youssef Haidar · @0xYoussef_ · Research Analyst
Gradient is an AI infrastructure platform building an open, distributed alternative to centralized AI labs and data centers by harnessing a global mesh of idle, heterogeneous consumer devices to enable an Open Intelligence Stack (OIS).
Echo-2 decouples inference from training using a dual-swarm architecture that separates latency-sensitive model sampling on consumer "Actors" from high-throughput policy updates on centralized "Learners."
During initial benchmark testing, Echo-2 achieved a 10.6x drop in training costs, reducing total post-training expenses from $4,490 on a commercial cloud platform to just $425, while simultaneously increasing training velocity by 13.0x.
In comparative benchmark testing across five math reasoning datasets, Echo-2 achieved a mean reward score of 35.75 on a Qwen3-8B model, slightly outperforming ByteDance’s verl framework's 35.30 mean score. This research demonstrated that Echo-2 maintains full algorithmic fidelity while reducing cumulative hardware costs by 33–36% compared to expensive data center clusters.
ZODL Raises: A new era for privacy UX?
By: Shale Ferdana · @0x_Cloud · Research Analyst
On Mar. 9, 2026, Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) announced a $25 million seed round. The round drew participation from some of the most prominent venture firms in crypto, including a16z crypto, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, Maelstrom, Winklevoss Capital, Cypherpunk Technologies (formerly Leap Therapeutics), and Chapter One. Notable angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, David Friedberg, Haseeb Qureshi, Mert, and James Nicholas also participated.
The raise comes after a governance dispute in the Zcash developer community. On January 7, 2026, the entire staff of the Electric Coin Company (ECC) resigned following a governance dispute with Bootstrap, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that oversees ECC. CEO Josh Swihart announced the mass departure on X, accusing Bootstrap board members Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai of moving into misalignment with Zcash's core mission. Swihart characterized the resignations as a “constructive discharge”, arguing that employment terms had been altered in ways that made it impossible for the team to operate effectively. In the 24 hours following the announcement, ZEC fell roughly 14%, dropping from around $497 to approximately $410, driven by uncertainty about who would maintain and upgrade the core protocol going forward, as the ECC staff have been the most significant contributors to the Zcash protocol since its inception in 2016.
This uncertainty was resolved when the former ECC team formed a new company (ZODL), officially separating itself from the Zcash development fund and Bootstrap. Alongside the new entity, ECC's flagship wallet, Zashi, was rebranded to Zodl, signaling a clean break from the past while preserving continuity for existing users, who retain their seed phrases, funds, and the app without interruption. According to ZODL’s press release on the raise, the wallet has facilitated over $600 million in ZEC swaps since October and driven growth in the shielded Zcash pool by over 400%.
As the world becomes increasingly volatile, calls for financial surveillance and censorship will only grow louder. Shielded ZEC transactions serve as a counterforce to this trend, but bridging the gap between complex privacy tech and everyday usability remains essential for at-scale adoption. With $25 million in committed capital from some of the most prominent names in crypto and a structural shift from a nonprofit to an independent, venture-backed company, the ZODL team is well-positioned to close this gap through continued upgrades to the capabilities of Zodl wallet, the underlying Zcash protocol, and partnership expansion that enable ecosystem interoperability.