Trump’s Crypto Czar Out - David Sacks, the US’s special government employee designated as the crypto and AI czar, is stepping down after serving 130 days.
Trump’s Iran Extension Crashes Bitcoin - Bitcoin dropped 3.2% over 24 hours to $68,507 on Friday morning following geopolitical volatility concerning Iran.
XRP slides toward $1.35 - XRP dropped roughly 2.7% in 24 hours, trading near $1.35 after falling below $1.40. A late surge in selling volume suggests the move was driven by forced liquidations rather than organic selling.
Webinar Series: A Valuation of Polymarket (POLY)
Polymarket is one of the leading prediction market platforms, and with a POLY token likely launching in 2026, the central question for investors is whether the $20 billion FDV Polymarket was reportedly seeking on March 7, 2026 is justified. In this webinar, Messari senior research Analyst Austin Weiler builds a ground-up fee multiple valuation across bear, base, and bull scenarios to find out. (edited)
Register here to attend.
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: Youssef Haidar, Matt Kreiser · @0xYoussef_ @KreiserMatt · Research Analysts
Pharos is a modular Layer 1 blockchain designed to serve as global infrastructure for real-world assets (RWAs), founded by former Ant Group executives who led its blockchain infrastructure team.
Unlike other chains that only parallelize execution, Pharos targets the entire block lifecycle, consensus, execution, storage, and data availability as a concurrent process, aiming to sustain 30,000 transactions per second (TPS) on mainnet.
Pharos Store embeds the Merkle tree directly into the storage engine itself, collapsing the I/O path from eight to ten disk reads down to one to three. This targets an under-the-radar bottleneck that caps throughput on even the fastest parallel chains.
Pharos unifies EVM and WASM under a single deterministic runtime (DTVM), allowing Solidity contracts to natively call Rust contracts with no bridges or cross-VM overhead.
Special Processing Networks (SPNs) let developers spin up application-specific execution layers for demanding workloads, such as derivatives trading and ZK verification, inheriting mainnet security through native restaking rather than bootstrapping a new validator set from scratch.
Kelp has grown into one of the leading restaking ecosystems, with $1.25 billion in TVL and $3.0 million in annualized revenue as of March 20, 2026.
Stablecoins and RWAs have scaled, but no onchain credit layer serves short-duration financing markets: global trade receivables ($25+ trillion annually) and cross-border payment settlement ($200+ trillion annually).
Trillions remain locked in prefunded settlement buffers, not due to capital scarcity, but because credit cannot be accessed precisely when liquidity is needed.
Existing DeFi lending protocols are built for speculative overcollateralization — structurally misaligned with the short-tenor, self-liquidating cycles of trade finance and FX settlement.
Kelp launched KUSD: a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by verified trade receivables and real-world payment flows, generating over 10% yield from borrower repayments rather than token incentives.