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BTC Consolidates - Bitcoin is consolidating between $87,000 and $90,000, with market participants watching the Federal Reserve's decision and a potential US government shutdown as catalysts.
Tokenized News - The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed on Wednesday that existing securities laws still apply to tokenized versions of traditional securities, regardless of issuance method.
Bybit’s Bank - Bybit is launching "MyBank" in February (pending regulatory approval), enabling users to hold and move 18 fiat currencies using IBANs.
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In This Edition of Fully Diluted:
Messari’s Dylan Bane sits down with Sal Gala, co-founder and managing partner at Escape Velocity Ventures, and Connor Lovely, founder at Proof of Coverage Media, to explore the current state of DePIN in 2025. They delve into the evolution of DePIN, its revenue growth, and the challenges faced by the sector.
The group also discusses recent developments across the DePIN landscape, including strong revenue growth from projects like GeoNet and Helium alongside ongoing challenges in decentralized compute. It also examines how buybacks, regulatory clarity, and improving market structure are shaping growth, increasing enterprise interest, and influencing expectations for where DePIN adoption is headed next.
Read The Full DePin Report Here
You are an institution or protocol operating in a market where regulatory scrutiny is increasing, narratives shift weekly, and internal stakeholders want faster, defensible answers.
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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Argentina regularly ranks among the world’s most crypto-active countries. In 2024, 61.8% of the country’s crypto transaction volume involved stablecoins, well above the global average of 44.7% and edging out even Brazil (59.8%). But while headlines often frame this as a story of “grassroots adoption,” the underlying drivers point to something more sobering: dollar-pegged digital assets are thriving in Argentina not because the crypto economy was working, but because the traditional one was failing.
The Argentine peso lost over 50% of its value between mid-2023 and early 2024. When the exchange rate fell below $0.004 in July 2023, monthly stablecoin volume jumped above $1 million. Following President Javier Milei’s pro-dollarization announcement in December, it dropped further to below $0.002. At the same time, stablecoin volume spiked again, surpassing $10 million in January 2024. These surges weren’t signs of increased DeFi participation or innovation. They were acts of self-preservation as Argentinians scrambled to protect their savings amid 143% inflation and widespread poverty that affected 40% of the population.
Stablecoins, especially USDT, have become the preferred gateway to dollars in a country where FX controls limit formal options. Most of this activity flows through P2P platforms like Binance and regional apps like Lemon Cash, often operating without strict regulatory oversight. Unlike in the U.S. or Europe, where stablecoin demand ties to onchain activity or trading, in Argentina, the usage is largely offchain and informal.
But high usage doesn’t equal broad inclusion. Stablecoin adoption in Argentina skews toward younger, urban, and digitally literate users. Users are exposed to opaque collateral models and regulatory risks tied to centralized issuers. What’s more, a reliance on USD-backed stablecoins reduces a central bank’s ability to enact monetary policy and ties the economy to the actions of the Fed. The most popular stablecoin in Argentina is Tether (USDT), not because of transparency, but because of liquidity and 24/7 accessibility in local P2P markets.
Argentina’s stablecoin boom offers a powerful lesson. It shows that crypto infrastructure can provide relief during economic collapse. But it also shows the limits of that relief. Stablecoins may preserve value, but they don’t rebuild trust, reduce inequality, or replace a functioning financial system. Adoption, in this case, is a symptom, not a solution.
