Presented by
Ripple-GTreasury - Ripple has launched Ripple Treasury, an enterprise platform that integrates management of traditional cash and digital assets following its $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury.
New Fed Chair? - Kevin Warsh's odds of being named President Trump's Fed chair pick surged to 93% on Polymarket and 94% on Kalshi ahead of the expected announcement on Friday morning, January 31, 2026.
Dollar Volatility Surges - Markets are unsettled as the Trump administration reportedly prepares to name Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve Chair on Friday, replacing Jerome Powell.
New here? Ask Copilot up to 5 free queries per day with Messari Basic.
Dylan Bane, Messari's lead DePIN Research Analyst, and Salvador Gala, Co-Founder of Escape Velocity Ventures, have co-authored the 2025 State of DePIN. The 59-page report provides an in-depth analysis and review of the DePIN sector throughout 2025 and a forward-looking perspective on what lies ahead for DePIN in 2026.
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.
Chromia continued to position its Layer-1 as infrastructure for data-intensive applications, with Q4 execution focused on strengthening core network participation and expanding its AI and data tooling surface.
Chromia broadened its AI and data infrastructure footprint while bringing AI infrastructure closer to production readiness through three milestones, completing Base and Arbitrum interoperability on Dec. 5, 2025, integrating with Virtuals’ Agent Commerce Protocol on Dec. 11, 2025 to support structured, queryable agent job data on Chromia, and launching a GPU-powered inference demo on testnet on Dec. 23, 2025.
Chromia’s network activity expanded in Q4, with average daily transactions increasing 26.6% QoQ and 71.7% YoY to 642,900, while average daily active addresses increased 3.4% QoQ and 106.6% YoY to 4,128.
Chromia initiated the scheduled phaseout of staking rewards on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain on Dec. 2, 2025, shifting staking incentives toward Chromia mainnet and aligning long-term incentives with native staking ahead of governance activation.
The Chromia team shipped a major redesign of the Chromia Vault in Q4, introducing portfolio-style balance aggregation across application chains, improved application discovery, and improved staking transparency through dynamic fee sharing and estimated APR displays.
VeChain deployed the Hayabusa upgrade on Dec. 2, 2025, which transitioned VeChainThor from Proof of Authority (PoA) to Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS).
StarGate 2.0 replaced the legacy node-based system with a staking NFT model that increases economic security, VTHO rewards, and user participation with the addition of new Node tiers. VeChain also began phasing out the Legacy Node rewards program.
VET’s market capitalization declined 52.1% QoQ to $894.7 million, and VTHO’s market cap fell 51.0% QoQ to $73.0 million amid weakened market conditions.
Network adoption continued to expand with total known addresses increasing 9.4% QoQ to 14.4 million and rising 213.5% YoY.
VeBetter expanded its governance and incentive framework with the launch of the Galaxy GM NFT tier and automated DAO voting.
USDD’s first year post-2.0 launch is defined by yield as a core product strategy. Through USDD Earn and sUSDD, the protocol emphasizes savings yield as a primary value proposition, offering rates above typical stablecoin market yields.
sUSDD serves as the primary savings vehicle for USDD. The token accrues yield through a rising redemption rate and consolidates incentives into a single, composable product, with over $310 million in TVL on Ethereum as of January 2026.
Issuance design balances yield-driven demand with risk controls. Vault-based minting on TRON introduces rate-sensitive supply backed by over-collateralization, while fixed-rate swapping via the PSM on Ethereum and BNB Chain prioritizes direct par redemption.
USDD relies more on protocol-native mechanisms for peg enforcement than most stablecoins. Minting, redemption, and liquidation rules played a larger role than secondary-market liquidity in anchoring price behavior.
USDD reflects a deliberate tradeoff. The protocol pursued above-market savings yields to drive adoption while using explicit collateral buffers, rate controls, and transparency to manage associated risks.
From Our Sponsor
While broader risk assets sold off on macro jitters, HYPE ripped. The protocol captured the demand for commodities, with silver alone clearing $1B in 24-hour volume, while HIP-3 open interest climbed to roughly $793M, up sharply from a month ago.
One of the more interesting projects to surface on HyperEVM amid this activity is Hyperlend, the network’s leading lending and borrowing protocol. On January 19, 2026, Hyperlend announced a $1.7 million fundraising round from RockawayX, No Limit Holdings, Nucleus, Duplicate Capital, and Dumpster, among others. The announcement coincided with the release of HPL tokenomics, which skew decisively toward growth and participation rather than rent extraction: 30.14% allocated to ecosystem growth and incentives, 25% to a genesis community airdrop, 22.5% to core contributors, 17.36% to strategic investors, and 5% reserved for liquidity.
That structure feeds directly into Hyperlend’s confirmed HPL airdrop, distributed through the genesis allocation. The protocol’s points system rewards sustained onchain behavior, with 25% of the total HPL supply reserved for points participants. Hyperlend materially sweetened the program by increasing the points pool from 300M to 450M. The update also introduced bonus multipliers for users staking via the hypurr_co validator while remaining active, further tightening the loop between capital, activity, and alignment.
