Citi Partnership - Citi joins Visa in backing Stablecoin payments company BVNK.
SoftBank Expansion - SoftBank’s PayPay buys 40% stake in Binance Japan to fuse crypto with cashless payments.
Coinbase Integration - Coinbase integrates DEX trading within its exchange for US users on Base network.
New here? Ask Copilot up to 5 free queries per day with Messari Basic.
This week, the Enterprise team breaks down why stablecoins are the cleanest UX for mainstream onboarding and how “crypto neobanks” could outcompete custodial fintech by combining self-custody, real yield, and seamless payments. We assess the Perp Wars—Hyperliquid’s staying power versus fast-rising challengers Aster and Lighter—and the implications for Solana’s perp scene. Finally, we unpack Double Zero’s launch, token design controversy, and why specialized private networking could turbocharge high-performance chains.
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.
Decentralized Wireless (DeWi) / DePIN
Roam’s node count surged 427.5% YTD, reaching 6 million nodes across 3M+ users and 578M+ total check-ins
Over 14.98B points issued and 10.08B burned show a highly active, utility-driven ecosystem with strong conversion into ROAM tokens
Competes with Helium and other DeWi protocols but differentiates through focus on WiFi + eSIM, decentralized identity, and active user participation
DePIN / Decentralized Cloud
Integrations with Saga, Gensyn, Morpheus, and VPS AI deepened role in powering decentralized AI compute and agentic workloads
CPU usage rose 14% QoQ, while storage usage surged 41%, signaling broader adoption across smaller, non-AI workloads
Eight proposals funded $1.33M in core infrastructure, new provider tooling, and global events
Autonomys integrates:
(1) Storage: distributed blockchain & AI agent data storage network (Archive size up 16% QoQ (143 GB))
(2) Consensus: Proof-of-Archival-Storage + Proof-of-Time
(3) Decoupled Execution: modular domains for transactionsCumulative events up 67% QoQ to 172.1M,
July 2025 saw AI3 token transferability go live; Auto EVM (smart contracts) and Auto ID (identity/agent verification) expected in Q3
Ever since Hyperliquid’s token launch in November 2024, the perp dex has dominated the market with no real competitors in sight. Due to Hyperliquid earning about $1 billion in annualized revenue, each chain has been pushing to catch up and eat into Hyperliquid’s market share. Recently, there have been a couple of competitors that have been successfully catching up. Those competitors are Lighter and, most notably, Aster. Both applications have used incentives and the hope of dethroning Hyperliquid by becoming the biggest perp dex to gain users and volume traded. Although over the weekend, the DefiLlama team decided to delist all Aster volume, as they claimed the volumes were mirroring Binance perp volumes. This decision sparked a conversation around data transparency on X, and currently, the true volume for Aster is still up for debate.
Without including Aster’s volume, Hyperliquid is still the king when it comes to Perp trading. In the last month, it has led all chains with $288.3 billion in volume, resulting in a 34.7% market share.
This has led to some in the Solana ecosystem asking why the performant chain has been so far behind in perp dex volume. In the last month, Solana had the fourth-most perp volume, with $54.7 billion traded and a 6.6% market share.
Over the last 30 days, Solana has averaged $1.8 billion in daily perp dex volume. Jupiter was the leader during this time period with $763 million in average daily volume, even though it only allows the trading of BTC, ETH, and SOL. Quietly behind them was Pacifica, which launched mainnet in June and started tracking volume on Sept. 9, 2025. Pacifica averaged $645 million in daily volume over the last month.
Although the concern has been valid, Solana has multiple catalysts upcoming that can raise the chain in the rankings:
Jito’s upcoming Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) will allow native Perp Dexs, like Drift and Adrena, to build cancels and maker priority into their transaction pipelines, attracting market makers to the platform.
Despite losing early battles between chains with the most performant perp dex, Solana still has many catalysts upcoming that could lead the chain to winning the Perp Wars as it continues to dominate the Internet Capital Market narrative.