Today's News Recap
Monero Movement - Monero suffers deepest-ever blockchain reorganization, invalidating 118 transactions.
Polkadot Pivot - Polkadot to tighten tokenomics by capping DOT supply at 2.1 billion.
London Launch - London Stock Exchange enveils blockchain-based platform for private funds.
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Messari Protocol Reporting
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.
Lending protocol that supplies settlement liquidity for cross-border payments
Huma 2.0 (Solana) went live Apr 9 with permissionless deposits lifting avg. daily depositors +462% QoQ (128 → 719)
Monthly volume (originations + repayments) reached $514.5M (+309% YoY); originations $255.8M (+305% YoY)
HUMA token launched May 26; staking (Jun 30)
Circulating market cap rose 30% QoQ to $489M, with price climbing to $0.61, slightly outperforming ETH
$16.6M in Q2 trading volume, led by mid-tier wallets holding most liquidity
Claimed rewards increased 7.5% QoQ to 4.1M APE; MAYC and BAKC holders grew share
Transitioned from a decentralized DAO to ApeCo (administered by Yuga Labs) for treasury, grants, and product oversight
First-party, pull-model oracle network delivering real-time prices for crypto, equities, FX, commodities, rates
TVS hit $5.31B (+4.8% QoQ)—one of the few oracles to grow in Q2’25
648k price updates (+10.8% QoQ); cumulative updates reached 759M across 100+ chains
OIS staking climbed to 938M PYTH (+46.9%
Two Bits
Bitcoin Miner Revenue: From Subsidies to Sustainable Fees
By: AJC
When Bitcoin miners produce a block, their rewards come from two sources:
Block subsidy (newly issued BTC)
Transaction fees.
Historically, the subsidy has far outweighed fees, but in 2023 and 2024, fees briefly became a meaningful contributor to miner revenue.
The surge was driven by metaprotocols, secondary protocols built on top of Bitcoin that use custom data within transactions to enable features the base network doesn’t natively support. Ordinals, which enabled NFTs on Bitcoin, fueled a boom in 2023, helping push network fees above $500 million in Q4’23, the highest in recent history. Metaprotocol activity peaked in early 2024 with the launch of Runes, a metaprotocol for token issuance, driving $450 million in fees in Q2’24.
Since then, metaprotocol activity has cooled, and with it, miner fee revenue. Fees are now at their lowest since the trend began, averaging under $500K per day, or about $179 million annualized.
For now, miner profitability remains supported by the block subsidy, which stands at 3.125 BTC per block until the next halving in 2028. But with each halving, reliance on fees grows. Eventually, fees will need to sustain miners as subsidies diminish. If the network cannot generate durable fee markets by then, miners may be forced to fundamentally rethink their business models.