Messari Enterprise: Coming 2/11

The day we launched in January 2018, I sent an email to prospective investors that I had worked with in the past explaining the “why” behind Messari. I led with this:

“The primary question [Dan and I] have today is how can people invest intelligently and responsibly in crypto amidst so much noise? We (like most of you, I'm sure) were taken off-guard by the euphoria and excesses of 2017. Yet even if we're bearish in the medium-term and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in the near-term, we remain extremely bullish in the long-term.

We like the crypto money use case, and think that one of those assets will eventually overtake gold and become a new global reserve. We like the "smart securities" use case, which hasn't really emerged yet, but which we think will be a significant innovation - a new, dynamic, and more liquid type of asset that doesn't fit neatly into any existing bucket of a corporate balance sheet. We like the utility token use case insofar as it will fund some exciting new tech teams, but think the tokens themselves are overvalued by orders of magnitude. When they crash -- and the crash will be vicious -- we think some of the better teams will try to convert their tokens to "smart" securities. [Note: “DeFi” = “smart securities."]

This cryptoasset "barbell" mental model informs much of our vision and strategy for Messari in the years to come. And we share it in the hopes that it will help you better understand how we plan to tackle the opportunities that present themselves in bull and bear markets.

We start with the mandate to better organize cryptoasset information.

Our goal is to lead the transition from a sentiment-driven to fundamentals-driven cryptoasset market. Whether that is by working to self-regulate [via standardized disclosures], providing research and analysis tools [via subscription products], or ultimately advising teams or managing capital, we know we need to start simply: by defining what fundamentals might even look like for this new asset class and improving data integrity and transparency standards now."

Three years later, we’ve built one of the best data ingestion engines in the industry and pull from market-leading data providers like Kaiko, Coin Metrics, Flipside, CoinGecko, The Graph, and more. But we also recognized early on that qualitative data moves markets. Project stakeholders, proposed economic designs and distribution policies, security audits, strategic integrations, and development roadmaps matter more than on-chain data at the earliest phases of project development.

Having worked with 100+ crypto projects via the Messari Registry initiative, and built a massive research community, we’ve built the pipes to systematically ingest and curate high-signal, unstructured data from projects, and push updates to infrastructure partners, investors, and developers alike.

Our new product, Messari Enterprise, is the result of the past three years of that cumulative work. It launches next Thursday (2/11) with 125+ top crypto organizations as early subscribers.

Infrastructure companies (Coinbase, Anchorage, BitGo, Fidelity, Fireblocks, Chainalysis), investors (Blockchain Capital, Blocktower, CMS, Polychain, Framework, Multicoin), and projects (Aave, Synthetix, Cosmos, Solana, Filecoin, NEAR) are leveraging Messari Enterprise to keep tabs on meaningful day-to-day project updates amidst a sea of noise.

It’s been a hit so far, and we invite you to check it out for yourself during our launch event here.

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL: SNX, Kava, Barnbridge, Stacks, AVAX, UMA, Polkadot, Cosmos, CREAM, PERP (+ 20 updates)
• Opyn raises $6.7 million from Paradigm (The Block)
• NYDIG CEO says it expects AUM to 4x from $6 billion this year (CoinDesk)
• Why India should buy bitcoin (Balaji)
• PayPal has a new crypto division (Blockworks)
• A little bit about Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade (CoinDesk)
• The Avalanche ecosystem (The Block)
• The Block founder, Mike Dudas leading stablecoin BD at Paxos (CoinDesk)
• Terra launches $10mm DeFi fund (CoinDesk)
• Daily Shade: Pump my bags, just don’t pump them yet. (NLW)