Messari Monthly: September 2025

Key Insights

• Virtuals’ daily fees jumped 597% in August, from $33,000 to $230,000, even as its market cap fell 10%, signaling a break in correlation between price and fundamentals. This divergence was partly driven by newer agents like Mamo, ArAIstotle, and 1000xAgent.
• Onchain Gacha marketplaces have reached product-market fit, processing $124.5 million in volume in August and positioning tokenized trading cards as a leading use case for exotic RWAs. Their growth highlights how tokenization can repackage collector experiences with instant liquidity and global access.
• Kinetiq markets on Pendle (kHYPE and vkHYPE) have attracted $805.9 million in TVL. With 49.3% of kHYPE's supply deployed on Pendle, Kinetiq makes up 90.4% of Pendle's TVL on Hyperliquid and 7.4% of Pendle’s total TVL.
• By late August 2025, ETH-focused digital asset treasuries (DATs) like BTCS, SBET, ETHZ, and BMNR all fell below their ETH-backed net asset value (NAV), signaling a structural repricing rather than a temporary arbitrage opportunity.
• Unit surpassed $1 billion in TVL after growing 1,529% since February, fueled by additional asset integrations and a whale-driven $3.2 billion BTC/ETH volume day that outpaced Coinbase and Bybit. This demonstrates Hyperliquid’s growing competitiveness with top centralized exchanges in both perpetuals and spot markets.

This monthly report showcases 5 distinct perspectives from the Enterprise team for September. Each section features a unique chart or graphic, accompanied by in-depth analysis that contextualizes the data and examines its broader implications for the crypto industry.