Research Analyst @CryptoRick98 sits down with KF, co-founder of edgeX, to break down the State of edgeX Q4 2025 report. The conversation covers edgeX's explosive growth in TVL, perp trading volume, and fees — all achieved amid one of the most volatile quarters in crypto history. KF also discusses edgeX's upcoming TGE, the Circle Ventures investment and native USDC integration, RWA perps now making up 20-30% of total volume, the Maru community token, and the team's long-term vision for an AI agen...
Mar 16, 2026•27 min
In episode 21 of Messari's Fully Diluted, Alex Beaudry is joined by analysts Hayden Booms, Dillon Shirley, and Qorban Ferrell to break down the most important moves happening across DeFi, derivatives, and on-chain AI. The team dives deep into Hyperliquid's HIP3 markets, Uniswap's fee switch expansion to L2s, and the rising Venice AI (VVV) controversy.Dylan brings real volume data showing that Hyperliquid's HIP3 markets — led by TradeXYZ's equity and commodity perps — have become a legitimate ven...
Mar 06, 2026•40 min
Conor Moore, co-founder and COO of USD.AI, joins Messari's Fully Diluted podcast to discuss the emerging on-chain credit market for GPU-backed loans. USD.AI provides financing for neoclouds and AI infrastructure companies, competing directly with traditional banks and private credit funds. The protocol has successfully originated loans backed by NVIDIA GPUs including H100s and H200s. The episode explores how USD.AI differentiated itself by focusing specifically on GPU assets rather than generali...
Feb 17, 2026•42 min
The Messari team analyzes prediction markets after the Super Bowl drove record volumes across Kalshi and Polymarket. With $6.2 billion in weekly volume split between sports betting and political markets, the question is whether this represents a local top or sustainable growth. Will prediction markets scale to entertainment, culture, and long-tail markets, or is volume topping out? The discussion covers regulatory advantages, UX challenges, and whether Robin Hood and Coinbase building their own ...
Feb 13, 2026•48 min
Dylan Bane sits down with Anirudh from Robot Ventures to discuss a provocative thesis: stablecoin issuers could become the marginal buyers of US debt, helping finance the explosive growth of AI infrastructure.Anirudh explains how Tether and Circle have already become the 15th largest holders of US Treasuries, and why this matters for both crypto and American competitiveness. The conversation explores how on-chain capital markets could unlock trillions in AI CapEx that traditional finance can't p...
Feb 09, 2026•43 min
The Shoot the Sh*t Podcast #19 dives deep into DePIN's real state in 2026. While token prices are down dramatically, revenue is surging and networks are becoming genuinely profitable. InfraFi emerges as the most exciting DePIN development, offering stablecoin holders 10-15% yields by financing off-chain infrastructure like GPU compute and energy projects. USDAI is leading this charge and could spark a major narrative shift when it launches its token.Trade XYZ's equity perps are seeing explosive ...
Feb 05, 2026•47 min
Sam Elfarra, Community Spokesperson at TronDAO, reveals how Tron’s first-mover advantage on USDT has created a liquidity revolution in emerging markets, making crypto accessible to the unbanked and transforming cross-border payments. With annualized settlement volumes nearing $8 trillion and stablecoins accounting for over 42% of USDT circulation, Tron’s influence on world finance is unprecedented. This episode dives into how Tron balances decentralization with high-speed performance, how it’s f...
Feb 05, 2026•27 min
Dabba is building the future of connectivity in India through decentralized physical infrastructure on the Solana blockchain. This episode of Fully Diluted features founder Karam Lakshman discussing how Dabba has become one of the fastest-growing DePIN networks globally, expanding from 1,000 to 75,000 WiFi hotspots in just 18 months with nearly 500,000 daily active users. The project taps into India's unique market structure, where 100,000 small cable operators need capital and technology to tra...
Feb 02, 2026•29 min
In this episode of Fully Diluted, Messari’s Dylan Bane sits down with Sal Gala, co-founder and managing partner at Escape Velocity Ventures, and Connor Lovely, founder at Proof of Coverage Media, to explore the current state of DePIN in 2025. They delve into the evolution of DePIN, its revenue growth, and the challenges faced by the sector. They cover: • The impressive revenue growth of GeoNet and Helium • The challenges and setbacks in the decentralized compute sector • The role of buybacks and...
Jan 28, 2026•40 min
Drones, not satellites, might power the next generation of maps and spatial AI. In this episode of Fully Diluted, Messari’s Dylan Bane sits down with Alec Wilson, COO of Spexi and founding contributor to LayerDrone, to break down how their DePIN-powered drone network is creating a standardized, ultra–high-resolution imagery layer of the Earth.They cover:- Why drone imagery (1–3 cm per pixel) can beat both satellites and planes- How Spexi software and LayerDrone’s web3 incentives coordinate thous...
Jan 22, 2026•33 min
Join us for another episode of Fully Diluted with Messari Analysts Matthew Nay, Sam Ruskin, Qorban Ferrell, and Jake Koch-Gallup.This week, we explore Jake's insightful analysis of RAILGUN, a cutting-edge ZK privacy tool for EVM networks, and discuss its valuation and market impact. We also cover the resurgence of meme coins, the rise of equity perps, and the macro trends driving the metals market. Tune in for a deep dive into the world of privacy tech, market dynamics, and the future of decentr...
Jan 15, 2026•49 min
Prediction markets may be the first real breakout product for consumer crypto—and they’re only getting started. In this episode of Messari’s 2026 Theses consumer series, we’re joined by Tulip King and Baba, two former Messari analysts, to unpack where consumer crypto actually goes next. The conversation spans prediction markets as base infrastructure, why memecoins and NFTs needed a reset, how wallets become the new distribution layer, and whether crypto social finally has a real unlock. We conn...
Dec 31, 2025•53 min
Perps are leveling up from a crypto-native niche into a global trading primitive—and equity perps may be the breakout narrative of 2026. In this year-in-review episode of Messari: Unqualified Opinions, Messari Research Analysts Sam and Qorban are joined by Messari alumni Sunny and Kunal to unpack 2025’s biggest DeFi themes: Hyperliquid’s rise, the equity perp inflection, the maturation (and looming skepticism) around prediction markets, how political markets could evolve, and why yield-bearing s...
Dec 22, 2025•49 min
In this episode, Dylan, Sami and Seth break down why crypto + AI isn’t just a moral counterweight to Big Tech—it’s a faster innovation engine. They explain how BitTensor’s subnet model turns AI development into an open, incentive-driven competition (similar to how Bitcoin relentlessly optimized SHA-256), and why 2025’s biggest shifts—open-source catching up, reinforcement learning’s rise, and massive data center capex—set the stage for decentralized AI to find real product-market fit. The conver...
Dec 22, 2025•46 min
Messari’s Theses 2026 multi-chain roundtable breaks down who’s really winning the L1 / L2 wars and what that means for the next cycle. The Enterprise team dives into: - How Ethereum clawed back from peak despair in 2025 - Why Arbitrum and Base are pulling away from the L2 pack - What a Robinhood L2 could mean for every existing rollup - MegaETH’s token + native stablecoin experiments - Jeremy’s new Disruption Factor framework for ranking L2s - Solana’s push to become the “onchain NASDAQ” - Hot t...
Dec 18, 2025•52 min
In this episode of the Messari Thesis Podcast, the Enterprise research team recaps the wild year that was 2025 and lays out their highest-conviction bets for 2026. We dig into why Bitcoin has clearly separated from the rest of the market, how Hyperliquid and a handful of standout apps stole the spotlight, and why long-tail L1s are running out of room. The team debates whether institutions really break the four-year cycle, how the stablecoin and yield meta evolves as rates fall, and where DeFi ba...
Dec 17, 2025•46 min
How much of “crypto AI” is still just narrative—and how much is finally real? In this episode, Messari’s Enterprise team unpacks findings from Messari’s newly released State of AI Report and what they mean for decentralized AI, infra, and the broader market. Chris walks through why post-training, reinforcement learning, and test-time compute are pushing us into a new decentralized AI paradigm, from swarm-style inference networks like 42 Network to open source models that are finally seeing real,...
Dec 08, 2025•59 min
What if the smartest AI didn’t live in a hyperscale data center—but across millions of everyday devices? In this episode, Chris Davis sits down with Ivan Nikitin, co-founder of Fortytwo, an AI network built on crypto rails that turns idle consumer hardware into a global swarm of specialized models. After a decade in traditional AI—training agents, conversational systems, and even a spatial reasoning foundation model—Ivan hit the hard wall of AI scalability: not enough compute, endlessly bigger d...
Dec 05, 2025•57 min
In this episode, Messari's Chris Davis sits down with Shayon Sengupta, Partner at Multicoin Capital, to unpack how crypto-native markets are reshaping everything from wireless networks and AI compute to data collection and talent markets. They trace the lineage from Bitcoin mining to Helium and today’s DePIN / “internet labor markets,” dig into why verification is the hardest (and most under-rated) problem, and explore how crypto can fund the massive resource aggregation AI requires. We also con...
Dec 03, 2025•59 min
The public internet wasn’t built for high-performance blockchains.In this episode of Fully Diluted, Messari’s Dylan Bane and Matthew Nay sit down with Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, to unpack how a global mesh of privately contributed fiber links is becoming the low-latency “private internet” for Solana and other high-throughput chains. Austin explains why 20–30 hops over the public internet introduce jitter, slow block propagation, and widen trading spreads—and how DoubleZero’s 70+ fi...
Nov 20, 2025•33 min
Monad is gearing up for one of crypto’s most anticipated launches — a high-speed, censorship-resistant L1 built to merge scalability with true decentralization. In this episode of Fully Diluted , Dylan Bane and Matthew Nay sit down with Monad’s Kevin and Jack to discuss the tech behind Monad’s 10,000 TPS architecture, how decentralization fits into the next phase of crypto, and what users can expect from day one of mainnet. We cover the team’s origin story, the challenges of building from zero t...
Nov 10, 2025•48 min
Messari CTO Diran Lee sits down with Karam Lakshman, CEO & co-founder of Dabba, to unpack how a DePIN marketplace, local cable operators, and crypto incentives could build a new Telco in the world’s toughest market—India. We cover broadband vs. mobile realities, Dabba’s business model and token system, the choice of Solana & BONK, incentives, and the growth roadmap. 0:00 Introductions 1:33 Tech Journey 7:04 Internet in India 13:29 Business Model 21:17 Token System 24:46 Solana & BONK...
Oct 30, 2025•32 min
Q3 was ETH’s quarter. Messari Research digs into why ETH ETFs saw more inflows than BTC, how ETH-focused DATs amassed ~3.8% of ETH supply in one quarter, and what MNAV convergence means for future buy pressure. We also cover stablecoin growth (and USDe’s breakout), the slow-but-real maturation of tokenized equities/commodities, the rise of “corporate chains” (Stripe/Tempo, Circle/Arc, JPMorgan/Kinexys, Google Cloud), and the debate around next-gen EVMs (Monad, MegaETH). We wrap with Internet Cap...
Oct 24, 2025•52 min
In this episode of Fully Diluted, Messari’s Dylan Bane and the Messari Research team sit down with Mert Mumtaz, Co-founder and CEO of Helius, to unpack the evolving privacy landscape in crypto. They dive deep into Zcash’s resurgence, Solana’s growing DeFi ecosystem, and the regulatory and technical hurdles shaping the next generation of privacy-preserving systems. Mert discusses why privacy is fundamental to crypto’s future, how advancements in ZK proofs, FHE, and MPC are transforming usability,...
Oct 23, 2025•43 min
On this episode of Fully Diluted, Messari’s Dylan Bane and Chris Davis sit down with Yan, founder/CEO of OpenMind (and Stanford engineering professor on sabbatical), to unpack the near-future of physical AI—LLMs embodied in robots that can navigate homes, talk, learn, and even pay for services. 00:00 – Introductions 01:58 – Robotics & AIState of robotics, near-term use cases (security checks, eldercare prompts, math tutoring), why start with quadrupeds vs. humanoids, form-factor tradeoffs an...
Oct 16, 2025•59 min
In this Episode, Messari's Enterprise team digs into three hot threads: why stablecoins are the best onramp for mainstream users, whether on-chain neobanks can beat custodial fintech, and the latest in the Perp Wars (Hyperliquid vs. Aster/Lighter). We close with Double Zero’s launch, token design debates, and what it means for high-speed crypto networks. 0:00 – Introductions 1:24 – Plasma & XPL Launch 3:45 – Self-Custody & Web3 UX 20:27 – Aster & BNB Ecosystem 28:02 – Perp Market Sha...
Oct 09, 2025•45 min
Injective CEO Eric Chen joins Messari’s Dylan Bane on Fully Diluted to unpack a finance-first Layer-1 built for performance and markets. Injective is a Cosmos SDK chain with instant finality (~25k TPS) and MEV-resistant orderbook/financial modules that power apps like Helix. We cover permissionless market creation (including pre-IPO perpetuals for OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe via Theta pricing), the multi-VM roadmap with a new EVM environment and exchange precompiles, wallet abstraction and LayerZero ...
Oct 08, 2025•35 min
Botanix co-founders Willem Schroé and Alisia Painter join Messari's Dylan Bane on Fully Diluted to unpack a Bitcoin Layer-2 built for real finance. Botanix is a proof-of-stake Bitcoin L2 where 50% of gas fees flow to stakers via STBTC—a liquid, up-only, native Bitcoin yield backed by on-chain economic activity (not points or new tokens). We cover how users bridge BTC → Botanix → stake → earn, instant peg-outs, and why the team’s Spiderchain design prioritizes decentralization and censorship resi...
Sep 17, 2025•43 min
This week, the Messari Enterprise team digs into the next big unlocks and headwinds across crypto: 🔹 Exotic RWAs (Pokémon cards, watches, wine): why tokenizing non-financial collectibles finally improves UX (instant settlement, lower trust frictions) and could onboard normies. 🔹 Macro setup: weak jobs, CPI/PPI ahead, gold ripping, and why a surprise 50 bps cut isn’t crazy — plus what that means for BTC, SOL, and funding conditions. 🔹 Solana DATs & flows: Galaxy/Jump/Multicoin’s $1.65B veh...
Sep 12, 2025•1 hr 10 min
VC Brandon Potts (Framework Ventures) joins Fully Diluted to cut through the noise on crypto venture right now. We cover why “let the token rip” is a dead-end playbook, where real demand and distribution come from, and why the next wave looks like application-specific infrastructure, stablecoins at scale, and energy/DePIN feeding AI—not generic infra or meme “vibe-coded” apps. What we cover 🔹 Why most CT hot takes are wrong & why we’re still early 🔹 The new bar for founders: demand, distri...
Sep 03, 2025•51 min
