Messari’s New Site + OnChainFx Acquisition: Building An Open, Independent Crypto Data Service

It’s been just six months since I stumbled through my investor rolodex with a laptop, a couple of screenshots, and some half-baked grunts about building an “open data layer” for crypto.

Since then, we’ve brought in over a dozen leading (and global) crypto funds as partners, recruited an exceptional team of ten (majority developers), and outlined our vision for how exactly we plan to bring better transparency and sanity to the Wild West of crypto.

Today, I am *stoked* to share three announcements that will accelerate Messari’s growth:

+ We have acquired OnChainFx, a site I consider best-in-class for cryptoasset data tracking. You have probably seen me tweet and blog about this site frequently. It is a tremendous resource and I’m proud to be able to tuck it into the early Messari product suite. The OnChainFx product will not change much, but we will build additional tooling around its dashboard, and leverage the Messari analyst community to further improve its token profile pages.

+ We have relaunched the Messari website and newsletter in a new, mobile-friendly format that should help us emerge as the “front page for crypto.” We’re combining the best parts of OCFX, my TBI curation, and our community-driven research library to form a one-stop shop for tracking crypto’s daily developments, and coming up the industry’s steep learning curve. We encourage you to provide feedback on the site (it is, after all, an imperfect MVP); as you can expect major design and usability upgrades in the coming months.

+ We are extending additional invitations to our crowdsourced token data library’s private beta for industry executives, fund analysts, and other researchers. Apply for access here! Our 100+ community analysts have collectively completed 50+ token research reports in the past three months, and they’re just getting started.

The most obvious question/criticism you might have is: “How does a ‘front page for crypto’ help bring transparency to the industry?

Isn’t that a media strategy vs. B2B self-regulatory play?”

Well, it is a media strategy (see you in the arena, CoinDesk! ;)), but it is more than anything else a means to an end.

High-quality content curation can be earned media, community development, and FOMO-inducing business development all rolled into one. Assuming you get the formula right. For us, we’re in the early stages of building a flywheel:

1) Leverage brands that executives and crypto obsessives already trust: OnChainFx and TBI’s Daily Bit.

2) Build the largest and most engaged audience in crypto by any means necessary. The way to win the war for attention is to give people 10x the learning resources in 10% of the time. Smart curation is king.

3) Parlay eyeballs into community contributions to our data library. Create an army of mission-driven analysts.

4) Use the audience and community contributions to exert social pressure on token issuers. Collaborate with them on common sense, non-controversial, standardized disclosures (insider transactions, supply policy tweaks, roadmap updates, etc.) to abide by the spirit of consumer protection laws and build trust with hodlers.

5) “Enforce” those disclosures and best practices via a token-curated registry governed by top funds, exchanges, and other underwriters. Co-opt these liquidity providers as partners in advancing the industry and token teams will fall in line in the hopes of winning a place on the a token whitelist — for transparent, high-integrity projects.

6) Plow everything back into building an open platform upon which third parties can build additional data tools (investor portfolio tracking, issuer treasury management & accounting, advisor/investor reputation scoring, etc.) Push competition up the stack, and demand real value-added research from paid services. Remedial things like a token’s network value, are things public equities investors would expect from the cover of a 10-K, not paid research. Let’s make the table stakes items open-source.

Radical cooperation with third party partners should reinforce the confidence we build in the Messari brand, which brings us back to #1.

***

Someone came up to me at a meetup in Hong Kong last month, and asked a pointed, but thoughtful question: “I’ve found your writing and tweets insightful, but you’re angry and hyper negative recently. Why do you stick around? Aren’t you burnt out?”

I told him the truth: yes, I’ve felt burnt out, and have on occasion let anger get the better of me (a constant struggle…someday I hope to emerge as a meditative philosopher king like other more evolved crypto pundits). And yes, I was somewhat relieved at the blood-letting in the crypto markets in June.

But I’d really just burnt out on hype and nonsense. On self-dealing and intellectual dishonesty. On the corrosive impact that fast money has had on even some of the best people in the industry, and the corruption that can stem from rapid liquidity, greater fool investing, and structural information asymmetries.

It pisses me off, because we’re supposed to build something better, and I still believe we can and should and will. But the truth is, you can either tilt at windmills and get jaded by human nature and the inevitable market hype cycles that every hyper-growth industry must go through, or you can try to fix the structural issues.

At Messari, we choose the latter.

Building trust and transparency in markets goes all the way back to the bedrock of modern capitalism: double-entry accounting. It wasn’t until 14th century Italian treasurers (and Franciscan monks) popularized the idea that clean books weren’t just good business, but a moral imperative, that we saw an economic explosion. Trusted commerce led to the rise of the firm, a boom in innovation, and our global, interconnected economy. These early pioneering bookkeepers were called the “Messari” or “trusted ones.”

Today, we need to build tools that will foster trust and transparency in decentralized, “tokenized” markets. If we can do so, we could usher in a new era of commerce that’s leads to a better, fairer, and smarter financial system. An economic boom that is on par with what we last saw in the Renaissance or industrial revolution.

How’s that for cynicism?

For the indefinite future, Messari’s focus will be on sustainable value creation vs. short-term value capture as we position ourselves as a trusted data source for a multi-trillion dollar token economy.

We hope you’ll read today’s post as more of an invitation than announcement.

We want to earn your time and attention, to convince you to join us as visitors / subscribers / contributors, and to build products and content that live up to the unreasonably high expectations I’ve set for our team and early community. If you come along for the ride, we can do some pretty wild stuff together to help fix some of crypto’s toughest problems.

And, you know. Earn it.