Artificial intelligence is commoditizing news and routine research across industries, prompting crypto media companies to reinvent themselves as data platforms, analytics providers, and organizational infrastructure. Companies rushing to build AI-enabled databases aim to become the industry’s reference tier, the source of information that investors, regulators, and algorithms rely on to understand digital assets.
On June 12, Blockworks acquired Messari, combining two of the largest data and research operations in cryptocurrency into a single platform covering over 40,000 digital assets.
The Wall Street Journal pegs the price at more than $10 million, which is a significant discount from the roughly $300 million valuation Messari offered after its Series B in 2022, and the discount shows how much the economics of crypto information have changed in four years.
Blockworks raised funding in April at a valuation of $192 million in a round led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, and publicly stated that it intended to use the funds to acquire competitors. Co-founder Jason Yanowitz explained his goal in plain language: He wants to build the Bloomberg of cryptocurrencies.
Messerli’s acquisition reflects the changes that have been building under the AI ​​hype over the past few years. The value of financial information is moving away from articles and toward the databases on which articles are built. The companies that will be in a position to dominate the coming years will be those with legitimate datasets that institutions and machines will treat as authoritative.
This type of research and reference work makes money from feeds, terminals, and API calls rather than from readers, and because it responds to compliance officers and quants rather than viewers, it is a structurally different business than a typical newsroom.
Why publishing is no longer an advantage in the age of AI
The pressure on media companies starts with distribution, where the traffic that has funded digital publishing for two decades is steadily being drained across the broader media business. Google search referrals to publishers have declined by approximately 33% globally over the past year.
According to the Reuters Institute’s annual trends report, referrals from the U.S. are down 38%, referrals from Europe are down 17% and referrals from Google Discover are down 21%. By early 2026, approximately 58% of Google searches will end without a click on an external site as AI-generated summaries answer questions on the results page.
Penske Media sued Google over the change, claiming the search company was cannibalizing the traffic it promised publishers in exchange for allowing them to index their works.
For crypto outlets, the result is a steady quarter-over-quarter decline in the value of breaking news and daily commentary, a format that has long been the driving force behind their traffic model. Token unlocks and financial disclosure summaries are generated in seconds and consumed within the chat window. Previously, you no longer need to click afterwards.
All financial markets tend to move in the same order as they mature. Start with reports and opinions when information is lacking, and simply explain a new asset class to gather an audience. As institutions seek context and framework rather than headlines, they move into the field of research.
The data is then standardized when an investor wants to query a database rather than read 50 notes on the same subject. And it ends with infrastructure. There, that data essentially becomes a workflow that the market cannot operate without.
Bloomberg reached that end decades ago, which is why it makes about $11 billion a year, charges nearly $31,980 per terminal seat by 2026, and keeps more than 325,000 subscribers wired into its system.
The journalism the company produces is just a sideshow to its core business. The reason the market can’t switch off devices is because it informs models, pricing, and compliance systems.
Cryptocurrencies are entering that fourth stage, and Yanowitz estimates that they could get there much faster than stocks. While building research and reference operations in traditional markets requires large teams of human analysts to manually enter tax returns, cryptocurrencies natively generate structured, real-time, machine-readable information through on-chain and standardized disclosures, making them ideal inputs for automated systems.
According to CryptoSlate’s own report, corporate AI adoption rates have increased from OECD figures of 8.7% in 2023 to 14.2% in 2024 and 20.2% in 2025, and consuming agents are starting to transact on their own.
What does the reference layer control?
Once the market reaches that stage, those who control the reference data will have influence over everyone downstream. Because asset managers price their portfolios based on reference data, index providers build products on it, exchanges connect it to their systems, regulators cite reference data, and AI models train on it.
Any company that owns standard figures for the protocol’s circulating supply or Treasury holdings can decide how to allocate billions of dollars without ever announcing an opinion on it. And the future gatekeepers of this market will be database operators, who will be positioned even further upstream than traditional editors.
Consolidation of power and influence is already underway, and Blockworks’ acquisition of Messerli is just the latest example. Paris-based Kaiko acquired Amberdata in early June to strengthen its derivatives and on-chain coverage and add AI-focused research tools for banks, asset managers, and hedge funds.
In January, oracle provider RedStone acquired Security Token Market with a dataset spanning over 800 tokenized assets. Each of these transactions drew fragmented sources of invaluable information into the hands of a few.
What makes this more important than regular media integration is what institutions need before scaling up to digital assets. Large allocators require standardized disclosures, clean historical datasets, legal entity mapping, governance archives, and risk metrics that can be defended against their own compliance committees.
Cryptocurrencies have already institutionalized storage, settlement, and trading. Information is now becoming institutionalized, and the demand for reliable data is growing along with the demand for capital.
AI raises the stakes for all of these, rather than lowering them. In the very near future, analysts will rarely open protocol documentation manually and will instead ask a model to compare all layer 1 networks in terms of financial composition, validator concentration, governance participation, and revenue.
The quality of that answer depends on which database the model is trained to trust. So which companies own those datasets is a conundrum that all automated comparisons must pass. That position worsens over time, as each new consumer of organizations and machines makes the underlying data more valuable and a little more difficult to delete.
Established publications have been feeling this pressure for some time. The economics of independent publishing are becoming increasingly tough as distribution fragments and machines absorb daily reporting and erode the advertising and referral revenues that have funded newsrooms for years.
But they also amass years of reporting, structured metadata, original research, and editorial credibility, and their archives can become the raw material for the AI-enabled knowledge bases on which agency intelligence products and models rely.
The enduring position of cryptomedia may be to provide a layer of authoritative information for AI to consume while retaining editorial judgment to decide what belongs within it.
Cryptocurrencies were built to remove trusted middlemen from money and allow people to transact without a bank or clearinghouse in between.
As institutions and AI enter the picture, they begin to build a new set of trusted intermediaries to control that information, and companies that end up owning legitimate datasets, supply volumes, governance records, and on-chain metrics that every investor, regulator, exchange, and model treats as ground truth may have more influence than traditional news organizations.
