Messari's Unqualified Opinions

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 banks, RWAs, and prediction markets actually fit.We also get into L1 vs L2 dynamics, Solana’s on-chain market structure experiments, the rise of yield-generating stablecoins, and the explosion of on-chain derivatives from equity perps to exotic real-world assets. Finally, everyone shares one spicy prediction for 2026—from a G20 nation adding Bitcoin to its strategic reserves to a single meme coin rising from the ashes.00:00 2025 Winners & Losers07:00 L1, L2 & Multichain09:25 Institutions & Stablecoins13:55 Yield & DeFi Banks23:45 2026 Narratives28:55 Regulation & Tokens33:30 Equity Perps & TradFi40:10 2026 Market OutlookHosted by Matthew Nay of MessariSubscribe for more conversations at the intersection of crypto, DePIN, and real-world infra.Follow Messari on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MessariCryptoFollow Unqualified Opinions on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uG5qpwFg67zTt0VQRTaZ7?si=13163cbebe01415eFollow Unqualified Opinions on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/messaris-unqualified-opinions/id1455666979____This episode and its contents do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. Hosts and guests may hold cryptocurrencies discussed in this content. This content is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Nothing contained in this content is a recommendation or suggestion, directly or indirectly, to buy, sell, make, or hold any investment, loan, commodity, or security, or to undertake any investment or trading strategy with respect to any investment, loan, commodity, security, or any issuer. This content should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security or commodity. Messari does not guarantee the sequence, accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any information provided in this content.

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, paid demand.Read the Full State of AI 2025 for FREE: https://messari.io/report/state-of-ai00:00 – Introductions01:11 – State of AI & Crypto08:28 – AI Agents & Micropayments23:05 – New L1 & TG Analysis36:10 – Market & Cycle Outlook50:04 – Token Launch Advice56:22 – On-Chain Activity57:52 – ConclusionHosted by Matthew Nay of MessariSubscribe for more conversations at the intersection of crypto, DePIN, and real-world infra.Follow Messari on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MessariCryptoFollow Unqualified Opinions on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uG5qpwFg67zTt0VQRTaZ7?si=13163cbebe01415eFollow Unqualified Opinions on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/messaris-unqualified-opinions/id1455666979____This episode and its contents do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. Hosts and guests may hold cryptocurrencies discussed in this content. This content is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Nothing contained in this content is a recommendation or suggestion, directly or indirectly, to buy, sell, make, or hold any investment, loan, commodity, or security, or to undertake any investment or trading strategy with respect to any investment, loan, commodity, security, or any issuer. This content should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security or commodity. Messari does not guarantee the sequence, accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any information provided in this content.

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 data centers, and no sustainable path forward.Fortytwo flips that script. Instead of one giant “god model,” it orchestrates small, specialized models into a swarm inference network. Each query is handled by a sub-swarm of experts that generate answers, peer-rank each other’s outputs, and aggregate the best result—creating a system that’s more robust to hallucinations, prompt injection, and noisy prompts (yes, including the “cat on the roof” test).Messari’s State of AI Report calls decentralized inference “one of the most important emerging architectures in AI,” and this conversation offers a firsthand look into how that future might unfold.Read the Full State of AI 2025 for FREE: https://messari.io/report/state-of-ai00:00 – Introductions03:05 – Crypto & Security10:16 – Models & Swarm Performance24:02 – Consumer Devices & Nodes38:02 – Custom Model Training43:16 – Demand & Pricing53:31 – Future, Token & Data Use59:00 – ConclusionHosted by Chris Davis of MessariSubscribe for more conversations at the intersection of crypto, DePIN, and real-world infra.Follow Messari on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MessariCryptoFollow Unqualified Opinions on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uG5qpwFg67zTt0VQRTaZ7?si=13163cbebe01415eFollow Unqualified Opinions on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/messaris-unqualified-opinions/id1455666979____This episode and its contents do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. Hosts and guests may hold cryptocurrencies discussed in this content. This content is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Nothing contained in this content is a recommendation or suggestion, directly or indirectly, to buy, sell, make, or hold any investment, loan, commodity, or security, or to undertake any investment or trading strategy with respect to any investment, loan, commodity, security, or any issuer. This content should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security or commodity. Messari does not guarantee the sequence, accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any information provided in this content.

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 connect these themes to insights from Messari’s newly released State of AI 2025 report, discussing how AI, decentralized data markets, and crypto-native coordination are converging to reshape the economic landscape.Read the Full State of AI 2025 for FREE: https://messari.io/report/state-of-aiThe conversation then zooms out to the future:• Can agents run zero-employee companies?• How will we pay humans for the data and labor that trains AI?• Why proof of personhood and content authenticity may become existential primitives for the internet.Shayon closes with candid advice on breaking into VC and how to actually be useful to founders.0:00 – Introductions1:01 – Background (Shayan’s path from math & startups to Multicoin)4:30 – Investing Thesis (DePIN, internet labor markets, crypto as “money + markets”)13:02 – Data & Verification (capital formation, network taxonomy, and why verification is hard)22:40 – AI & Labor (compute markets, inference clouds, talent networks, zero-employee orgs)43:28 – Identity & UBI (proof of personhood, Worldcoin, deepfakes, online identity)49:20 – Future Ideas (data-poor domains, specialized data DAOs, brain–computer interfaces)53:56 – How to Get Into VC (advice on writing, differentiation, being useful to founders)57:30 – Conclusion (wrap-up + future BCI episode tease)Hosted by Chris Davis of MessariSubscribe for more conversations at the intersection of crypto, DePIN, and real-world infra.Follow Messari on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MessariCryptoFollow Unqualified Opinions on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uG5qpwFg67zTt0VQRTaZ7?si=13163cbebe01415eFollow Unqualified Opinions on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/messaris-unqualified-opinions/id1455666979____This episode and its contents do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. Hosts and guests may hold cryptocurrencies discussed in this content. This content is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Nothing contained in this content is a recommendation or suggestion, directly or indirectly, to buy, sell, make, or hold any investment, loan, commodity, or security, or to undertake any investment or trading strategy with respect to any investment, loan, commodity, security, or any issuer. This content should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security or commodity. Messari does not guarantee the sequence, accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any information provided in this content.

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+ fiber links, multicast, and future FPGA acceleration aim to fix it. They also get into the 2Z token, DZ SOL liquid staking, validator incentives, and what it will take to push Solana toward 100k+ TPS and eventually 1M+.You’ll learn:🔹 Why major financial firms and web2 giants don’t rely on the public internet—and why blockchains shouldn’t either🔹 How DoubleZero’s contributors (Jump, DRW/Cumberland, and others) provide fiber that validators can “plug into” alongside the public internet🔹 How jitter, least-cost routing, and bandwidth caps quietly limit DeFi and on-chain trading today🔹 The design of the 2Z token and DZ SOL stake pool, and how they align network costs and validator economics🔹 What multicast, edge filtration, and hardware acceleration could unlock for next-gen L1s and cross-chain apps🔹 DoubleZero’s 2026 roadmap, new geographies and tenants, and how non-crypto systems might eventually tap the network00:00 – Introductions01:17 – Double Zero Basics02:00 – How It Works04:09 – Chain & Solana Use07:03 – Network Flow32:06 – Token & Rewards39:44 – Solana Future48:06 – ConclusionHosted by Dylan Bane and Matthew Nay of MessariSubscribe for more conversations at the intersection of crypto, deepin, and real-world infra.Follow Messari on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MessariCryptoFollow Unqualified Opinions on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uG5qpwFg67zTt0VQRTaZ7?si=13163cbebe01415eFollow Unqualified Opinions on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/messaris-unqualified-opinions/id1455666979____This episode and its contents do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. Hosts and guests may hold cryptocurrencies discussed in this content. This content is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Nothing contained in this content is a recommendation or suggestion, directly or indirectly, to buy, sell, make, or hold any investment, loan, commodity, or security, or to undertake any investment or trading strategy with respect to any investment, loan, commodity, security, or any issuer. This content should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security or commodity. Messari does not guarantee the sequence, accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any information provided in this content.