Making tokens trustworthy

It was a consequential day for finance: Blockworks has acquired Messari, creating a new champion of onchain capital markets.

Also, SpaceX went public.

These two things are related!

Raising $75 billion from investors has made SpaceX the largest IPO of all time (by a factor of three). Amazingly, much of the price discovery happened on-chain. 

The IPO was prix fixe: investors were offered the shares at $135, take it or leave it — an offer that goes against all precedent and convention. Investment banks typically start with a proposed price range for new shares, then adjust it based on feedback from investors. It’s an opaque process that only institutional customers are privy to.

(Note: Goldman and Morgan Stanley made about $100 million each for running that not-so-complicated process.) 

This time, the feedback happened in full view. Pre-IPO perpetual futures trading on Hyperliquid let everyone know where SpaceX was likely to price.

It may even have influenced the pricing. Did Elon Musk choose $135 because it was 20% below the perps market? Or was the perps market 20% above where it knew Musk would price it? It’s impossible to say.

Either way, the onchain market was active. Over $1.2 billion worth of SpaceX futures traded on Hyperliquid today.

Many people think there is much more of this to come — including some in a position to make it happen. 

Larry Fink, for example, believes "we're just at the beginning of the tokenization of all assets.”

All assets. “From real estate to equity to bonds,” he added.

Similarly, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in December that “all US markets will be on chain within two years.”

December was six months ago already, so that leaves us just 18 months to prove him right. 

The purpose of combining crypto’s two largest data and market intelligence platforms — Blockworks and Messari — is to pull that future of markets forward.

(Note: my suggestion to rebrand as either Blockssari or Messworks has unfortunately been rejected. We’re still just Blockworks.)

Fink and Atkins both pitch tokenization as a way to make finance more efficient: moving assets on blockchains is faster and cheaper than moving them through the banking system.

But that’s only part of the story. Blockchains, they both say, will make finance more transparent and predictable — and therefore more trustworthy.

Trust in crypto itself is currently at a low ebb. “Even I don’t trust these markets anymore,” Blockworks co-founder Mike Ippolito said in a podcast today.

So it might sound incongruous to claim that crypto can help restore trust in traditional markets. 

But crypto’s defining features are transparency and disintermediation — two things that should improve any market. The more visible a market is, and the fewer gatekeepers it has, the more likely people will be to trust it.

If, that is, they can understand it.

Blockchains are transparent, but that alone is not very helpful. Without an interpretation layer of data curation, blockchains are incomprehensible.

The Messari acquisition accelerates Blockworks’ efforts to provide the interpretation layer that makes onchain data comprehensible, meaningful, and useful.

“Together, we can build the single system of record for all onchain assets,” Blockworks said in a statement announcing the deal.

This can be a big business. In 2025, Nasdaq made almost four times more selling data and data-related services than it did in trading fees.

It’s an important one, too.

Without data, there is no trust. Without trust, there are no markets. And without markets, Elon Musk is not going to Mars.

So that’s the Blockworks mission: to bring transparency and trust to onchain markets — which may soon be nearly all markets, the ones that fund SpaceX included.

Might Blockworks someday help humanity escape from Earth?

Fink and Atkins were unavailable to comment, but I’m sure they think it could happen.

— Byron Gilliam

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