Messari

What it is

Messari is a research terminal for crypto with an API bolted to every part of it. The terminal covers roughly 40,000 assets with prices, profiles and screeners; on top of that sit the things people actually renew for — 200-plus standardised diligence reports, a news feed aggregated from 500-plus sources with AI summaries, token unlock schedules, a fundraising and M&A database, Signals for social mindshare, and Monitoring, which surfaces 60-plus categories of event across 1,000-plus assets with a human check before it reaches you.

Blockworks acquired Messari in June 2026, and the site now carries the byline "Messari by Blockworks". The product, the domain, the terms and the pricing page are still Messari's own, which is why this card files it under that name; the Enterprise contact link in the docs already points at Blockworks.

It sits in market-data APIs here rather than on-chain analytics because the market and reference endpoints are what every paid seat includes and what the SDK is built around. The on-chain half — 25-plus networks, 200-plus protocols, 30-plus stablecoins — is real, and it is a secondary listing rather than the job the subscription is bought for.

Pricing

Two published numbers. Basic is $0 a year and buys the read-only version of the terminal. The individual Enterprise seat is $4,500 a year, and that is the only figure on the page — there is no monthly rate published anywhere in it, so there is nothing to discount and nothing to compare per month. Team Enterprise, additional seats, Monitoring and the add-on APIs are all "contact sales". There is no self-serve trial; the pricing FAQ says so in as many words.

The individual seat includes four APIs — Assets, Market Data, Exchanges and Markets. Every other family is marked "Custom API Package" in the plan comparison, which covers News, Key Developments, Signals, Diligence, Research, Token Unlocks, Fundraising and the AI API. Rate limits are 200 requests a minute globally for unpaid, Lite and Pro, 600 for Enterprise; the AI endpoints are metered separately at 10 requests a day free and 600 a minute on Enterprise, with a credit pack on top.

There is a third route that skips subscriptions entirely. x402 bills per request in USDC settled on Base or Solana, with no account and no API key, and Messari publishes the per-call rate in dollars — $0.00 for the asset, metric and market listings, $0.10 for asset details, all-time highs or ROI, $0.15 for a daily asset time series and $0.18 for hourly, $0.35 for market time-series metrics, $0.75 for a market time series and $0.25 for an AI chat completion. It is the cheapest honest way to find out whether the data is what you need.

Data & coverage

Market data covers price, trading volume and market cap for more than 40,000 assets across a stated 210-plus exchanges. Exchange coverage is aggregate rather than granular — spot volume, futures volume and futures open interest per venue, not a tape.

The on-chain side is metric-level, not query-level: 25-plus layer 1s and layer 2s including Ethereum and Solana with fees, active addresses and the usual network series; 200-plus protocols with TVL, active addresses, deposits, borrows and trading volume, split into DEX, lending, liquid staking, interoperability, ETFs and more; 30-plus stablecoins with supply, transfers and transaction volume. You do not write SQL against a chain here — you read Messari's computed series.

The qualitative half is what the coverage numbers understate. News comes from 500-plus sources with per-article asset tagging and topic classification. Monitoring watches 60-plus event types across 1,000-plus assets from 700-plus sources, and the pitch is that a human verified each one before it fired. Token unlocks cover vesting and cliffs for 150-plus assets; fundraising covers 17,000-plus rounds plus M&A and investor profiles. Bulk downloads come out as CSV or JSONL, gated by tier.

Integrations

The hosted MCP server is the cleanest way in for anything agentic: one URL, OAuth against your API key, and two tools — document search over Messari research and news, and a natural-language query tool over the quantitative datasets. Both are wrappers on the Agents API and inherit its permissions. Monitoring delivers over Slack, email, webhook or API, and there is a Slack bot sold as an add-on. The official SDK is TypeScript.

Limitations

The SDK is the weak link and it is easy to miss, because the docs point at three packages and none of them lands cleanly. The Quickstart installs @messari/sdk-ts, whose latest npm release is 0.4.0 from June 2025 and whose linked repository, messari/sdk-ts, returns a 404. The examples page installs and imports @messari/client, which is not a package on npm at all — the registry 404s for it. The older @messari/sdk is still published at 0.0.10 from April 2025, is no longer referenced by any docs page, and the MessariKit repository behind it last saw a commit in August 2025. Meanwhile the API has kept shipping: Monitoring, the Agents API, x402 and the hosted MCP server all postdate every one of those releases. Treat the REST endpoints as the real interface and the SDK as a convenience that has fallen behind.

Almost everything distinctive is Enterprise-gated, and the gate is finer than the plan page suggests. The MCP server needs not just Enterprise but the AI Toolkit, and its two agent tools need the ai_toolkit_permission flag on the team or they return FORBIDDEN — a permission a buyer would not know to ask for. The free AI allowance of ten requests a day is enough to see the shape of an answer and not enough to build against.

As a market-data source it is shallow by design. No order books, no trade tape, no funding rates, no options, no per-market granularity — exchange data stops at spot volume, futures volume and open interest. If a pricing or execution system needs a reference rate or a venue tape, this is not the provider for that job.

Two moving parts worth knowing before you wire anything up. Intel is being retired in favour of Monitoring — the docs call Monitoring its "next-gen replacement" while the Intel API still carries a deprecated GET form — so anything built on Intel is built on a deprecation. And protocol data is API-only: the docs state plainly that it is not currently available in the UI, so what you can see in the terminal is not what you can pull.

On the AI: what the product emits is prose and rows, not calls. Copilot answers questions with citations into Messari's own corpus. Deep Research runs asynchronously for five to ten minutes and returns a long-form templated report with source links, refreshed weekly. The Search agent deliberately returns only the retrieved documents, with no synthesised answer, and leaves the writing to you; the Compute agent returns the SQL it ran alongside the rows. Signals ranks assets by mindshare and sentiment, which is attention rather than a view on price. Nothing documented issues a buy, a sell, a target or an allocation — but every one of those outputs is generated text, and a cited report is still a report somebody has to check.

Alternatives

The jump on this card is from free to 4,500 dollars a year, so the useful alternatives are the ones that price the middle. Token Terminal sells protocol fundamentals at 350 dollars a month, Artemis at 100 for a seat, and DefiLlama gives away the TVL and fee series entirely.

For the news half, nothing here matches the analyst-verified event stream; the nearest thing in the catalogue is Santiment, which reads social rather than reporting, and CoinGecko API, which carries asset profiles and prices without the research desk behind them.

If it is the raw material you want rather than the write-up, Dune and Allium sell the chain data these profiles are built on.