[1IP-74] Messari Protocol Services 1inch Proposal 2025

ABSTRACT

We propose that Messari continues to provide research and reporting services for 1inch Network in the form of Quarterly Reports. This will serve to better inform existing stakeholders and attract new ones while building out the open-source data infrastructure for the community.

ABOUT MESSARI

Messari is a team of crypto natives passionate about building powerful data analytics tools for the Web3 world. The company was started in early 2018 and has since scaled to over 150 employees after raising a Series B led by Brevan Howard. Messari has also received a grant from The Graph to become a core developer. It has allowed the company to build and standardize subgraphs, creating a robust open-source data infrastructure for the broader crypto ecosystem.

Messari is functionally split into two distinct units:

• Messari Enterprise, a paywalled market intelligence platform that operates like a traditional SaaS business.
• Messari Protocol Services, which provides research and reporting services on behalf of protocols and DAOs. The entirety of the work from the underlying data infrastructure to the reports themselves are open sourced and publicly available. Therefore, the work is sustained based on grants from projects whether through the development team, grants program, or DAO treasury funding.

This proposal is coming on behalf of Messari Protocol Services.

PROPOSAL BREAKDOWN

Quarterly Reports Four (4) Quarterly reports on 1inch that present and analyze KPIs and fundamental metrics including:

• Financial metrics: circulating market cap, fully diluted market cap, circulating supply, total supply, token inflation, revenue, staking yield, treasury balance, treasury expenditures
• Network metrics: transactions (successful, failed, total), active addresses, new addresses, average transaction fees, contract calls, contract callers, address retention, days active per address, transactions per address, contracts interacted with per address
• 1inch Network specific metrics: daily average external volume, daily average transactions, total 1inch staked, and treasury balance

Examples: State of 1inch Q2’24, State of 1inch Q1’24

RATIONALE

Surfacing on-chain metrics and key developments

These reports better inform existing stakeholders through recurring, data-driven research from trusted, independent analysts. The actionable insights generated from these reports will better educate them on the economic, financial, and social health of 1inch, whether it’s a surge in trading volume across a certain market or the implications of a major upgrade or governance decision. There are compounding effects to this as various stakeholders are able to leverage our work to further their goals.

Example - Gauntlet using Messari’s assessment of interest rate optimizations on protocol revenue to further quantify the impact.

Facilitate protocol business development

This information gets sent out to over 360,000 of our subscribers of which ⅓ comprises most of the top crypto-native builders in the space. By continuing to deliver high-quality information around 1inch’s mechanics and real traction, it increases the likelihood of more projects building on and integrating with 1inch.

We’ve seen Messari’s reporting frequently end up on major DAO governance forums (deploying Uniswap on Filecoin VM and Avalanche)

Institutional adoption

Existing mainstream coverage of crypto is woefully lacking. Investment banking and sell-side equity research coverage of crypto fails to paint an accurate picture of the material developments in this industry. When it comes to DeFi and even more nuanced aspects of this industry, things only get worse.

To combat this Messari has spent significant resources getting onboarded to many of the largest traditional research platforms in the world, including the Bloomberg Terminal, S&P Capital IQ, and Refinitiv. This goes a long way to further professionalize the projects we work with to the vast majority of major funds, banks, financial service companies, and large corporations in the world. After reading these reports, these entities will better grasp the magnitude of economic activity generated by the protocol.

There are trillions of dollars in AUM represented by the consumers of these platforms, so even a small percentage of users consuming this information and acting on it can drive meaningful activity on-chain.

Distribution Metrics

Bloomberg Terminal: 325,000 users S&P Global Capital IQ: 12,000 enterprises Refinitiv: 400,000 users

Additional Stats (Refinitiv + S&P)

13 asset managers >$100b 22 asset managers >$1b 5 hedge funds >$50b 11 hedge funds >$1b Aggregate AUM: $12.2 trillion
12 Enterprises (Mkt cap: +$750b)

Commitment to transparency

Funding this reporting underscores 1inch’s proactive commitment to transparency, public awareness, and accountability, both fundamental principles in this industry. It sends positive signals to potential users, clients, and partners.

PRICING & RESOURCES

“State of 1inch” Quarterly Reports cost $22.5k USD each, totaling a $90k contract for 12-15 months of collaboration. This goes towards funding:

• Research. Messari analysts spend several weeks researching and writing each report, along with an extensive internal editing and review process by the broader team.
• Data Science and Engineering. Each report will have its own dedicated data science and engineering resources tasked with providing all the relevant raw data. This requires ingesting large amounts of data which is housed in a data warehouse, incurring storage and compute costs.
• Distribution. Messari has several members of the team working on distribution for these reports across all of Messari’s channels along with the thirdparty partners.