Abstract:
We propose that Messari provides research and reporting services for Venus 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. We’ve also received a grant from The Graph to become a core developer. It has allowed us 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
(4) reports on Venus that present and analyze KPIs and fundamental metrics including:
○ Financial metrics: circulating supply, token inflation, protocol revenue by source, depositor revenue, borrower Interest, circulating market cap, fully diluted market cap
○ Key Metrics: Outstanding loans/deposits, net deposit/withdrawals, net borrow/repay, liquidations, depositor yield, staking yield, utilization, interest rates, market concentration, number of pools ○
○ User Analysis: daily active users, new addresses, total fees paid by chain and token
○ Market Share Analysis: Key metrics vs. other lending protocols ■ Separate certain metrics by chain where relevant
○ DAO Analysis: Voter activity, treasury composition and expenditures, grant funding distributed (if applicable)
○ Qualitative Discussion of protocol upgrades, governance, grants, and roadmap initiatives
Examples: Venus, 1inch, Synthetix
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 Venus, 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 our assessment of interest rate optimizations on protocol revenue to further quantify the impact.
Facilitate protocol business development
This information gets sent out to over 350,000 of our subscribers of which ⅓ comprises most of the top crypto native builders in the space. By getting high-quality information around Venus’s mechanics and real traction, it increases the likelihood of more projects building on and integrating with Venus.We’ve seen our 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 we have 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 numbers
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Bloomberg Terminal:
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325,000 users
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S&P Global Capital IQ
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12,000 enterprises
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Refinitiv
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400,000 users
Additional stats*
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5 asset managers >$100b
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10 asset managers >$1b
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5 hedge funds >$50b
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11 hedge funds >$1b
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Aggregate AUM: $5.5 trillion
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12 large corporates
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Market cap: $750b
*numbers are only from Refinitiv as we’re working with Bloomberg and S&P to get more distribution stats
Commitment to transparency
Funding this type of reporting demonstrates a proactive commitment by Venus to transparency and accountability, two core tenets of this industry. Doing so sends positive signals to prospective users, clients, and partners. Additionally, our work with regulators in DC has made it clear that this type of transparency is looked upon favorably and highlights decentralization by working with third-party service providers to execute crucial functions.
Pricing & Resources
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(4) Quarterly Reports ($23,750/quarter)
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(1) Enterprise License ($8,000/annual) *comped
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Total: $95,000
Which goes towards funding:
Research
Our 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
We have several members of the team working on distribution for these reports across all of Messari’s channels along with the third-party partners.