Everyone present bears responsibility for the increasingly superficial nature of crypto investment research.
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Everyone present bears responsibility for the increasingly superficial nature of crypto investment research.
Crypto research is dead, long live crypto research!
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Artem Oak
Compiled by: TechFlow
I've been wanting to talk about this topic for a while, and today I've finally decided to speak up.
Even though I might be shooting myself in the foot, as I am a co-founder of @OAK_Res_EN (a research outlet), I believe it's necessary to discuss the current state of the concept of "research" in the crypto space today and what it has become.
Before diving in, I need to clarify the scope of "research" referred to in this article.
I won't be discussing academia or theoretical research (for that, you can refer to @post_polar_).
I also won't be discussing blockchain infrastructure or MEV (for those, look at the work of @Nethermind, @VitalikButerin, or Flashbots).
Furthermore, I won't focus on on-chain research (for that, refer to @zachxbt, @arkham, or @mlmabc).
The focus of this article will be on "Research Outlets".
1 - What is a Research Outlet?
Broadly speaking, research outlets are media companies that provide more in-depth information than news media. Here are some examples:
- News Media: Trump bought a burger with Bitcoin.
- Research Outlet: Deep Analysis of the Bitcoin Market State in Q4 2025.
- News Media: Analyst says Ethereum price could surge to $6,420.
- Research Outlet: $ETH burn reaches all-time high as FrankDeGods releases another revenue-sharing-based ERC-20 token.
You get the idea.
Historically, this space has been dominated by three major players: @MessariCrypto, @blockworksres, and @delphi_digital (of course, there are others, but these three have been the most well-known to crypto investors in recent years).
Apart from Messari focusing on research, the others have also been involved in other activities in the crypto space. For example, Blockworks used to have its own news division (though it shut down in 2025), and TheBlock adopted a similar organizational model. Meanwhile, Delphi has supported numerous projects in the field through its investment arm, Delphi Ventures.
These three companies dominated the crypto research space, becoming the primary source of quality content for institutions and crypto investors willing to dig deeper. This content wasn't just news; it included data analysis and, in some cases, even predictions.
Then, everything started to change.
2 - The Rise of "Research"
During the 2022-2024 crypto cycle, many realized that research was a quite profitable business: the media market was becoming saturated, protocols became more cautious about inflated data, and they also wanted to reach a more professional audience to promote their solutions, incorporating research as part of their marketing toolkit.
At the same time, the pricing of the aforementioned three giants was relatively high, leading to the emergence of more alternatives.
The First Wave of Research Outlets
One of the first research outlets I noticed on Twitter was @FourPillarsFP. They offered long-form articles centered on technology, analysis, and data. Subsequently, other outlets emerged, such as @castle_labs, @GLC_Research, @hazeflow_xyz, @OAK_Res_EN, and @OnchainHQ, among others.
While traditional research outlets typically relied on dual revenue streams (subscriptions + marketing budgets from protocols and blockchains), these new outlets primarily focused on product promotion. Whether it was a new feature for your favorite protocol, a new blockchain upgrade, or the launch of a new project, these outlets provided crypto teams with broader reach, covering multilingual audiences (e.g., FP focused on the Korean market, OAK Research had strong influence in French-speaking regions) at lower prices than Messari. Additionally, they offered many new creative ideas for promoting products.
While I personally believe the emergence of this first wave of research outlets was overall beneficial for the industry (of course, I may be biased), the next wave disrupted the field and further blurred the concept of "research."
The Emergence of Research "Abusers"
First, the vast majority of accounts on Crypto Twitter (CT) calling themselves "researchers" are likely just accounts using AI to generate content. They take the hottest topics, process them through ChatGPT (likely the free version), and post them to attract traffic and engagement.
The second wave of crypto "research" quickly became unbearable: no platform or website support, filled with lengthy tweet threads about some protocol you don't care about, but backed by an active Kaito promotion campaign; add in various alliance badges and a flood of AI-generated content, and the entire timeline was flooded with this "research" spam.
The crypto research space became overcrowded and even somewhat meaningless.
I believe this second wave of "alternative research" was negative for the entire industry because it blurred the definition of "research," leading to a group of people with little understanding of the crypto space having significant online influence within our ecosystem.
3 - The Cost of Complacency: Why Crypto Research Has Come to This
Whenever things don't go well, people tend to look for someone to blame. In the current state of crypto research, we need to reflect not only on the marketing personnel responsible for budgets in crypto companies but also on ourselves—both traditional research outlets and the first wave of new research outlets.
Traditional research outlets became complacent, and innovation stagnated. What we often saw were three reports with similar styles, like "State of X Report for Q3 202X" (where X represents some protocol nobody cares about). These reports were sold at high prices but had extremely simple structures: some data, some news, plus some analysis content applied by the same analyst to different protocols.
The first wave of new research outlets directly shifted their focus to marketing: they didn't need to provide real value to users because this content was free. Their main task was to negotiate with protocols, agreeing on the quantity and price of articles (and social media promotion content) they would produce for them.
The problems with this content mainly stem from two aspects:
- Protocol Restrictions: Most protocols, when paying research outlets, typically won't allow you to make negative comments about them. This restriction prevents you from publishing some viewpoints you truly believe in, thereby reducing the quality of research articles.
- Data Availability and Lack of Interpretation: For those who genuinely need data, most of it can be easily found on @DefiLlama (they are the industry leaders). Therefore, if your article simply lists data without in-depth analysis and interpretation, then such content becomes meaningless.
Of course, not all protocols will restrict your publications, but if the protocol you serve is unhappy with how you describe them, your coverage can quickly become biased.
This is why research outlets have fallen to their current state: the article content is dry, with almost no unique insights (alpha), and the readership is limited to a small number of participants in the market. These articles could easily be replaced by DeFiLlama data combined with the latest news scraped by ChatGPT.
Although AI has given the concept of "research" a bad name, the real reason for the current state of crypto research is actually the complacency and laziness of industry practitioners.
4 - Personal Reflection
"Wow, this guy criticizes so harshly, yet isn't his own research outlet doing these things too?"
Yes, I am well aware of what we have become.
2025 was a strange year for OAK Research. I've already outlined what we went through in a previous article, but we indeed failed to deliver satisfactory results in some aspects. In the final part of this article, I want to discuss this.
If you want to know more, you can check out my article here: Click here.
When we started OAK Research, we believed data should be our core value. However, we quickly realized that no matter how much time and effort we invested in this area, we couldn't gain an advantage. Because platforms like DeFiLlama could always provide data faster, better, and more clearly.
After much thought, we found that we were indeed one of the earliest teams to notice some important narratives, such as the Fee Switch narrative, $ENA's performance, Hyperliquid's dominance, etc. Therefore, we decided to focus on discussing protocols, blockchains, innovation, and narratives. However, after a few months, we gradually fell into the old path of "doing marketing budgets for protocols." Our sole goal became promoting products, rather than providing truly valuable articles for the users who followed our content.
This is a mistake we don't want to make again and a direction we hope to avoid in the future.
Our Future Commitment
"Research" in the crypto space should represent meaningful content, should express genuine opinions, and focus on areas the company truly cares about (whether it's privacy, L1 performance, perp DEXs, DeFi, etc.).
In the future, we hope to provide more content that can truly impact readers, offering them deep insights into what is truly important in the current crypto cycle.
We will still collaborate with protocols, blockchains, exchanges, and other crypto products. But these collaborations will focus on deeper content, providing more insights, and offering more comprehensive explanations of why we choose to cover a certain topic or why we decide to partner with a particular project.
We express our sincere gratitude to those partners who truly trust us (gm @ethena_labs, @eulerfinance, @pythnetwork, @krakenfx, @HypurrFi, @plasma, and other partners). We hope to continue collaborating with them but with a new direction and higher-quality content to bring more value to the projects and the entire ecosystem.
Conclusion
Although this article is quite critical of the current state of crypto research, I predict that this year, some emerging research outlets will rise to a status comparable to existing traditional players, becoming one of the core budget expenditures for protocols seeking additional exposure beyond traditional PR.
I also look forward to more collaboration among major research outlets. We have already collaborated with @castle_labs and @hazeflow to launch our End-of-Year (EOY) report, but in the future, we hope to extend this collaboration to @FourPillarsFP, @blocmates, and @dl_research (hehe, @paigeaarhus), and other research outlets.
Finally, this year has confirmed that we are on the right path. Yes, we have made some mistakes, but today we are able to recognize these issues and do better in the future.
Happy 2026, everyone!
Crypto research is dead, long live crypto research!
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