Startup Blockworks wants to become the crypto equivalent of Morningstar. How it plans to do it

Crypto startup Blockworks plans to use the proceeds from its previously unreported fundraise to scoop up some of its rivals and become a kind of Morningstar for digital assets, co-founder Jason Yanowitz told CNBC.

The company aims to build out its crypto-focused data platform for traders of on-chain assets, which include cryptocurrencies as well as digital representations of equities, commodities and real-world assets that live on blockchains. Its goal is to serve as a destination for the kind of high-quality tools that have long benefited traders of stocks and bonds but have so far eluded their crypto counterparts. 

“We’re so behind on data and research and information [for digital assets],” Yanowitz said. “In traditional finance you have Morningstar … but also like FactSet … and Moody’s and S&P Global Research.

“Those don’t exist yet for assets that are coming onto [the blockchain],” he added.

To realize that vision, the firm plans to scoop up a few of its competitors with the proceeds from its Series A extension round that closed earlier this year. Co-led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures with support from Coinbase’s venture capital arm, the extension round valued Blockworks at $192 million. 

Yanowitz declined to disclose the dollar amount of funds raised in the extension round. The founder also declined to disclose Blockworks’ exact revenue figures, but he said that its annual recurring revenue grew more than 500% last year and “continues to scale rapidly.”

A portion of those gains come from Blockworks’ events business, which hosts a popular institutional crypto conference called the Digital Assets Summit.

A sprawling crypto data industry

Crypto-native companies have competed to scrape, clean, aggregate and distribute data from blockchains to sell to traders for more than a decade. Traders use that data to track price patterns, time trades and mitigate risks, among other things. 

A clear leader in the sprawling crypto data industry, which could be worth as much as billions of dollars, has never been crowned, per Yanowitz. As a result, retail and institutional traders of on-chain assets have had to rely on a hodgepodge of tools and services from a wide range of data providers to make informed purchases and sales, which is both inconvenient and expensive.

It’s a pain point that could deter people from trading digital assets, hindering the market’s growth at a time when it has more support than ever to gain ground. 

Over the last two years, the U.S. has increasingly adopted a softer regulatory and legislative stance on tokenized assets, leading the crypto market to boom. In 2024, the Securities Exchange Commission greenlighted spot bitcoin and ether ETFs to trade, widening institutional and retail traders’ access to the crypto market. In 2025, Trump signed the Genius Act into law, a measure that established a crucial legislative framework for stablecoins.

Improving crypto adoption through data access

While the cryptocurrency market has grown and matured, the same can’t be said about many of the data providers that serve it, according to Yanowitz.

“Every asset class in history has required data you can rely on, a way for businesses to communicate with investors, and disclosures that hold issuers accountable,” Yanowitz said. “In traditional markets, that infrastructure is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In crypto, almost none of it exists.”

However, the executive is hopeful that his firm can address those hinderances to wider alternative asset adoption.

“Crypto has a trust problem, and it is two-sided,” Yanowitz said. “Businesses have not done the work to earn institutional trust, and investors do not have the information they need to underwrite the asset class. We are here to fix both sides of that.”