Deloitte Taps Blocknative Team to Advance Web3 and AI Strategy

May 22, 2026

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Deloitte, one of the Big Four professional services firms, has acquired Blocknative, a crypto infrastructure company, in a talent acquisition deal following Blocknative’s plan to wind down its operations.

The acquisition is not a full company buyout but rather a transfer of Blocknative’s talent pool to Deloitte, with the former Blocknative team set to drive Web3 innovation across Deloitte’s client portfolio.

The move, according to Blocknative, is aimed at leveraging blockchain and cryptographic technology to address the trust, coordination, and verification problems that hinder enterprise adoption of agentic artificial intelligence, particularly as several traditional financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, develop their own agentic AI solutions.

“This chapter of our work in the ecosystem is coming to a close: on mempool visibility, transaction orchestration, block building, MEV auctions, private order flow, transaction pricing, and more,” said Matt Cutler, Blocknative founder and chief executive officer.

“That work was shaped by our customers, the protocol teams, wallet builders, researchers, and institutions who pushed for better answers.”

With Blocknative winding down its operations, the company has announced that it will shut down its application programming interface (API) services on June 19, 2026, alongside its gas network, which relies on the API. Teams and companies that depend on the Blocknative API have been advised to begin migration planning, including testing, swapping, and confirming operational readiness, before the June 19 deadline.

The shutdown of Blocknative comes amid a wave of crypto company closures over the past few months. The last quarter saw more than 20 crypto companies restructuring or shutting down due to declining market conditions, high operational costs, and strategic pivots toward artificial intelligence, including Dmail, Balancer Labs, Magic Eden, and Tally.

About Blocknative

Blocknative is a San Francisco-based blockchain infrastructure company that specializes in real-time observability and optimization tools for public blockchains, particularly Ethereum and other EVM-compatible Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks.

Before its planned shutdown, Blocknative had raised around 34 million dollars from investors and built a decentralized oracle gas network that provides real-time gas pricing data across more than 40 networks.

It has also served several notable blockchain companies, including the Ethereum Foundation, Curve Finance, and Tally.

Tags:

#Crypto #Web3 #Blockchain #Ethereum #Infrastructure #AI #Deloitte #Blocknative #Agentic AI #Acquisition

Dune Cuts 25% of Staff to Accelerate AI Crypto Data Push

Charles Obison

May 18, 2026

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Fredrik Haga, CEO and co-founder of crypto analytics firm Dune, has revealed the firm’s plan to lay off a quarter, or 25%, of its staff, citing AI investments as the reason for this decision.

“We’re restructuring Dune to sharpen our focus around the core data products thousands of customers across the crypto industry rely on. That unfortunately means we’ve let 25% of the team go this week. These are exceptional people I can wholeheartedly recommend. Ping me if you’re hiring top crypto talent,” Haga wrote in a post on X.

The decision to lay off some of its staff, according to Haga, is driven by the firm’s plan to accelerate more quickly with AI, with Dune positioning itself as the only firm to have built an end to end stack for crypto data. Its stack performs key roles in data ingestion, quality assurance, storage, cleaning, normalizing, and querying.

“With Dune MCP, teams and agents can now build dashboards and workflows without needing to know anything about SQL or data infrastructure and associated costs,” Haga said. Dune Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open protocol that allows AI tools to connect to external data sources in a structured way. It automates much of the manual work associated with data use.

By cutting its workforce, Dune aims to double down on AI and its end to end crypto data stack, including its model context protocol, which is already being used by some of the industry’s biggest players such as Polygon Labs, 1inch, Base, OP Labs, Blockworks, and COW Protocol.

Tech Layoffs Continue to Rise

Layoffs, especially in the tech and crypto sectors, continue to rise. According to a recent survey, about 81,000 layoffs were recorded in the first quarter of 2026, the highest since 2023, with the number reaching more than 100,000 by early May.

Several crypto companies have reduced their workforces in recent months. Coinbase most recently cut 14% of its workforce, laying off about 700 employees. The company cited a volatile crypto market and a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence focused operations as reasons for the layoffs.

Other companies, including Crypto.com, Gemini, Algorand Foundation, and Block, have also reduced their workforces. Many of these firms have pointed to a volatile crypto market and a broader strategic pivot toward artificial intelligence as contributing factors to the cuts.

Tags:

#Web3 #Coinbase #AI #Artificial Intelligence #Dune #Fredrik Haga #Crypto Analytics #Crypto Layoffs #Blockchain Data #Dune MCP

Crypto’s Moment: The Shift Has Happened

Nathan Mantia

May 10, 2026

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I've been attending crypto conferences for years now, each one has its own unique appeal. And there was a time, not too long ago actually, when showing up at these conferences meant navigating a room packed with hoodies, anonymous Twitter handles, and a uneasy sense that the whole thing might collapse before lunch. Consensus 2026 in Miami was something else entirely. Suits. Bankers. Senators. The kind of people who, five years ago, may have sent a junior staffer to take notes and report back with a politely skeptical summary...maybe. If that Senator or Banker was on the cutting edge of what was happening in the space.

But, what was clearly apparent after attending Consensus 2026, this past May 5th through 7th at the Miami Beach Convention Center, among the more than 15,000 attendees across 150-plus sessions and thousands of private meetings... institutional representation is here. And in force. A group collectively managing an estimated $10 trillion in assets. JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Mastercard, and Goldman Sachs all had a seat at the table. This is not your old crypto conference anymore, at least not in the way that they all used to be.

From Speculation to Infrastructure

One of the clearest signals of how much the narrative has changed came from Binance’s chief marketing officer, Rachel Conlan, who put it plainly on stage: “We were in the Prohibition era. Now we are in the infrastructure phase.” That framing amplified across the entire conference. Executives from Revolut, Circle, Ripple, and a dozen other firms echoed the same sentiment in different ways: crypto has stopped trying to prove it deserves to exist and started figuring out how to scale.

A panel on crypto ETFs captured the mood well. “The market is the market,” said Dave LaValle, president of CoinDesk Indices, “it’s not crypto and traditional anymore.” Following the successful launch of U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs earlier this year, institutional access to digital assets has become genuinely standardized. In parts of Asia where spot crypto remains restricted, ETFs are now the primary on-ramp. The direction of travel is undeniable.

Conversations at the conference focused less on whether crypto belongs in traditional finance and more on portfolio allocation, diversification, and long-term positioning. That is a different conversation, and the people having it are different too. Despite the current downtrend in crypto, the increased regulatory clarity under this current U.S. administration has long-term optimism among some very serious players.

That optimism on regulatory clarity was arguably the dominant subtext running through almost every major session. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse offered one of the conference’s more quoted predictions, projecting the crypto market cap at $3 trillion by 2031 while arguing the industry should stop fighting internally and get behind the proposed CLARITY Act, imperfections and all. Panelists at events across the three days reinforced that point: regulatory certainty, more than any technological breakthrough, is what drives institutional inflows.

Stablescoins, AI, RWAs, and the Next Wave

Stablecoins were everywhere at Consensus, and not as a theoretical construct. Several speakers pointed to stablecoins as the clearest real-world use case currently accelerating mainstream blockchain adoption.

Beyond stablecoins, two other themes kept surfacing in sessions and hallway conversations: real-world asset tokenization and the convergence of AI with blockchain.

On the tokenization side, high-level sessions at Consensus outlined legal and technical blueprints for moving trillions in assets, from treasury bills to real estate, onto the blockchain for around-the-clock trading. Asset managers at the conference described it as one of the more credible near-term use cases for the technology, particularly given the growing appetite from traditional finance firms looking for yield and efficiency.

The AI angle was harder to pin down but harder to ignore. Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu suggested AI agents will eventually replace dating apps when it comes to partner selection, which got attention mostly for the absurdity of the framing. The more grounded version of the discussion, played out at Agentic University, a new dedicated technical track at the conference, centered on autonomous AI agents executing on-chain transactions and managing liquidity without human intervention. Whether that future arrives in two years or ten is still unclear. But it is definitely coming and that is certain.