Cork Protocol

Cork has raised $5.5M to build the missing tokenized risk infrastructure for digital assets. Led by @RoadCapMgmt and @a16zcrypto CSX, Cork has raised from investors who recognize the market opportunity of introducing tokenized risk into the digital asset ecosystem.

Phil Fogel says almost everything onchain is an unpriced credit product and KelpDAO proved it: "Almost everything onchain is actually a credit product. A stablecoin is a credit product. An LRT, an LST, IOUs with credit risk, infrastructure risk." "We're stacking all these risks on top of each other and the risk is interconnected. There's no way to isolate individual portions, price them, hedge them, or even set a market signal on what they should cost." "KelpDAO, bridge risk, liquidity risk in Aave that nobody priced, depeg risk on the LRT, oracle risk. All at once. None of it was isolated. None of it was priced. The only question anyone was asking was what's my rate. Cork is building the primitive that changes that."

The reality is that risk assessment hasn’t evolved much since the earliest days of onchain markets. Real-time pricing and information about the risk of different products is table stakes in TradFi. Onchain finance needs to catch up in order to support more institutional capital. @philfog at Stable Summit

The biggest unlock for institutional capital onchain isn't another lending market or yield strategy. It's the bridge between qualified custody and onchain representation, and it has to start with cash. Get cash onchain in a strongly regulated format and the rest of the curve gets built on top of it. The underlying securities are already coming. The piece that makes them usable for institutions is what's still missing. A sharp moment from a recent panel @Philfog moderated alongside @SPDJIndices, @BaillieGifford, and @Bitwise.

Nice to see risk management as its own category in @serotonin_hq’s State of Onchain Credit report. The protocol mechanism of Cork operates as tranching: assets are split into two in order to price and transfer risk. The impact of tranching, however, extends across categories: ✔️ Risk Analysis: with transparent risk pricing, everyone from vault curators to asset allocators to retail investors can see how risky an asset or position might be. ✔️ Risk Management: risk can be hedged against for specific strategies and assets. ✔️ Liquidity: robust risk management begets liquidity, helping DeFi grow to new levels.

The importance of yield diligence is growing. How is the yield being generated? How sustainable is it? How secure is it? How liquid is your position, truly? Yield is rarely free

Audit-and-pray is dead, the real fight is in the mempool Alongside @HypernativeLabs and @buda_kyiv, Baptiste broke down real-time exploit interception, whitehat front-running, and the rise of 24/7 crypto SOCs youtube.com/watch?v=qJv8Ku…

"The time to solve security is before you need it. Once it's broken, everyone's watching and you're out of time." Our CTO @Pybast lives in the part of DeFi most people don't think about until it's too late: what happens when things break, while they're breaking. He took the stage at Rekt to talk about exactly that.

@Philfog @SchwabNetwork Watch the full interview 👇 schwabnetwork.com/video/crypto-s…

When something goes wrong, who absorbs the loss? @philfog on @Schwabnetwork: As institutions move into DeFi, they bring with them a new wave of people who have deep, traditional expertise in pricing and underwriting risk. They will look for familiar solutions to risk management and direct their capital accordingly.

DeFi's whole promise is non-skeuomorphic finance, building primitives onchain to create products TradFi can't. But the industry still hasn't cracked its most basic problem. KYC and onboarding remain the real bottleneck. You can embed compliance logic, licensing terms, and a dozen other rules directly into a smart contract and still end up doing paperwork. In 2026, parts of that paperwork still need wet signatures. The smart contract is the easy part; the bottleneck is the human in the loop, which nobody has automated yet. A sharp moment from a recent panel @Philfog moderated.

"These tail risk events will push the ecosystem to reassess how risk is currently expressed and priced in DeFi. Right now, all risks are effectively bundled into a single APY. That one number incorporates liquidity risk, collateral risk, smart contract risk, and tail risk. For a more mature system, that is not sufficient."

Full interview 👇 schwabnetwork.com/video/crypto-s…

Yield continues to be the most attractive value proposition to onchain investors. Despite yields compressing across the DeFi ecosystem, neither the appetite nor the competition will slow down. The easiest, most liquid assets have already moved onchain. To offer more competitive yields, expect more esoteric, illiquid assets to follow in the months to come. They'll come with their own opportunities, and their own risks.

A question worth sitting with: you can have centralized stablecoins and permissionless rails at the same time... for now Whether that holds is the actual fight Stable Summit panel with @Philfog, @SupersetFinance, @USDT0_to, @stablecoin, and @GearboxProtocol.

1/ 🧵 $292M of rsETH — was drained from @KelpDAO's @LayerZero_Core bridge in a single forged message. 48 hours later, $13B of DeFi TVL had walked out the door whilst it remains unclear where the losses actually will land. Let's unpack the ecosystem impact.

Full panel 👇 youtube.com/watch?v=3LJLqC…

TradFi has lessons to teach us. TradFi acknowledges that different assets have different liquidity, and pays accordingly. A liquidity premium pays you more for being locked up for a longer time. This is why treasuries have lower rates; they're more liquid. You accept the risk of a more illiquid asset, and thus you reap the reward. DeFi doesn't have the same lever to disambiguate assets. The risk of illiquidity is shuffled around between users. It's never isolated, never priced, and never traded, so it remains an existential time bomb. One of the sharpest conversations at @stable_summit this year was about exactly this.