1kx

We @1kxnetwork just released the most extensive report on monetization of the crypto industry to date: The 1kx Onchain Revenue Report (H1 '25) aggregates verified onchain fee data across 1,200+ protocols - mapping where users pay, how value flows, and which sectors are driving growth👇

CoinShares, the leading regulated asset manager, is launching its first onchain strategies on Railnet, composed of a unique direct portfolio allocation combining DeFi and real world assets. Traditional asset managers were always going to enter crypto. The real question was when and under what conditions. They started by launching ETP/ETF products, for some of them tokenised these funds, but the end goal what to extend what they have been operating for years into new rails. Over the past year, we have seen the emergence of curators shaping the onchain yield space through lending pool curation. This marked the beginning of a broader shift, moving from static yield exposure such as staking to more dynamic lending strategies. We are now entering the next phase: onchain asset management. This new category enables direct allocation across the full spectrum of DeFi, including lending, liquidity provision, and perpetual DEXs, while integrating onchain portfolios of real world assets such as money market funds, commodities, private credit, and equities. The result is a more scalable and sustainable approach, less dependent on short term token incentives. This is precisely why @CoinSharesCo is becoming a founding asset manager on Railnet. @railnet_org introduces the first open yield layer designed to standardise how synchronous DeFi positions and asynchronous RWA allocations coexist within the same onchain fund or vault. Beyond the smart contract infrastructure, Railnet provides asset managers and allocators with risk management data rooms to assess asset exposure, protocol exposure, as well as liquidity and smart contract risk across their portfolios. This also enables the application of KYT, KYC, and AML policies, ensuring compliance standards can be adapted to different worldwide jurisdictions and regulatory requirements. After extensive work with @jmmognetti, Jérôme Castille, Pierre Porthaux,Coinshares, the leading regulated asset manager, is launching its first onchain strategies on Railnet composed of a unique direct portfolio allocation combining DeFi and real world assets. Traditional asset managers were always going to enter crypto. The real question was when and under what conditions. They started by launching ETP/ETF products, for some of them tokenised these funds, but the end goal what to extend what they have been operating for years into new rails. Over the past year, we have seen the emergence of curators shaping the onchain yield space through lending pool curation. This marked the beginning of a broader shift, moving from static yield exposure such as staking to more dynamic lending strategies. We are now entering the next phase: onchain asset management. This new category enables direct allocation across the full spectrum of DeFi, including lending, liquidity provision, and perpetual DEXs, while integrating onchain portfolios of real world assets such as money market funds, commodities, private credit, and equities. The result is a more scalable and sustainable approach, less dependent on short term token incentives. This is precisely why @CoinSharesCo is becoming a founding asset manager on Railnet. @railnet_org introduces the first open yield layer designed to standardise how synchronous DeFi positions and asynchronous RWA allocations coexist within the same onchain fund or vault. Beyond the smart contract infrastructure, Railnet provides asset managers and allocators with risk management data rooms to assess asset exposure, protocol exposure, as well as liquidity and smart contract risk across their portfolios. This also enables the application of KYT, KYC, and AML policies, ensuring compliance standards can be adapted to different worldwide jurisdictions and regulatory requirements. After extensive work with @jmmognetti, Jérôme Castille, Pierre Porthaux, Benoît Pellevoizin and the CoinShares team, we are proud to bring these products to market and help define a new category in digital assets: onchain asset management. A new era in yield is emerging beyond staking and lending, combining the best of DeFi and real world assets. More to come soon 👀 and the CoinShares team, we are proud to bring these products to market and help define a new category in digital assets: onchain asset management. A new era in yield is emerging beyond staking and lending, combining the best of DeFi and real world assets. More to come soon 👀

DAS: @1kxnetwork 🤝 @archetypevc luma.com/8lysmsca

Congrats to the @cryptio_co team on the Series B. At 1kx, we back the infrastructure that turns crypto from a novel asset class into a durable financial system. Cryptio sits squarely in that category. Institutional adoption does not happen without trusted financial operations, robust controls, and audit-ready systems of record. Cryptio is building that layer for the digital asset economy, and today’s milestone reflects both the urgency of the problem and the strength of the team solving it. Excited for the road ahead.

Introducing LI.​FI’s API for Agentic Commerce, a one-shot integration for building agentic workflows onchain. We’ve released a complete toolkit for AI agents: MCP server, agent skills, and agent-native documentation. Market access for agentic commerce is now solved.

Crypto social obituaries are a genre now. Farcaster and Lens both change hands, everyone lines up to declare it dead. But they're pattern-matching to the wrong thing. The first wave didn't fail because of crypto. It failed for the same reason Mastodon and Nostr never broke out. Users don't migrate for ideology. Portability doesn't solve cold start. That's just how social networks work. Meanwhile something nobody expected is working: social financial networks. Systems where the point isn't followers or engagement. It's coordinating information, capital, and collective belief. Polymarket is arguably crypto's most successful social product and looks nothing like a traditional social network. And right when things look bleakest, something novel emerges. Moltbook recently launched. A social network for AI agents where humans are observers. In days, agents created religions, governance systems, manifestos, revenue strategies. What if the next breakout social network on blockchains isn't for humans at all? Co-authored this with @PapaDari_

Join us today at 12pm EST for “Scaling DePIN: Real-World Use Cases You Can’t Ignore” X Space.

Explore how DePIN drives scalable infrastructure for AI, compute, and beyond.
 Featuring:
James Dunthorne @Neuron_World (Neuron Innovations)
Mark Ballandies @onocoyRTK (Onocoy)
Robert Koschig @1kxnetwork (1kx) Hosted by Marcello @marcellovtv (Genzio Media)

Tune in here: x.com/i/spaces/1drjz…

In the next 16-24 months, millions of workers in software, finance, operations, and beyond are going to face a real question: what do I do now? The answer, for a surprising number of them, will be: I start something. Here's why that matters for capital formation. 🧵

What’s the real threat to privacy? At ETHDenver, @_weidai argued it isn’t “too little privacy.” “We can argue about ideology… but at the end of the day we need to get this to people to use. That’s what we’re trying to build.” Throughput improved. Demand for blockspace didn’t follow. Maximal-privacy approaches didn’t scale. If hacked money can move through a fully private system, you lose leverage. It gets harder to tell regular users from bad actors. That’s a protocol constraint rather than a moral argument. Threat-resistant (evasion-resistant) privacy is the path Wei is pointing at: protect normal users, keep stolen funds from disappearing cleanly. Crypto touches real capital and real incentives. Designs should reflect that.

We've been investing in crypto infrastructure since the early days, and the pattern is always the same: fragmentation creates friction, and friction kills adoption. Building a cross-chain DeFi experience today means stitching together multiple bridges, DEXs, and contract calls. Each one a potential failure point, each one losing users along the way. LI.​FI Composer changes this. It allows developers to compose multi-step, multi-chain workflows into a single transaction, turning what used to be a brittle patchwork into a native onchain primitive. At 1kx, we believe the protocols that win long-term are the ones that become invisible infrastructure. The ones developers can't imagine building without. Composer enables those kinds of primitives.

The Year Ahead: Forecasts from our Investment Team 2026 is the year DePIN stops being a science project. 1kx Research Associate @jakub_rusiecki weighs in: DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) has shown token incentives can mobilize distributed real-world supply quickly. In 2026, the bar rises: the best teams will win on reliability, coverage, and integration into real workflows - not just “nodes.” What we expect to see next: 🛰️ Drone intelligence becomes a product (imagery + airspace awareness): @SpexiGeospatial, @LayerDrone, and @skysafe's FliteGrid ⚡ Energy DePIN moves from pilots to programs: @daylightenergy, @fuseenergy (distributed energy) 📱 Web2 UX, Web3 rails: consumer apps quietly powered by decentralized supply - @helium, @Hivemapper, @DIMO_Network Key takeaway: This is the year DePIN starts looking less like an experiment and more like a repeatable business model.

The Year Ahead: Forecasts from our Investment Team Tokenization moves from novelty to a real product category. 1kx Research Analyst @explorerdfa: Tokenized funds gained real momentum in 2025, including meaningful steps from large financial institutions like @jpmorgan. @WSJ's @Vlajournaliste covered J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s launch of its tokenized money market fund (MONY) here: wsj.com/finance/invest… In 2026, the race is less about issuing tokens and more about building markets that users trust. The winners will be the teams that can earn distribution, sustain liquidity, and run clean operations inside clear legal and regulatory constraints. Issuance is getting cheaper. Distribution, catalog coverage, UX, and market quality are where the category will be won. Tokenized cash is becoming core infrastructure. Tokenized treasuries and cash equivalents are increasingly used as core collateral and settlement plumbing for onchain activity, including trading, borrowing, treasury management, and structured products. Tokenized equities are also shifting from “issuance” to market structure. For example, @business's @KatLeighDoherty reported that NYSE is building a venue for 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… This is a clear signal for 2026: the next wave will be won by whoever controls the rails, concentrates liquidity, and delivers execution quality users can rely on. The bottlenecks in RWAs remain legal and operational, not technical. Rights, disclosures, corporate actions, licensing, redemption guarantees, and day-two operations will decide what scales. Key takeaways for 2026? Tokenized Equities Expect more coverage across equities, funds, and new wrappers. The differentiator will be where liquidity concentrates, how good execution is, and whether these products feel as reliable as traditional venues. Tokenized Cash Look for cash products that behave like dependable building blocks: transparent, liquid, easy to integrate, and resilient during volatility. RWAs The strongest platforms will look like hybrids: strong distribution paired with institutional-grade operations and controls. What we will use to judge winners: 1) Distribution: where users already are, including wallets, exchanges, brokerages, and bank-adjacent rails 2) Liquidity: consistent market quality, not just listings 3) Operations: corporate actions, disclosures, redemptions, and audits that work without manual heroics If you’re building in tokenization, RWAs, or market infrastructure, we’re always up for a conversation.

@neilhar 🎲

Proud to share MFV’s investment into Bluff, leaning into our thesis that speculation drives innovation Why did MFV invest? Crypto casinos sit within the cross section of speculation, infrastructure, payments, trust and so many concepts blockchains were meant to solve. It is also one of the few products with PMF in crypto today and we believe is the precursor to innovation across the entire industry. How does Bluff transform an industry for the better? Online casinos are extreme-environment software companies. They are stress tests for payments, trust, identity, incentives, regulation, and real-time systems. They force ideas to work under pressure, which is how infrastructure ultimately matures. Online casinos act as adversarial laboratories for money, identity, incentives, and trust, the combination of which accelerates infrastructure that later morphs into fintech, crypto, marketplaces, and consumer platforms. It happened for brick and mortar casinos and online casinos and we believe the same will happen for crypto casinos. The team If there’s a single team to accomplish these objectives, we believe it is this one. Senior execs from Stake, bet365, William Hill, Bodog, YOLO and everyone else they’ve assembled in a short period of time is THE team. Hands down. Traction - 125M bets in beta - $10B+ wagered - >650k+ players onboarded - Real money betting went live last week

@bluffcom 🔥

BLUFF has raised $21M, led by @1kxnetwork. We’re building the next-gen platform for online betting - faster, bigger, and made for the internet. We’re here to be #1.

@pet3rpan_ @bluffcom 🎲

Incredibly excited to announce that @1kxnetwork has led a funding round into @bluffcom, a social-first, next-generation real stakes gaming platform. Establishing Bluff as a consumer-grade betting platform is just the initial beachhead for the long-term goal of evolving into a platform for increasingly novel games that differentiate via a social-first product strategy. It’s rare for a team to have such depth of crypto-native operating experience combined with traditional operating track records spanning Stake, Bet365, William Hill and more. We’re proud to partner and support them here in this funding round.

@confetti_win 🎉

The Year Ahead: Forecasts from our Investment Team "Crypto will become a building block for better AI products.” 1kx Research Partner @_weidai shares his POV: There has been a lot of hype surrounding the intersection of crypto and AI, and there is significant value in leveraging crypto rails or technologies in AI products; however, just adding decentralization or a token isn’t enough. What matters for 2026 is that projects start to leverage crypto to build better AI products. For example, programmable incentives for bootstrapping data networks or coordination, discovery, and reputation platforms for agents are each made more efficient with crypto. Standards such as @ethereum Improvement Proposal ERC-8004 (eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8004) and x402 payment protocol (coinbase.com/developer-plat…) point toward agents that can prove who they are and pay each other in real time. Key takeaway for the year ahead: Only adding decentralization or a token is not enough.

That shift is already visible if you know where to look... For example, @chernandburn & @abhiruproy30 reported for @Reuters that @Arm launched a dedicated Physical AI unit at @CES, while @nvidia framed robotics as a full-stack platform problem: reuters.com/business/autos… This isn't simply a narrative shift but an organizational one. And platforms don’t reorganize around science experiments. At the same time, @IFR_Robots shows service robots scaling across logistics, hospitality, cleaning, and healthcare: ifr.org/ifr-press-rele… These are markets driven by procurement, compliance and operations - in other words, momentum can't be attributed to hype cycles. Regulation is also catching up fast... The EU AI Act introduces mandatory logging and lifecycle traceability for high-risk systems starting in 2026: ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/arti… Audit trails stop being optional the moment robots enter regulated workflows. Now, what's crypto's role in all of this? When robots become infrastructure, coordination and trust costs move from the edges to the center, which is where crypto then becomes an essential coordination layer for identity, auditability, and multi-party accountability. Key takeaway for the year ahead: The hard problem in Physical AI has evolved from “can it work?" to “can multiple parties trust, audit, insure, and operate it at scale?” ...this is where new coordination rails - technical, legal, and financial - will become decisive.

The Year Ahead: Forecasts from our Investment Team Physical AI is becoming infrastructure. 1kx Research Principal @nichanank shares her POV: Physical AI in 2026 will focus on robots becoming deployable infrastructure. Once systems move out of demos and into real workflows, the constraints flip - capability matters less than legibility, accountability, and coordination.