1kx

In episode 62 of Scenius Studio I sit down with @lalleclausen, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of @1kxnetwork. With Lasse at the helm and roots dating back to 2018, 1kx has become one of the industry’s most reputable venture firms with a deep-research, thesis driven investment approach. The team recently released the second iteration of their Cost of Trust thesis which frames where they believe the largest crypto outcomes will come from over the next few cycles. Lasse is a true professional with a firm grip on the evolving crypto venture dynamics. In this episode we discuss: ➔ Lasse’s background and the decision to launch 1kx ➔ Lessons learned in the 8 years since running the firm ➔ Evolving venture dynamics and the new founder archetype in crypto ➔ The Cost of Trust Thesis 2.0 ➔ What categories enable a 0-1 change and have rent-seeking intermediaries that are ripe for disruption and large outcomes ➔ Attributes that 1kx looks for in the founders they back ➔ Lasse’s spiciest takes 🌶 Hope you enjoy this episode of Scenius Studio. Links to listen below👇 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3edvAl… Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sce…

Everything we back at @1kxnetwork comes down to one question: what does it cost two parties who don't fully trust each other to transact, and who keeps the margin that cost creates? In capital markets that margin runs to $17 to $24 billion a year on trade processing alone, the back-office work of matching, confirming, and reconciling trades that exists because every party keeps a separate ledger that has to be checked against everyone else's. It's the most measurable piece of the cost of trust, billed back to whoever is transacting. $32B in real-world assets now sit on public blockchains, up 5x from January 2025. BlackRock's BUIDL alone holds $2.4B; Apollo, Franklin Templeton, Goldman, BNY, and JPMorgan are all running tokenized funds or payment rails, with Kinexys processing more than $5B daily; the DTCC announced a tokenization pilot for 2026 earlier this year. The shift from crypto-native experiment to incumbent infrastructure project happened largely in the last 18 months. Tokenization is doing four things to assets in this market: letting them settle around the clock, making ownership programmable, cutting issuance and servicing costs by collapsing intermediaries, and opening access to investors who couldn't reach these assets through domestic brokers. The limits matter just as much: liquidity still depends on whether anyone wants the asset, credit risk still depends on whether the borrower pays back, and most tokenized equities today are synthetic or custodial claims rather than direct shares on a company's register. I wrote a piece walking through the six layers of the RWA stack and where value concentrates by asset class. 1kx invests in the three layers an incumbent ends up renting from someone else regardless of how much it spends internally: compliance, data, and the issuance infrastructure asset managers depend on. Four 1kx portfolio companies already serving institutions at scale: @SuperstateInc, @0xPredicate, @cryptio_co, @redstone_defi. Between them, they cover issuance, compliance, accounting, and oracles for the firms running this market. The fourth layer runs the other way. Distribution isn't a neutral rail, it's the place to own the end customer, and the edge we see there is in DeFi, the channel we think gains most from tokenization. Full piece linked in the reply. Building in this space? We want to hear from you. Disclosure: 1kx is an investor in Superstate, Predicate, Cryptio, and RedStone.

Deployment of agentic AI is no longer bottlenecked by capability, but rather on security & trust. New piece in the @1kxnetwork cost of trust series: 20+ security incidents, 50+ products, and 100+ academic papers condensed and mapped onto a four-layer architecture.

Update on lending markets: @aave's share of TVL amongst lending protocols drops towards all-time lows, whilst @spark and @Morpho are gaining