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.

What's coming onchain today is mostly old products in a new wrapper. Same thing, new label. @SamirTabar and @Philfog on what actually changes the game: go down to the primitive, rebuild there, and you finally see truly novel financial assets emerge with brand new capabilities.

"Imagine pump and dump schemes happening at machine scale where the machines coordinate and you have no visible controls." @SamirTabar and @Philfog on what happens when agentic finance goes wrong, and why it's going to make Madoff look small.

In 2006, burry walked into goldman to write a custom CDS on a basket of subprime mortgages, negotiated bilaterally and settled offchain over weeks and months. That same trade can now happen onchain, and soon both sides of it will be agents.

What's next at Cork: vault infrastructure where curators become primary risk underwriters One vault, many markets, each tuned to a specific buyer More from the @therollupco

One question DeFi teams haven't answered: if you bought downside protection and the underlying gets exploited, can you use that protection to walk away with clean assets? Right now it's up to a multisig in real time. Real underwriting decides who eats the loss before it happens.

Global insurance is a $7.2T business running on decades-old plumbing. Meanwhile, DeFi already secures $79B and tokenized RWAs are pushing $30B after quadrupling in a year. Everyone talks about bringing capital onchain. With capital comes risk, especially as increasingly-liquid and open markets are still supported by outdated risk infrastructure like global insurance is.

A vault gets a bad signal and every agent following it runs the same playbook in the same minute: liquidity vanishes, spreads blow out, and few survive. This is what the future of onchain risk management looks like as agents takes more and more of a primary role in DeFi. Agents need more flexible and scalable ways to manage risk than flee at the first perceived sign of a problem.

the next Cork is almost here, think you'll like it

Duration risk doesn't magically disappear when things are brought onchain. Like watching a world cup stadium emptying through a single door.

Agents do 250K txs onchain daily. Cork is built for them: •One address for every market •Find any pool without querying the chain •Uses the rollover standard agents are converging on •Check prices for free, settle on commit Three commands, no middleware, no UI to scrape

If it exists onchain, you can price it with Cork

Most people know Cork for liquidity buffers and peg resilience. Those are real products, live, shipping. But they aren't the full picture. Cork's primitive lets anyone build bespoke risk products onchain. Custom triggers, custom settlement, custom premiums. The kind of structured risk product that historically only existed in bilateral TradFi deals, the bespoke CDS Michael Burry walked into Goldman to get written in 2006. The difference: Cork's are transparent, composable, fully collateralized from the start, with no margin calls and no counterparty default risk. Live onchain, audited by Certora and ChainSecurity, in production.

Three Michael Burrys walk up to the same @Morpho vault token, each wanting something completely different. One wants NAV protection that swaps to stablecoins at 97 cents if NAV drops more than 3%, the next wants pure on-demand liquidity at NAV for a higher premium and no downside coverage, the third doesn't want a swap at all but cash insurance up to 10 cents per dollar if NAV slips below par. Same vault, same asset, three completely different products. None of these easily exist in DeFi or TradFi today because you take what's on the menu or you walk away. That's the entire problem with how risk works in this industry. Agents don't pick from menus, they write them, and Cork is the rails for the menu they're about to write.

Risk customization, not risk mitigation. Take one @Morpho vault token. Three different users walk in wanting three different things out of their position: NAV protection, on-demand liquidity, range coverage. None of these products exist for them today, and no single “risk mitigation” product would fit their specific needs. We’re building the layer for scalable risk mitigation at Cork.

prompt engineering was 2024 context engineering is 2026

Over the last couple of weeks, I replaced our project management layer at Cork with an agent. The setup is straightforward. A repo holds read credentials for Granola, Slack, Notion, Drive and the Github commits. A scheduled Cronjob fires every 4 hours, pulls the diff since the last run (new transcripts, messages, commits), and runs it through a classifier that maps each artifact to an owner and an active workstream. Output writes to a public dashboard: who’s working on what, what was shipped, status of each feature in development and progress towards quarterly goals etc. No more moving tickets on a kanban; that whole workflow is now automated. The main constraint we built that makes this work: the agent only ingests what’s readable in the shared workspace. A decision made in a DM is invisible. So the team has moved almost everything into public surfaces. Commit frequently to remote, threads in channels instead of DMs. Working in private now has a direct cost (it doesn’t get counted), and working in public now has a direct and measurable benefit. The system still has some limitations and kinks, information that is untracked leaves minor gaps and crunching large volumes of data automatically can at times cause miss-annotations, but it’s directionally where the future of task tracking will go, enabling us to focus on the real work instead of boring reporting tasks.

the past few weeks alone: @a16zcrypto $34B in onchain RWAs @HaunVentures $1B crypto x AI agents fund @PanteraCapital AI+blockchain thesis letter tokenized stocks at $3.4B/mo led by @OndoFinance the bear market is doing more work than the last bull

.@_TalkingTokens asked me: "If you could tokenize anything, what would it be?" Entire balance sheets is the answer. Banks and companies use their balance sheets for most of their actions. If you're able to tokenize an entire balance sheet, you could do everything else onchain.