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.

Loops aren't risky because they leverage exposure, they're risky because they leverage the assumption that liquidity will be there when you really need it. It rarely is.

It cost $18,000 for VaultBridge to put their remaining idle cash to work but keep it protected with Cork. The alternative was nearly $40k in foregone yield.

A month ago, $6-10B tried to leave Aave, driving 99.87% utilization for four days The new fix: lower the ceiling from 92% to 87% Same setup, slightly smaller buffer Memory is short

Excited to talk about how Cork fits into our agentic future!

“people are getting paid too little for the risk that they’re taking” @Philfog on why DeFi’s next phase is all about pricing risk properly. yellow.com/news/defi-risk…

How would the KelpDAO x Aave incident operated in a market integrated with Cork's risk infrastructure? Example: aETH was assumed fully liquid, but the exploit made it illiquid. A live Cork aETH pool would have let holders pay a premium upfront to guarantee exit liquidity at NAV, with that guarantee locked in a smart contract. Priced vs. unpriced risk

The security stack of a protocol is not an afterthought. Certain integrations, such as realtime monitoring, are core to a protocol’s design. Anticipate and plan it early, not post deployment!

@andyyy us, you knew that

With Venice absolutely ripping, what are the other top crypto x AI projects with great fundamentals???

we price prices

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.