Christopher

Osero has raised $13.5M, led by @SkyEcosystem and @Plasma. We're building the savings account for where your stablecoins already are.

Last week, 1kx Founding Partner @lalleclausen joined the "In Stablecoin We Trust: The Future of the Dollar" roundtable at the @MilkenInstitute Global Conference. A few takeaways. Stablecoin payment volume (excluding bot activity) averaged $49B per day in Q1 2026, up 110% year over year and compounding at 50% CAGR over the past five years. That puts daily stablecoin payments above Visa (~$44B) and Mastercard (~$30B). Supply outstanding crossed $273B by quarter-end, up 28% YoY. The growth is structural, not cyclical. Stablecoins are lower-friction payment rails picking up where the decline in correspondent banking has left off, and they offer better payment experiences for companies and individuals than the existing system delivers. One of the most interesting threads of the discussion was about trust. The trust that US institutions and the dollar generate is, in effect, expressed through market adoption of USD-backed stablecoins worldwide. It is very hard for any other country, currency, or political system to replicate that. Whether a jurisdiction can produce a stablecoin that earns free-market adoption is becoming a useful signal of institutional credibility. The build-out is happening in two layers. First, companies that handle the friction of integrating stablecoins into existing payment flows and treasury operations. Second, new banks being built that will flatten that friction into everyday treasury and payment work. Both layers are where we have spent the past several years deploying. The closing analogy stayed with us. Stablecoins are to blockchains what email was to the early internet. Email was foundational, but it was never the point. Today, stablecoins are how we send a digital dollar back and forth. Blockchains will enable programmatic trading, clearing, and settlement of every existing financial instrument, plus financial primitives that weren't possible before. Payments first. The rest is coming. #MIGLOBAL

Speedrunning on becoming irrelevant

1kx will be at the @MilkenInstitute Global Conference in Los Angeles, May 3 to 6, where @lalleclausen joins the roundtable "In Stablecoin We Trust: The Future of the Dollar." Milken brings together the CIOs, allocators, bank and asset-manager leadership, policymakers, and market infrastructure builders shaping the next decade of capital markets. This year, stablecoins and tokenized cash have moved from side panels into the core agenda: treasury, settlements, collateral, and liquidity. We published our Cost of Trust thesis in 2019, arguing that blockchain reduces the cost of establishing trust to near-zero. What we're seeing now is institutions actually paying for that trust reduction at scale, in stablecoins, tokenized cash, and the settlement infrastructure underneath them. That these questions sit at the core of Milken's agenda rather than its periphery shows how concrete the shift has become. The winners will be the structures institutions can actually hold, regulate, and plug into existing workflows. If you'll be at Milken and are thinking through what onchain finance means for your role as an allocator, issuer, or operator, our team would be glad to connect while in LA. milkeninstitute.org/content-hub/ev… #MIGLOBAL

The stablecoin market has 200+ issuers. Most won't survive contact with institutional capital. A few are already building for it. At the 2026 @rwasummit in Cannes, our Founding Partner @HeyChristopher moderated Stablecoin Wars: What Structure Will Win with @peterlih (@AllUnityStable), @Benjamin918_ (@CapApp), and @MartindRijke (@maplefinance). Three builders, three fundamentally different architectural bets: → AllUnity is issuing MiCA-regulated euro and CHF stablecoins under a BaFin e-money license, 100% backed, legally redeemable, and designed for businesses outside the crypto ecosystem → Cap is targeting pension fund capital directly, arguing smart contracts can allocate credit more efficiently than human-led underwriting, at structurally lower cost → Maple has shifted its primary KPI from AUM to ARR, betting that fee income matters more than scale Our read: yield efficiency and credit automation only matter if institutions can legally hold the underlying asset. Regulatory structure solves for that first. The stablecoins that matter will be the ones connected to the productive economy. The rest will remain infrastructure for crypto, not for capital markets. Full panel below. youtube.com/watch?v=ZBcOMh…

A highlight of @1kxnetwork investments within our thesis on threat-resistant & compliant onchain privacy. - @0xMiden: chain designed from the ground up for programmable privacy (ZK) - @zksync: private & customizable prividiums (ZK) - @inconetwork: user-friendly privacy layer for existing chains (TEEs) - @SeismicSys: privacy-enabled EVM-based fintech L1 (TEEs) - @ligero_inc: private account layer for all chains, custom-built for businesses (ZK) - @0xPredicate: programmable policy infra, for privacy protocols, defi, & beyond - @fiber_evm: private EVM wallet infra w/ a slick mobile app (ZK) Here's the exciting bit: (at least) five of the above projects are about to go live this year! 2026 is the year for onchain privacy. ----- At 1kx, we put our money where our mouth is. We develop theses and partner with the best founders to realize the shared vision.

Onchain finance needs threat-resistant privacy → Real-world & institutional finance cannot move onchain without privacy → To prevent misuse (e.g. laundering of hacked funds), the only viable solution is to build threat-resistant privacy More in my op-ed in Forbes 👇

EBC12 Speaker: Christopher Heymann (@heyochristopher) | Founding Partner | @1kxnetwork Before venture capital, Christopher Heymann spent years building technology companies as a CTO. He co-founded 1kx in 2018, building it into one of the most active early-stage token funds in the market, backed by sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, endowments, and family offices. The firm has backed over 150 projects across cryptoeconomic design, governance, and decentralized infrastructure. 1kx does not just provide capital, it embeds itself in the technical and strategic challenges founders face. Join the leaders shaping digital assets in Barcelona on September 16-17: #tickets" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">eblockchainconvention.com/european-block…

Proud for @1kxnetwork to lead the pre-seed for @justinmujin to build @giggles_app, a new social network that explores the intersection between video discovery and financialization. I first discovered Giggles organically on TikTok and immediately reached out to see how well Justin had already grasped the core affordances of crypto in reshaping relationships and communities with financialization. We spent a lot of time over several months building a relationship and concluded that we should work together. Today, I'm proud to share our partnership publicly and am incredibly excited to watch them execute in the near term with their launch.

We’re excited to share that 1kx led the pre-seed in @giggles_app - a new kind of social network where users can buy into videos early and participate in the upside as they spread. We think Giggles opens up a compelling new design space at the intersection of social behavior, market design, and crypto-native coordination. Congrats to @justinmujin, @itsedwinwang, and the whole team. Big thanks to @TechCrunch and @asilbwrites for the exclusive: techcrunch.com/2026/04/07/a-t…

The Q1 2026 onchain revenue report update is out

The elephant in the room for onchain yield in crypto is Bitcoin 🐘 Most of our clients hold billions in BTC that generate no yield. Today, only ~1.6% of BTC (about $21B out of a $1.35T asset class) is productive, for a few key reasons: → BTC is not natively yield-bearing like ETH or SOL → Since FTX, centralized lending desks have largely disappeared (e.g. Genesis) → The “Bitcoin staking” narrative has lost momentum post-FTX → Bitcoin holders tend to be particularly cautious when putting their assets to work We are addressing this with @railnet_org, in partnership with @monarq_mgmt, the asset management arm of @FalconXGlobal. Led by @ShiliangTang and a team with backgrounds at @TowerVentures and @Point72Careers, Monarq has developed a strategy that takes BTC as input and allocates it across DeFi and RWA opportunities. The approach is multi-venue, risk-managed, and fully transparent, targeting up to 6% yield on BTC. Railnet provides the orchestration layer: configurable risk controls, real-time accounting across positions, and fully auditable onchain execution. Allocators can see exactly where capital is deployed and how yield is generated. Excited to help shape the future of onchain asset management and make billions of Bitcoin productive again🚶 More information: railnet.org/blog/monarq-la… PS: Tomorrow, we are releasing a Railnet Talks episode with Shiliang Tang from Monarq Asset Management. We go deeper into what an institutional approach to BTC yield really means, why it is difficult to execute well, and what the market is missing today. Stay tuned 👀

@TweetsOfSumit Die Entfernung wie weit die Politiker in Berlin an der Realität vorbei entscheiden wird mittlerweile in Astronomischen Einheiten (AE) gemessen.

Berlin wieder ganz vorne mit dabei. 🤦🏽‍♂️

First GPU customer SIGNED! 🔥 Our first NVIDIA DGX B200 GPU nodes are LIVE - running real enterprise workloads right now. The ICN ecosystem just expanded into a new class of hardware - and this is only the beginning. Ready to deploy your workloads? Let's talk. 📥 icn.global

The investor dinner and the start of something great. 1kx @HeyChristopher @Explorerdfa @karimhelpme 1Confirmation @YekiM_o a16z @Jay_Drainjr Archetype @DannySursock Bitkraft @CegaPereira Blockchain Capital @_Kinjalbshah CMT Digital @OliverJaros_ Compound VC @0xsmac Crucible Capital @Melt_Dem Cyber Fund @Lomashuk Dragonfly Capital @TomhSchmidt Electric Capital @MariaShen Fraction @Tkhoury Frictionless @SolanaLegend @LoganJastremski Hashed @Baekkyoumkim Haun Ventures @Brxckinridge Lightshift @SimaoCCruz Maximum Frequency @Neilhar Multicoin Capital @SpencerApplebau @ShayonSengupta North Island Ventures @GregMRosenthal ParaFi Capital @Anjan_Vinod Portal Ventures @EvanbFish Polychain @codeisnotlaw Reverie @Lsukernik Strobe Ventures @WinnieLaux Yzi Labs @0xRickyW

Andrej Karpathy on autoresearch with an untrusted pool of workers: "My designs that incorporate an untrusted pool of workers (into autoresearch) actually look a little bit like a blockchain. Instead of blocks, you have commits, and these commits can build on each other and contain changes to the code as you're improving it. The proof of work is basically doing tons of experimentation to find the commits that work." The idea that distributed & permissionless autoresearch ~= proof-of-useful-work remains a high-level intuition for now, but it is extremely intriguing to say the least. Someone needs to take this further. See QT for more on what's missing.

If your business is impacted please get in touch with us at @WalletConnect ~ we can onboard merchants or PSPs and pick up wherever you need plus you’re going to love the new WCP flows!

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 👀