We’re excited to announce that Cork has been trusted with $5.5M to build the missing risk layer for onchain finance. The seed round was led by Road Capital and a16z CSX, with participation from 432 Ventures, BitGo Ventures, Cooley, DEPO Ventures, Funfair Ventures, G20 Group, Gate Labs, Hyperithm, IDEO Ventures, PEER VC, Stake Capital, and WAGMI Ventures.
This raise marks an important milestone for Cork. More importantly, it signals the emergence of tokenized risk as a new onchain infrastructure category that will bring market-driven risk pricing, hedging, and liquidity management to stablecoins, vaults, and real-world assets (RWAs).
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The Bedrock for $600T in Tokenized Assets
The onchain world is at a crossroads. Over the past year, onchain markets were stress-tested in real time. We saw eight major stablecoin depegs, including two outright defaults, and the most intense liquidation event in crypto’s history on October 10, 2025.
At the same time, regulatory clarity is accelerating the entry of traditional financial institutions into onchain markets. Stablecoins are now a core settlement layer with a supply that doubled since 2024, surpassing $250 billion in circulation. Meanwhile, tokenized treasuries and private credit are scaling rapidly, and RWAs are in a transition from today’s $30 billion market cap to the tokenization of over $600 trillion in assets that exist offchain.
Whereas before, depegs, defaults, and liquidation cascades only worried a small niche, now they’re a bottleneck to a more meaningful adoption of onchain finance by a larger pool of investors and, ultimately, everyday users. Onchain risks are scaling together with the assets they affect.
Despite this, onchain risk management has remained in its infancy. It’s clear that the infrastructure for it has never been more necessary.
Funding Will Push Onchain Risk Infrastructure Forward
Cork Phoenix recently went live on the Ethereum Mainnet with an answer to this need. It introduced a programmable risk layer for onchain assets that unlocks new capabilities for onchain markets, such as:
- Standardized risk pricing across stablecoins, vaults, and RWAs
- Market-driven hedging for depeg, duration, and liquidity risk
- Redemption liquidity backstops that bridge offchain settlement constraints
- Composable risk primitives that integrate directly into vaults and yield-bearing assets
With this funding, Cork will expand these solutions to bring new risk markets into production, deepen integrations with vaults and asset issuers, and support product pathways as institutional adoption accelerates. This will establish Cork as the leading markets based solution to tokenized risk and help scale onchain markets through world-class risk tooling.
The Future of Risk with Cork
Today’s milestones are not yet a complete solution to onchain risk, however. Cork is on a path to reimagine risk for the onchain era where money is programmable and there can be a market for anything.
We have a unique opportunity not just to build infrastructure for risk, but to create new ways to understand risk that are not skeuomorphic or analogous to what existed in traditional finance. Institutional-grade risk management is only the first step. The larger opportunity is to create new ways of understanding and managing risk that are native to programmable finance and accessible to an over $600 trillion TAM.
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