Bootstrapping token networks @1kxnetwork

Joined October 2019
Christopher retweeted
Reveal time for those mysterious numbers we've been posting @get_optimum over the last couple months. It was $ETH stake actively being onboarded to mainnet mump2p! Now that we've seen consistent high-performance propagation (2.5-3.5x faster 🤯 ) it's time to celebrate! 🥂 3.4 billion dollars worth of ETH is already being boosted, and we've got our sights set much higher. More stake, new chains, and specialized products to come. Jobs not finished.
The Optimum team is pleased to announce our first mainnet deployment, mump2p on Ethereum. With mump2p, data moves across all of Ethereum 2-3x faster, boosting validator performance and network health. $3.4B of Ethereum stake is already being boosted by mump2p, and we’re now opening up free access for all Ethereum node operators.
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Christopher retweeted
Armitage, @wintermute_t's onchain curation arm, selects @railnet_org for vault infrastructure 🤝 Starting with WETH Yield, combining leveraged ETH staking with lending and private credit. Here’s what to know 👇
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Happy not-so-Black Monday! When in doubt, trust the stats:
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Christopher retweeted
Rule-based stablecoin yield from real-world assets and DeFi, built by @CoinSharesCo on @railnet_org, is now live inside @safe. CoinShares and Safe are two of the strongest teams in European digital assets. Today we're shipping the future of programmable finance together, and bringing it to the DAOs, treasuries and platforms on a wallet that secures over $60B in onchain assets. CoinShares defines the mandate and risk framework. Railnet provides the infrastructure for execution, accounting and reporting. Safe surfaces it directly inside Safe. Assets and positions stay in the user's custody, as always with Safe. For fintechs and wallets, this is a path to offering onchain yield without building the asset-management infrastructure themselves. Live now, fee-free for the first six months. Thank you @jmmognetti, @rsquare and your teams for building this with us 🫡
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Christopher retweeted
2026 is the year fundamentals beat Bitcoin. In 2025, 85%+ of large-cap tokens underperformed Bitcoin. In 2026, roughly a quarter are ahead so far. A common feature among them is that they distribute value to tokenholders. Value distributed = holder revenue (rewards, buybacks, burns) minus dilutive emissions. Divide by market cap and you have a token's dividend yield. We tested 60 factors across $100M+ tokens, 2021 to Q3 2026. Tokenholder distributions produced the strongest signal of the 60. Tokens yielding 1%+ beat the rest by ~7pp a quarter, after controls for size, momentum, volatility, and Bitcoin beta. Their median return against Bitcoin in 2026 through Q3 was +17%, the first positive median since 2021. An illustrative, monthly rebalanced index of these tokens returned 82% in 2026 through Q3, net of assumed trading costs. Bitcoin returned -5%. But most of that has come since August, and the same rules underperformed Bitcoin in prior years. 23 quarters is a short sample, and with 60 factors tested, some results will look significant by chance. A return signal, not causation. It also does not mean every protocol should distribute. Sustainable distributions need profits or surplus cash flow; for protocols still growing, reinvestment may be the better use of capital. Fee and revenue levels are mostly a size effect once controlled; fee growth on its own showed no signal, and burns showed no signal of their own once we excluded protocols distributing 0.5% or more. Analysis by @KoschigRobert, 1kx Head of Economics. Presented by @lalleclausen, Founding Partner, at Token2049 last week. Full article: 1kx.capital/writing/2026-fun… Data: 1kx.capital/onchain-revenue-… The contents of this publication are for general information purposes only and should not be construed as, or relied upon in any manner as, investment, financial, legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or similar advice. They do not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. 1kx may hold positions in certain projects or assets discussed in this publication. Full disclosures: 1kx.capital/important-disclo…
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Miden is the most advanced turing complete blockchain that has been built till date. Period.
PQ-secure client-side proving is one of the best defenses against quantum computers and AI-assisted elliptic curve breaks. Say in some near future we find out that AI figured out how to reduce security of elliptic curves. What we thought has 128 bits of security actually has only 80 bits. Everyone needs to scramble to increase key sizes, which means major upgrades to protocols, apps. HW wallets and HSMs may no longer work and we'd need to build new ones, and much much more. Same happens if a viable quantum computer appears. It may not be able to break things fast enough initially - so, we'll have time to migrate - but any protocol where signatures/public key are know to the network needs to scramble to upgrade and change its very fundamentals. But - if we have client side proving, there is absolutely no rush and nothing needs to change immediately. The keys and signatures are never shared with the network, so we can keep using the same cryptography, same HW wallets, same HSMs etc. It would still be a good idea to migrate - but the migration could take many years, and be done much more safely.
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If you've been frustrated by narratives driving all the performance, there's good news for you. 2026 was the first year fundamentals actually outperformed Bitcoin.
Our founding partner @lalleclausen gave a keynote at @token2049 Singapore this week. He called it "2026 is the Year that Fundamentals Outperformed." Bitcoin has been the thing to beat since the 2021 top. In 2025, by @MessariCrypto and @Blockworks' count, more than 85% of large-cap tokens underperformed it. We publish fee and revenue data on protocols every month on the 1kx Onchain Revenue Dashboard, and this year we tested whether those fundamentals predict token returns, across 60 factors, 23 quarters and 1,149 tokens. Lasse's argument is that fees are what users pay a protocol for the trust it provides at a lower cost than an intermediary, so if the market has started to price that, it should show up in the returns. Next week we publish the full results, caveats included.
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today we're releasing apex-flash-1, our first open-weights model for security research post-trained on real vulnerabilities we found and got paid for. we are also releasing the abliterated variant for researchers who want fewer refusals in their own authorized workflows. how we built it: cantina.security/apex-flash
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Christopher retweeted
On the latest Block Party, @blockchain's podcast, our founding partner @lalleclausen cites research putting roughly 35% of US employment in trust-establishing functions. Auditors, notaries, attorneys, courts. That is the trust tax on the economy, and it's the problem 1kx has organised its entire portfolio around. Lasse walks host @Nickocary through it: why the winners of the last decade all combined a trust-related zero-to-one with a tangible fee reduction, why decentralized ID failed that test while stablecoins passed it emphatically, and what it means that his last international wire "was like sending a fax." There's also candid advice for first-time founders, including the fastest way to lose an investor's trust in the first meeting: try to sell them. "We've seen it a million times. We can smell it from a million miles away." Full episode linked below.
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Christopher retweeted
1kx has been named to @TIME's America's Top Venture Capital Firms 2026, compiled with @StatistaCharts. We have spent eight years underwriting blockchain technology on fundamentals: the infrastructure, the applications built on it, and onchain finance as it moves from experiment to market structure. The list measures firms on fundraising, investment activity, performance and leadership, and we are glad the work holds up on those terms. Credit belongs to the founders building at this frontier, and to the LPs who have committed across cycles with us. Full list below.
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Christopher retweeted
Total crypto revenues fell 23% YoY in H1 2026, to $47B. The decline is what you'd expect in a bear market. Most crypto revenue still tracks prices and volumes: exchanges, brokerage, wallets, staking, mining. Two drivers behind most of the $14B drop: 1) Finance-related income fell below 2024 levels. CEX, derivatives and market maker income was down $5.2B, onchain DeFi down $1.8B (-32%), ETF and fund management fees down $1.1B. 2) Blockchain revenues kept grinding lower. Staking and mining rewards fell $6.2B, transaction fees and MEV halved. Blockchains are down to 25% of industry revenue, a historical low. What didn't follow the cycle: stablecoin and RWA issuance, prediction markets, DePIN. Such less cyclical segments grew 14% YoY to $12B. That's 26% of the industry now, and the number we're watching most closely. Stablecoin and RWA issuer income added $0.7B. Stablecoin cards and payments added $0.1B, in line with what @a16zcrypto shared a few days ago. Prediction markets roughly 10x'd fee income, an estimated +$0.3B. DePIN fees nearly doubled. Middleware onchain fees rose about 70%, most of that @chainlink. DeFi/Finance fell in dollars but its share of industry revenue climbed to 64%. Consumer onchain fees held up better than average, down 20%. Some perspective: the last bear bottomed at $28B in half-year revenue (H2 2022). This one is running at $47B, with about a quarter of it coming from the segments that grew through the bear. What counts as revenue here: onchain-traceable fees, other income like staking yield, and offchain fees, either publicly reported (Coinbase) or estimated (Binance). The mix of the three barely moved YoY. Full methodology is in our 2025 revenue report. The 2026 edition is in the works.
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Christopher retweeted
Congrats to @cantinasecurity on the launch and the raise. We’ve backed this team from their earliest days, and this is why: their agents take a vulnerability all the way through to a verified fix. Live at cantina.security
We spent years finding vulnerabilities before attackers did. That was the easy part. Teams already know what's broken. Nobody has the bandwidth to close it. Today we raised $16.5M to make Cantina the security workforce for your security workforce. cantina.review/next-chapter-…
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We spent years finding vulnerabilities before attackers did. That was the easy part. Teams already know what's broken. Nobody has the bandwidth to close it. Today we raised $16.5M to make Cantina the security workforce for your security workforce. cantina.review/next-chapter-…
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Christopher retweeted
Onchain fees fell 33% in Q2, year over year. Value returned to token holders barely moved. That second number is the more interesting one. The decline itself is what a bear market looks like. DEX fees dropped $625M (-57%), led by @MeteoraAG, @Raydium and @PancakeSwap, three protocols that generated $1.5B in fees in H1 last year. Blockchain and MEV fees fell $362M (-40%). Launchpads fell 57%, with @Pumpfun accounting for nearly half of that. Not everything fell, though: Perps and prediction markets grew fees 22% YoY, led by @edgeX_exchange and @HyperliquidX. @Polymarket did close to $100M in Q2 alone. Lending and asset management kept compounding, with @Morpho, @USDai_Official and @maplefinance each adding $9-19M. @CantonNetwork added $179M in L1 fees, though much of that is incentive-driven, and we treat it accordingly. Two of these names, Canton and Polymarket, are new entrants to the fee top 20. And through all of it, distributions to token holders held nearly flat. @binance's burns still account for a meaningful share, but the more telling shift is protocols like Hyperliquid routing revenue into buybacks and burns as deliberate policy. Payout ratios went up in a quarter where revenue fell by a third. Whether that discipline survives a longer bear is one of the things we'll be watching closest into H2. We built a public dashboard to track all of this. Link in the first comment. Deep dive on the dashboard coming soon.
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Christopher retweeted
$100M in trading volume in 3 months! 🪻💜 How do we make sure anyone can create a market on any topic they want? We started with the biggest bottleneck: liquidity bootstrapping. 42 ensures that no market created on the protocol needs a professional market maker to get started. The volume isn't just a numeric milestone. It's proof that it works. Creators sit at the center of everything we build, and that's why what comes next is bigger: truly permissionless markets. Any event, anyone, anytime.
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Christopher retweeted
The vintages raised when consensus is weakest are usually the ones that outperform, and that is how this moment reads to us. Talent is strong, capital is scarce, and while many crypto funds say deal flow has dried up, we’re seeing more of it than at any point since we started. 1kx Founding Partner @lalleclausen joined @bennypjacobs on Scenius Studio to walk through what that looks like on the ground: --> Why Web2 founders are finding product-market fit in crypto while crypto-native founders are stalling --> Where the line falls between what wins as a token network and what wins as a company --> How Cost of Trust 2.0 holds up in the current cycle
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/3ed… Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Christopher retweeted
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.
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Christopher retweeted
1kx Research Partner @_weidai on the $2B+ that moved into AI security M&A in 2025-26, what it priced, and where the next venture-scale category gets built. Wei covers the Cost of Trust frame, applied to the agent layer - article link in the comments.
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.
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The fact in @_weidai’s piece I’d point someone to: $2B+ has moved into AI security M&A. The highest-risk failures are at the sequence level, one layer below where that capital went. That gap is the next venture-scale category.
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.
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Cost of Trust 2.0, the full conversation. Where the frame holds in financial infrastructure. Where it gets repriced at the AI edge. Where the next category gets built. Plus, where the thesis has evolved since the 2018 paper. 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t…
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