35% of US employment is spent creating trust. Auditors, notaries, attorneys, courts, custodians, compliance officers. Trust-establishing work is the single largest category in the modern economy. It is also being repriced. The repricing started in financial infrastructure. Custody costs heading to zero. Cross-border settlement collapsing from days to seconds. Aave hit $44B in custody at peak (late 2025) at zero fixed cost. It hit AI a second time. The Hong Kong CFO who got on a Zoom call with deepfakes of his CEO and the board, and wired $20M. AWS outages caused by AI agents managing production clusters without human oversight. AI is the most powerful trust-eroding technology we have built. Trust intermediaries built on human schedules cannot keep up with fraud produced on machine schedules. The cost of creating fakes goes to zero. The value of verified trust goes up exponentially. And it is opening categories that were not possible before. Permissionless conversion-based advertising. Hallucination-proof knowledge graphs. Programmable insurance. Eight years of investing. One argument. Cost of Trust 2.0, our 2026 thesis. Read it: 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t… 35% stat: "The Cost of Trust: A Pilot Study," SSRN. Aave peak TVL: DefiLlama. AWS outages: The Guardian, February 2026.

The useful version of an AI agent is also the risky one. It can read private context, take in outside inputs, and act. In this clip, 1kx Partner @_weidai explains why that combination makes prompt injection much more than a chatbot problem. More in Cost of Trust 2.0: 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t…

The new Wall Street is being built on Ethereum. Last week we brought together the institutional players who are making it happen. This is Top of the Block with @BitMNR @1kxnetwork @Auros_global @BlockdaemonHQ.

Tomorrow in NYC we're hosting Top of the Block, a special pre-@ethconf event cohosted with @1kxnetwork, @BitMNR, @Auros_global, and @BlockdaemonHQ. Financial institutions, licensed exchanges, DATs, hedge funds, market makers, node operators - the institutions powering the onchain economy all know that networking optimization is foundational to expanding it. Excited to bring them together for a great night in the city. 🥂

April fee data from the 1kx Onchain Revenue Report (1,000 protocols tracked). Aggregate fees are down (-11% MoM, -20% YoY) as market volatility decreased both vs. March (Iran-uncertainty calming) and vs. last year’s Trump tariff-related moves, causing DEX and MEV-related fees to drive most of the declines. It's a mixed picture on the category and protocol level, though. • DeFi/Finance -11% MoM is a mixed bag: --> Perps lost, e.g. @HyperliquidX -15%, though other markets gained, e.g. @Polymarket >3x in fees (largest gainer overall) --> Lending markets gained in fees, led by @aave (due to utilization increase - see here: x.com/KoschigRobert/status/2…) • L1 fee dispersion is widening. @ethereum 2x, @Zcash and @trondao up, while MEV-driven builders like @titanbuilderxyz give back March’s gains. Mostly a vol-compression unwind from March’s Iran-uncertainty spike. • Middleware 7% growth driven by @chainlink and @CatFeeio • DePIN 18% Fee decline almost entirely caused by @AethirCloud • Wallet sector down 17% in fees, mainly due to interfaces like @AxiomExchange (-24%), @tradexyz (-18%). Even @phantom’s fee decline is mostly from their perps-trading interface • Consumer overall flat-ish -4%, though bifurcation in Launchpads: @fourdotmemezh, @bonkfun, @farcaster_xyz with 50-80% declines in fees vs. @Pumpfun, @BagsApp positive. @printr as a new entrant So what for 1kx: the decline in trading activity is in line with the compression in market volatility. Continuous growth in emerging DeFi categories like RWA is consistent with our Onchain Finance overweight. Prediction markets entering a fee-generating phase (Polymarket >3x) is consistent with our Frontier Applications thesis. Launchpad bifurcation tells us the consumer category is sorting itself.

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-… #MIGLOBAL

Congrats to the @0xPredicate team on launching Predicate Asset Compliance. Stablecoin and RWA issuers have historically managed compliance manually, coordinating across compliance, legal, and engineering just to maintain basic controls like freeze lists and transfer restrictions. At institutional scale, that process breaks down. Predicate enforces compliance at the token contract level: issuers set their policies and the controls execute onchain in real time, covering address freezes, transfer restrictions, and regulatory reporting without engineering involvement each time. Day one customers include M0, Consensys, Centrifuge, Stellar Development Foundation, and Startale Group. We co-led Predicate's seed round in 2024 because institutional adoption of stablecoins and RWAs has always required this compliance infrastructure to exist. Now it does.

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=ZBcOMh4P…

Partner @1kxnetwork Peter Pan (@pet3rpan_) says there will be a class stratification in two directions in a post AI world: "Specifically in two ways, it's sort of this K effect. You're going to have one: the upper class that's effectively entirely focused on life maxing. It's all about health, longevity, human connection." "On the other end... you're going to have a bulk majority of the population who are going to wake up one day unemployed, misplaced, with more time than ever before, with less money than ever before, in a world that's more expensive than ever before". "There's a lot of opportunity for future work, new ways to make money that weren't possible before, especially outside of traditional, I would say, white-collar jobs that sort of dominated the labor market over the last 10 years".

Crypto has a privacy problem. And the industry is still thinking about it wrong. Blockchains are completely public: every transaction, every balance, visible to anyone forever. No institution runs its finances like that. But when $1.4B was stolen from Bybit, the only reason any of it got traced was blockchain transparency. Full privacy and that money is gone permanently. Institutions won't move their finances onchain without it. For institutions evaluating onchain infrastructure, this is still an unsolved problem. It's also the thesis behind 1kx's investments in privacy infrastructure, where we're backing teams building the version institutions can actually adopt. 1kx Partner and cryptographer @_weidai writes in @Forbes on why threat-resistant privacy is the only version worth building: forbes.com/councils/forbesbu…

Every company with a digital asset strategy is exploring onchain yield. Introducing LI.​FI Earn – the fastest way to launch and monetise an Earn feature. Access strategies from 20 vault protocols, with built-in cross-chain execution across 60 chains, via a single integration.

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-…

Will AI replace humans? Every wave of technology replaces humans at a task. The printing press, the loom, the spreadsheet. Each one triggered the same fear: "What will people do for work?"

We're on a roll today! 🚀 Kulipa raised $6.2M in seed funding, co-led by @FlourishVC and @1kxnetwork, with @WhiteStarCap and @fabric_vc ⬇️ theblock.co/post/396063/stab…

Mixed picture for onchain fundamentals in Q1 2026: User-paid onchain fees are ~50% lower than last year, and 26% down QoQ. Value distributed to token holders remains stable, while the number of monetizing protocols has slightly declined for the first time. Sector changes: • Overall decrease purely driven by DeFi (-34%) incl. related infra, e.g. bridges -43% • Perps hit hardest (-36%), Stablecoin issuance up driven by @SkyEcosystem • Wallets -16%, Consumer -12%, though launchpads up 10%! • DePIN the only positive sector, 13% • Blockchains -5%, though @Zcash up 80% and @0xPolygon with 4x Fee shares broadly in line with '25 avg: Blockchains 21%, DEXs 24%. Same for cohort view: protocols that first monetized in '24 or '25 still generate ~47% of all fees. Protocol-wise: @Zcash climbed to #2, @Pumpfun fees up. Biggest mover: @BagsApp ( 180 ranks), though the Jan fee explosion is fading. @farcaster_xyz now #25 after folding in @clanker_world fees. Protocols that stopped monetizing: @level, @elixir, @mars_protocol, @EARNMrewards, @Lifinity_io (shut down/exploits). @kucoincom hasn't announced any burn yet this quarter. Some protocols had >$100k in fees last quarter and are now at $0 - Among them: @quanto @lava @rezervemoney Shoutout to the data providers: @DefiLlama @tokenterminal @Dune @EigenPhi and many more 🙏 Featured charts: fee trends token holder distributions / fee shares by sector / top protocols by fees Q1 2026 👇

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

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 👀