April 14: DeFi lending is calm, yields at 2.2%. April 19: $13B has fled lending markets, those same yields are at 6.58%. The people who captured the difference didn't panic. Cork's buffer is what makes not panicking possible.

Over the last couple of weeks, I replaced our project management layer at Cork with an agent. The setup is straightforward. A repo holds read credentials for Granola, Slack, Notion, Drive and the Github commits. A scheduled Cronjob fires every 4 hours, pulls the diff since the last run (new transcripts, messages, commits), and runs it through a classifier that maps each artifact to an owner and an active workstream. Output writes to a public dashboard: who’s working on what, what was shipped, status of each feature in development and progress towards quarterly goals etc. No more moving tickets on a kanban; that whole workflow is now automated. The main constraint we built that makes this work: the agent only ingests what’s readable in the shared workspace. A decision made in a DM is invisible. So the team has moved almost everything into public surfaces. Commit frequently to remote, threads in channels instead of DMs. Working in private now has a direct cost (it doesn’t get counted), and working in public now has a direct and measurable benefit. The system still has some limitations and kinks, information that is untracked leaves minor gaps and crunching large volumes of data automatically can at times cause miss-annotations, but it’s directionally where the future of task tracking will go, enabling us to focus on the real work instead of boring reporting tasks.

I've been building DeFi for almost a decade and we went from zero to here: - Over 300b stablecoins issued onchain - Protocols that actually make revenue, all verifiable onchain - Billions in stablecoins yielding interest directly onchain - More safer ways to trade or lend (no ftx custody risk) - Embedded wallets that bring more users and are easy to integrate (i.e. Privy) - Fintechs and e-commerce platforms issuing stablecoins (PyUSD, SoFi, Western Union, Moneygram) - Big fintech involvement (Stripe with Tempo) - Fintechs integrating defi (i.e. Whop integrating Aave) - Almost all relevant major banks and asset managers have digital asset teams and also working on tokenization, stablecoins and defi (Fidelity, BlackRock etc) - Genious act regulating stable coins and removing uncertainty to enable fintechs and TradFi to participate - Clarity act coming, creating more certainty for crypto and defi - AI tools for defi security hardening and improved overall development process since early days - EU has MiCA certainty and UK following up - Banks banking crypto (Erebor etc) and better onramping The industry progress has been real, and will take of course years to come to see full adoption. We are closer now than ever before, yet moving 8 billion people onchain will take time. I think that we are in front of a moment where underlying tech is starting out-phases the crypto-native assets. It make sense for stablecoins to have bigger market caps that Bitcoin and Ethereum as world is moving onchain over time. Same thing will happen with trading and lending as more assets are tokenized and will grow directly onchain. This is net good for the ecosystem. It seems that fintech and tradfi is doubling down on blockchain like never before. The best way to progress is by building, and we have some of the smartest builders in the space, true believers that build with a real mission are still here. At some point crypto, defi, stablecoins, rwas are doing to be just called finance. No tribalism, no drama just boring tech that works and scales.

Bear markets are when these kinds of lists gets built My top 2: insurance for vault deposits and onchain reputation for borrowers/lenders One thing missing from this list: risk primitives for agents

DeFi TVL fell 24% in 2026, RWAs grew 38% That divergence is the whole thesis from @robdogeth, @borjaneira_, and Bryan Choe (a Cork x @RWA_xyz collab)

OpEd: 🗣️ Tokenized RWAs will thrive during the next crypto downturn because their yield is anchored to real economic activity, not crypto leverage, argue Cork's Rob Schmitt, researcher Borja Neira, and RWA.​xyz's Bryan Choe. coinmarketcap.com/academy/ar…