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: https://t.co/Y0qgmqHN9u
35% stat: "The Cost of Trust: A Pilot Study," SSRN.
Aave peak TVL: DefiLlama.
AWS outages: The Guardian, February 2026.
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:
https://t.co/M8JY2rENgR
We @1kxnetwork just released the most extensive report on monetization of the crypto industry to date:
The 1kx Onchain Revenue Report (H1 '25) aggregates verified onchain fee data across 1,200+ protocols - mapping where users pay, how value flows, and which sectors are driving growth👇