1kx

We invest at key inflection points for blockchain technologies to create breakthrough opportunities across global markets.

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

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.

https://t.co/ZAy2ib39k8

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

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

[Ben Jacobs @bennypjacobs]

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: https://t.co/FgyP4mHcWK

Apple: https://t.co/n91dG22O9o

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Capital markets spend $17 to $24B a year on trade processing alone, the back-office cost of matching up separate ledgers across every party in a deal.

Tokenization compresses that cost.

The savings land in compliance, data, and issuance infrastructure. Those are also the three layers the incumbents end up renting from someone else, which is the strongest place to build in this market and the part @explorerdfa walks through in detail.

[David Alemany @explorerdfa]

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.

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

From @_weidai’s new piece:

"every production system we examined makes local & per-step decisions. In contrast, the highest-risk failures are at the sequence level."

Security and Trust: The Bottleneck of Deploying Agentic AI. The 3rd drop in the Cost of Trust 2.0 thesis series: https://t.co/fPm3V8SvDT

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

https://t.co/nkq7eEydBl

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

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.

[Wei Dai @_weidai]

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.

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

35 cents stat: https://t.co/25dwYjHM5h (page 20)

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Only 35 cents of every advertising dollar reaches a real human.

@pet3rpan_ on where the cost of trust gets repriced next. From the full Cost of Trust 2.0 discussion, live today: https://t.co/ZAy2ib39k8

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

"Trust intermediaries built on human schedules cannot keep up with fraud produced on machine schedules."

From the full Cost of Trust 2.0 discussion, live today: https://t.co/ZAy2ib3H9G

[Nichanan Kesonpat @nichanank]

Stablecoin payments to emerging-market B2B and remittance corridors are the most important blockchain product category of 2026.

Trade finance is the largest underbuilt sub-segment, a $9T trust problem disguised as a logistics one.

New piece walks through the stablecoin-enabled trade finance stack, and previews where we @1kxnetwork are looking to deploy next

https://t.co/kS5D4r1p1J

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

The Cost of Trust 2.0 framework, applied to a $9 trillion category.

@nichanank on the rewiring of trade finance: stablecoin rails compressing correspondent banking rent (340bps on lower-value flows) and opening dollar access where banks structurally cannot reach.

The seven-layer trade stack, the MLETR regulatory gating analysis, and where we are investing.

https://t.co/mtZ3wVab9m

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

A bank CEO pitched us a consortium chain with editable transactions. The pass took 30 seconds.

If you can delete transactions, you built a database with extra steps.

https://t.co/ZAy2ib3H9G

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

25-30 bps a year to hold your money in a Swiss bank.

Smart contract: zero. Same custody, no fee.

The cost of trust gets repriced.

https://t.co/ZAy2ib3H9G

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

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: https://t.co/dMn4m4tlFM

[Optimum @get_optimum]

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.

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

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.

[Optimum @get_optimum]

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. 🥂

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

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: https://t.co/D5dzBCmy6w)

• 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.

[Robert Koschig @KoschigRobert]

Update on lending markets:
@aave's share of TVL amongst lending protocols drops towards all-time lows, whilst @spark and @Morpho are gaining

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Source: Visa Onchain Analytics (powered by Allium) — https://t.co/ADz0ZdEgLD

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Last week, 1kx Founding Partner @lalleclausen joined the "In Stablecoin We Trust: The Future of the Dollar" roundtable at the @MilkenInstitute Global Conference. A few takeaways.

Stablecoin payment volume (excluding bot activity) averaged $49B per day in Q1 2026, up 110% year over year and compounding at 50% CAGR over the past five years. That puts daily stablecoin payments above Visa (~$44B) and Mastercard (~$30B). Supply outstanding crossed $273B by quarter-end, up 28% YoY.

The growth is structural, not cyclical. Stablecoins are lower-friction payment rails picking up where the decline in correspondent banking has left off, and they offer better payment experiences for companies and individuals than the existing system delivers.

One of the most interesting threads of the discussion was about trust. The trust that US institutions and the dollar generate is, in effect, expressed through market adoption of USD-backed stablecoins worldwide. It is very hard for any other country, currency, or political system to replicate that. Whether a jurisdiction can produce a stablecoin that earns free-market adoption is becoming a useful signal of institutional credibility.

The build-out is happening in two layers. First, companies that handle the friction of integrating stablecoins into existing payment flows and treasury operations. Second, new banks being built that will flatten that friction into everyday treasury and payment work. Both layers are where we have spent the past several years deploying.

The closing analogy stayed with us. Stablecoins are to blockchains what email was to the early internet. Email was foundational, but it was never the point. Today, stablecoins are how we send a digital dollar back and forth. Blockchains will enable programmatic trading, clearing, and settlement of every existing financial instrument, plus financial primitives that weren't possible before.

Payments first. The rest is coming.

#MIGLOBAL