Cork Protocol

A programmable risk layer for onchain assets, including vault tokens, yield-bearing stablecoins, LSTs, and RWAs

 Backed by @RoadCapMgmt and @a16zcrypto CSX

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Cork has raised $5.5M to build the missing tokenized risk infrastructure for digital assets.

Led by @RoadCapMgmt and @a16zcrypto CSX, Cork has raised from investors who recognize the market opportunity of introducing tokenized risk into the digital asset ecosystem.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Most people know Cork for liquidity buffers and peg resilience. Those are real products, live, shipping. But they aren't the full picture.

Cork's primitive lets anyone build bespoke risk products onchain. Custom triggers, custom settlement, custom premiums. The kind of structured risk product that historically only existed in bilateral TradFi deals, the bespoke CDS Michael Burry walked into Goldman to get written in 2006.

The difference: Cork's are transparent, composable, fully collateralized from the start, with no margin calls and no counterparty default risk. Live onchain, audited by Certora and ChainSecurity, in production.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Three Michael Burrys walk up to the same @Morpho vault token, each wanting something completely different. One wants NAV protection that swaps to stablecoins at 97 cents if NAV drops more than 3%, the next wants pure on-demand liquidity at NAV for a higher premium and no downside coverage, the third doesn't want a swap at all but cash insurance up to 10 cents per dollar if NAV slips below par.

Same vault, same asset, three completely different products. None of these easily exist in DeFi or TradFi today because you take what's on the menu or you walk away. That's the entire problem with how risk works in this industry.

Agents don't pick from menus, they write them, and Cork is the rails for the menu they're about to write.

[Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) @Philfog]

Risk customization, not risk mitigation.

Take one @Morpho vault token. Three different users walk in wanting three different things out of their position: NAV protection, on-demand liquidity, range coverage.

None of these products exist for them today, and no single “risk mitigation” product would fit their specific needs. We’re building the layer for scalable risk mitigation at Cork.

[Anna Stone ✨therealstone.eth @TheRealStone]

prompt engineering was 2024
context engineering is 2026

[Robdog 🍾 @robdogeth]

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.

[Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) @Philfog]

the past few weeks alone:
@a16zcrypto $34B in onchain RWAs
@HaunVentures $1B crypto x AI agents fund
@PanteraCapital AI+blockchain thesis letter
tokenized stocks at $3.4B/mo led by @OndoFinance

the bear market is doing more work than the last bull

[Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) @Philfog]

.@_TalkingTokens asked me: "If you could tokenize anything, what would it be?"

Entire balance sheets is the answer. Banks and companies use their balance sheets for most of their actions. If you're able to tokenize an entire balance sheet, you could do everything else onchain.

[Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) @Philfog]

https://t.co/tC4elyrh3U

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

@AgenticSummit @Philfog the new agentic king

[Agentic Finance Summit @AgenticSummit]

Agents can create risk. Agents can amplify risk. They cannot manage or transfer risk. That is the gap Cork is building for.

Phil Fogel (@philfog), Co-Founder, @CorkProtocol, on programmable risk primitives and what capital formation in agentic finance actually requires:

[Robdog 🍾 @robdogeth]

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

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

If you're betting on agentic finance, watch this 🥵

@Philfog hits the stage in 10

[Agentic Finance Summit @AgenticSummit]

Agentic Summit 2026 https://t.co/8fUWhz77Ci

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

@AgenticSummit

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

@Philfog @Celo @selfxyz @AragonProject @zeroshadow_io @CurveFinance @Uniswap @townsapp @hedera @EthereumDenver @CoinTracker love the lego idea!

[Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) @Philfog]

Keynoting at @AgenticSummit, hosted by @Microsoft in NYC tomorrow at 4PM ET

Agents are already managing risk onchain but their only tool is exit, and when that's everyone's only tool it turns into a stampede

Cork is building the toolkit they don't have yet

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Liquidity used to be something you either kept idle or didn't have.
Our partnership with @Agglayer's Vault Bridge proved liquidity on demand as a solution, instead.

This enabled Vault Bridge the opportunity to utilize their assets to earn yield in Morpho, without stressing that movement on the bridge would create a liquidity crunch.
More earn opportunity for Vault Bridge and more peace of mind for all. Risk managed.

[Polygon | POL @0xPolygon]

Agglayer's Vault Bridge creates yield on bridged assets instead of letting them sit idle.

Cork Protocol's external liquidity buffer backs withdrawal capacity so capital stays deployed.

Two stress events, with every withdrawal served. See the case study:

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

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)

[CoinMarketCap @CoinMarketCap]

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.

https://t.co/CTgKlvInhi

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

https://t.co/6UN1P3GGyG

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

"DeFi yields are a function of leverage demand. Self-reinforcing on the way up. Self-defeating on the way down."

New @CoinMarketCap piece from @robdogeth on why tokenized RWAs break that pattern:
https://t.co/30F5EXt8Gm

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

We sit next to auditors and security researchers all year. Here’s what’s happening: AI is rapidly increasing the speed at which vulnerabilities can be detected and exploited. The gap between code being shipped and code being broken is shrinking.

Code doesn’t have time anymore to be constantly re-evaluated and patched once something is live.