Cork Protocol

The rails for risk

Price, hedge and transfer any observable onchain risk

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]

What that looks like in action:

• A depeg becomes a redemption at a known strike.
• A redemption queue becomes an exit into liquid collateral at NAV.
• A loop unwinds at a known price instead of cascading.
• A bridge failure becomes a direct redemption.

Cork turns each risk into a market.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Today, the risk surface area in onchain finance is vast.

Redemption queues, bridge and cross-chain settlement, depegs, liquidation cascades, and more. The asset side has diversified fast, but there’s still no general way to price, transfer or trade the risk.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

On Sept 4, a faulty price feed gave @vesuxyz wrong prices for two minutes.

That liquidated 47 positions holding about $3M of collateral.

Vesu: “The prices being fed in were wrong. Two minutes was all it took.”

It later recovered 95% of the lost assets.

Onchain, code does exactly what the price tells it to.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Nobody can defend all of onchain finance against intertwined, cascading events like this; they’re a consequence of composability. But individual positions, protocols, and strategies can be protected with risk infrastructure, so protection is in place before a cascade starts.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Every onchain financial tool shares one macro risk: composability.

Collateral, oracles, lending and derivatives plug into each other. That’s the opportunity, but a move in one place can also affect another automatically, with no human involved. October 10, 2025 shows how fast 🧵

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

That’s the double-sided coin of composability. The same connections that let capital move freely let risk move freely too. Looking at the most severe cases shows the need (and the opportunity) for risk infrastructure built natively for onchain assets.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

https://t.co/c6PexcwzTh

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Our new website is live 🌐

Come take a look. Link below ⬇️

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

https://t.co/3xfpMRUeME

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

The types of assets available throughout the onchain finance ecosystem grew quickly: stablecoins, staking tokens, tokenized funds, vault positions, looped positions, etc. All in a few years.

A widely-applicable way to isolate, price, manage, and transfer the risk inherent to all of these assets, meanwhile, has not grown.

The asset side of onchain finance got varied fast: stablecoins, staking tokens, tokenized funds, looped positions.

A general way to price and transfer the risk inside them hasn't followed.

Cork: A Market for Any Risk explains the one contract structure we use, where mostly just the oracle changes ⬇️

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Risk takes many forms. In March 2023, $3.3B of USDC's reserves was sitting in Silicon Valley Bank when the bank began to fail.

The assets themselves were sound, but banks were closed for the weekend and redemptions had to wait until Monday. USDC slid between 90 cents and put positions across onchain finance in jeopardy.

No matter their reason, redemption delays are a pervasive risk area in onchain finance, a result of the "real-time" liquidity promise of blockchains vs. the realities of offchain capital.

When no one prices the risk, everyone is at risk.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

Diversifying across multiple protocols is supposed to make you safer.

If one has a problem, your money in the others stays untouched. That logic breaks the moment they all draw liquidity from the same lending pool.

• On a normal day, you're holding several separate risks.

• On a bad one, you're holding the same claim on the same on the same jeopardized pile, just under different names.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

"Nobody's going to hand an agent $100 million without risk controls underneath it." - @Philfog on @TheCryptoMavs.

Most agents have exactly one risk tool right now: sell everything, all at once, the second something looks wrong. Enough agents doing that together isn't risk management, it's a cascading failure.

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

https://t.co/E6IidIFTmN

[Cork Protocol @Corkprotocol]

"Reinsurance looks like it's still operating in the 1990s"

It can take 90+ days to piece together exposure spread across separate books, while capital remains locked in deals that are difficult to exit. A shared onchain ledger could make exposure easier to verify and open up the reinsurance market to more outside capital.

Cork’s co-founder @Philfog with @YellowMedia_HQ. Link below ⤵️