Christopher

Bootstrapping token networks @1kxnetwork

[Kent Lin @kentlinyy]

Reveal time for those mysterious numbers we've been posting @get_optimum over the last couple months. It was $ETH stake actively being onboarded to mainnet mump2p!

Now that we've seen consistent high-performance propagation (2.5-3.5x faster 🤯 ) it's time to celebrate! 🥂

3.4 billion dollars worth of ETH is already being boosted, and we've got our sights set much higher. More stake, new chains, and specialized products to come.

Jobs not finished.

[Railnet @railnet_org]

Armitage, @wintermute_t's onchain curation arm, selects @railnet_org for vault infrastructure 🤝
Starting with WETH Yield, combining leveraged ETH staking with lending and private credit.
Here’s what to know 👇

[Robert Koschig @KoschigRobert]

Happy not-so-Black Monday! When in doubt, trust the stats:

[Laszlo Szabo @laszlo__szabo]

Rule-based stablecoin yield from real-world assets and DeFi, built by @CoinSharesCo on @railnet_org, is now live inside @safe.

CoinShares and Safe are two of the strongest teams in European digital assets. Today we're shipping the future of programmable finance together, and bringing it to the DAOs, treasuries and platforms on a wallet that secures over $60B in onchain assets.

CoinShares defines the mandate and risk framework. Railnet provides the infrastructure for execution, accounting and reporting. Safe surfaces it directly inside Safe. Assets and positions stay in the user's custody, as always with Safe.

For fintechs and wallets, this is a path to offering onchain yield without building the asset-management infrastructure themselves.

Live now, fee-free for the first six months.

Thank you @jmmognetti, @rsquare and your teams for building this with us 🫡

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

2026 is the year fundamentals beat Bitcoin.

In 2025, 85%+ of large-cap tokens underperformed Bitcoin. In 2026, roughly a quarter are ahead so far. A common feature among them is that they distribute value to tokenholders.

Value distributed = holder revenue (rewards, buybacks, burns) minus dilutive emissions. Divide by market cap and you have a token's dividend yield.

We tested 60 factors across $100M+ tokens, 2021 to Q3 2026. Tokenholder distributions produced the strongest signal of the 60.

Tokens yielding 1%+ beat the rest by ~7pp a quarter, after controls for size, momentum, volatility, and Bitcoin beta. Their median return against Bitcoin in 2026 through Q3 was +17%, the first positive median since 2021.

An illustrative, monthly rebalanced index of these tokens returned 82% in 2026 through Q3, net of assumed trading costs. Bitcoin returned -5%.

But most of that has come since August, and the same rules underperformed Bitcoin in prior years. 23 quarters is a short sample, and with 60 factors tested, some results will look significant by chance. A return signal, not causation.

It also does not mean every protocol should distribute. Sustainable distributions need profits or surplus cash flow; for protocols still growing, reinvestment may be the better use of capital. Fee and revenue levels are mostly a size effect once controlled; fee growth on its own showed no signal, and burns showed no signal of their own once we excluded protocols distributing 0.5% or more.

Analysis by @KoschigRobert, 1kx Head of Economics. Presented by @lalleclausen, Founding Partner, at Token2049 last week.

Full article: https://t.co/bUs8HxgAQy
Data: https://t.co/X0JQ4CAq65

The contents of this publication are for general information purposes only and should not be construed as, or relied upon in any manner as, investment, financial, legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or similar advice. They do not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. 1kx may hold positions in certain projects or assets discussed in this publication. Full disclosures: https://t.co/I2e8AMLH5l

[Sandeep | POL Shiller @sandeepnailwal]

Miden is the most advanced turing complete blockchain that has been built till date. Period.

[Christopher @HeyChristopher]

If you've been frustrated by narratives driving all the performance, there's good news for you. 2026 was the first year fundamentals actually outperformed Bitcoin.

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Our founding partner @lalleclausen gave a keynote at @token2049 Singapore this week. He called it "2026 is the Year that Fundamentals Outperformed."

Bitcoin has been the thing to beat since the 2021 top. In 2025, by @MessariCrypto and @Blockworks' count, more than 85% of large-cap tokens underperformed it.

We publish fee and revenue data on protocols every month on the 1kx Onchain Revenue Dashboard, and this year we tested whether those fundamentals predict token returns, across 60 factors, 23 quarters and 1,149 tokens. Lasse's argument is that fees are what users pay a protocol for the trust it provides at a lower cost than an intermediary, so if the market has started to price that, it should show up in the returns. Next week we publish the full results, caveats included.

[Christopher @HeyChristopher]

@johnlilic @1kxnetwork @lalleclausen @token2049 @MessariCrypto @Blockworks Gets better by the year

[Cantina 🪐 @cantinasecurity]

today we're releasing apex-flash-1, our first open-weights model for security research post-trained on real vulnerabilities we found and got paid for.

we are also releasing the abliterated variant for researchers who want fewer refusals in their own authorized workflows.

how we built it: https://t.co/sSIV6qKFGt

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

On the latest Block Party, @blockchain's podcast, our founding partner @lalleclausen cites research putting roughly 35% of US employment in trust-establishing functions. Auditors, notaries, attorneys, courts. That is the trust tax on the economy, and it's the problem 1kx has organised its entire portfolio around.

Lasse walks host @Nickocary through it: why the winners of the last decade all combined a trust-related zero-to-one with a tangible fee reduction, why decentralized ID failed that test while stablecoins passed it emphatically, and what it means that his last international wire "was like sending a fax."

There's also candid advice for first-time founders, including the fastest way to lose an investor's trust in the first meeting: try to sell them. "We've seen it a million times. We can smell it from a million miles away."

Full episode linked below.

[Christopher @HeyChristopher]

@0xMarcB Wait till you realize the discrepancy in performance between in office and remote teams

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

1kx has been named to @TIME's America's Top Venture Capital Firms 2026, compiled with @StatistaCharts.

We have spent eight years underwriting blockchain technology on fundamentals: the infrastructure, the applications built on it, and onchain finance as it moves from experiment to market structure. The list measures firms on fundraising, investment activity, performance and leadership, and we are glad the work holds up on those terms.

Credit belongs to the founders building at this frontier, and to the LPs who have committed across cycles with us.

Full list below.

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Total crypto revenues fell 23% YoY in H1 2026, to $47B.

The decline is what you'd expect in a bear market. Most crypto revenue still tracks prices and volumes: exchanges, brokerage, wallets, staking, mining. Two drivers behind most of the $14B drop:

1) Finance-related income fell below 2024 levels. CEX, derivatives and market maker income was down $5.2B, onchain DeFi down $1.8B (-32%), ETF and fund management fees down $1.1B.

2) Blockchain revenues kept grinding lower. Staking and mining rewards fell $6.2B, transaction fees and MEV halved. Blockchains are down to 25% of industry revenue, a historical low.

What didn't follow the cycle: stablecoin and RWA issuance, prediction markets, DePIN. Such less cyclical segments grew 14% YoY to $12B. That's 26% of the industry now, and the number we're watching most closely.

Stablecoin and RWA issuer income added $0.7B. Stablecoin cards and payments added $0.1B, in line with what @a16zcrypto shared a few days ago. Prediction markets roughly 10x'd fee income, an estimated +$0.3B. DePIN fees nearly doubled. Middleware onchain fees rose about 70%, most of that @chainlink.

DeFi/Finance fell in dollars but its share of industry revenue climbed to 64%. Consumer onchain fees held up better than average, down 20%.

Some perspective: the last bear bottomed at $28B in half-year revenue (H2 2022). This one is running at $47B, with about a quarter of it coming from the segments that grew through the bear.

What counts as revenue here: onchain-traceable fees, other income like staking yield, and offchain fees, either publicly reported (Coinbase) or estimated (Binance). The mix of the three barely moved YoY. Full methodology is in our 2025 revenue report. The 2026 edition is in the works.

[Christopher @HeyChristopher]

@dimakhanarin @GlebSidora @codos_ai @speedrun Congratulations, well deserved!

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Congrats to @cantinasecurity on the launch and the raise. We’ve backed this team from their earliest days, and this is why: their agents take a vulnerability all the way through to a verified fix. Live at https://t.co/ZCGLqfaiHz

[Cantina 🪐 @cantinasecurity]

We spent years finding vulnerabilities before attackers did. That was the easy part.

Teams already know what's broken. Nobody has the bandwidth to close it.

Today we raised $16.5M to make Cantina the security workforce for your security workforce. https://t.co/GWF2OICZsr

[1kx @1kxnetwork]

Onchain fees fell 33% in Q2, year over year. Value returned to token holders barely moved.

That second number is the more interesting one.

The decline itself is what a bear market looks like. DEX fees dropped $625M (-57%), led by @MeteoraAG, @Raydium and @PancakeSwap, three protocols that generated $1.5B in fees in H1 last year. Blockchain and MEV fees fell $362M (-40%). Launchpads fell 57%, with @Pumpfun accounting for nearly half of that.

Not everything fell, though:

Perps and prediction markets grew fees 22% YoY, led by @edgeX_exchange and @HyperliquidX. @Polymarket did close to $100M in Q2 alone. Lending and asset management kept compounding, with @Morpho, @USDai_Official and @maplefinance each adding $9-19M. @CantonNetwork added $179M in L1 fees, though much of that is incentive-driven, and we treat it accordingly. Two of these names, Canton and Polymarket, are new entrants to the fee top 20.

And through all of it, distributions to token holders held nearly flat. @binance's burns still account for a meaningful share, but the more telling shift is protocols like Hyperliquid routing revenue into buybacks and burns as deliberate policy. Payout ratios went up in a quarter where revenue fell by a third. Whether that discipline survives a longer bear is one of the things we'll be watching closest into H2.

We built a public dashboard to track all of this. Link in the first comment.

Deep dive on the dashboard coming soon.

[42 @42space]

$100M in trading volume in 3 months! 🪻💜

How do we make sure anyone can create a market on any topic they want?

We started with the biggest bottleneck:
liquidity bootstrapping.

42 ensures that no market created on the protocol needs a professional market maker to get started.

The volume isn't just a numeric milestone.
It's proof that it works.

Creators sit at the center of everything we build,
and that's why what comes next is bigger: truly permissionless markets.

Any event, anyone, anytime.

[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

[Christopher @HeyChristopher]

@pet3rpan_ @1kxnetwork Time flies!