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.

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.

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.

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 cantina.security

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. cantina.review/next-chapter-…

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.

$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.

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

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 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.

The fact in @_weidai’s piece I’d point someone to: $2B+ has moved into AI security M&A. The highest-risk failures are at the sequence level, one layer below where that capital went. That gap is the next venture-scale category.

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. 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t…

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. 1kx.capital/thesis/the-rewir…

Two years we sat on this one. The anchor isn't crypto. It's banks retreating from these corridors year after year, while the law finally catches up to digital trade documents.

Consortium chains were doomed the moment they wrote "editable" into the design.

Custody is the simplest thing a bank does. It's also the most expensive. That gap is the whole thesis.

Very timely reminder of the Cost of Trust. If you haven't read our thesis yet, I suggest you give it a read: 1kx.capital/thesis

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: 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t…

Our last startup almost got deplatformed by an App Store reviewer on a bad day. We waited two weeks with no path to appeal. That was my cost-of-trust moment. Cost of Trust 2.0 thesis live: 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t…

The game theory of "exploiting" the Zcash bug is much more complex. "If the Zcash bug were exploited, we would have seen a large outflow from the Orchard pool." No, it's not that simple. A sophisticated hacker would not have just withdrawn from the shielded pool and sold tokens. Why? Because once they are out of the pool, there is basically no way to launder a large sum of money. The orchard pool itself is actually the best way to launder counterfeit ZEC. The best scenario for a hacker is if (1) they remain the only party with counterfeit ZEC and (2) the Orchard pool remains in operation (not drained), so the hacker can launder the ZEC slowly (say, direct OTC within the Orchard pool over a longer period of time). Can we rule this out? Yes, this can be ruled out if we ask most ZEC holders in Orchard to withdraw (i.e. drain the pool). Another angle of attack that could have been executed which is hard to rule out: the hacker could have taken a large but ordinary-looking short position on ZEC after finding the exploit. This strategy is even plausibly deniable--you can reap rewards from knowing about the exploit early with little risk. Since there's a liquid perp market on ZEC, it's possible to "hide" a significant short position (worth millions) without moving markets significantly or leaving suspicious traces. A sophisticated hacker could have run a combination of the two strategies above.