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.
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David Alemany retweeted
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
1kx.capital/thesis/the-rewir…
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David Alemany retweeted
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: 1kx.capital/thesis/cost-of-t…
35% stat: "The Cost of Trust: A Pilot Study," SSRN.
Aave peak TVL: DefiLlama.
AWS outages: The Guardian, February 2026.
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David Alemany retweeted
We're seeing more deal flow than ever at 1kx.
And the quality of founders keeps getting better.
Crypto needs fresh people, passionate, determined and ready to take it to new heights, ready to give it their all. Like in 2018. Its great to see talented younger folks step in as founders and GPs. They will carry the space to the next level. Onwards.
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David Alemany retweeted
Congrats to the @0xPredicate team on launching Predicate Asset Compliance.
Stablecoin and RWA issuers have historically managed compliance manually, coordinating across compliance, legal, and engineering just to maintain basic controls like freeze lists and transfer restrictions. At institutional scale, that process breaks down.
Predicate enforces compliance at the token contract level: issuers set their policies and the controls execute onchain in real time, covering address freezes, transfer restrictions, and regulatory reporting without engineering involvement each time.
Day one customers include M0, Consensys, Centrifuge, Stellar Development Foundation, and Startale Group. We co-led Predicate's seed round in 2024 because institutional adoption of stablecoins and RWAs has always required this compliance infrastructure to exist. Now it does.
Introducing Predicate Asset Compliance: Automated compliance controls for stablecoins and RWAs.
Issuers define policies for who can and can’t access their assets. Predicate enforces them in real time, directly onchain.
Here's how it works and why we built it.
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David Alemany retweeted
Crypto has a privacy problem. And the industry is still thinking about it wrong.
Blockchains are completely public: every transaction, every balance, visible to anyone forever. No institution runs its finances like that. But when $1.4B was stolen from Bybit, the only reason any of it got traced was blockchain transparency. Full privacy and that money is gone permanently.
Institutions won't move their finances onchain without it. For institutions evaluating onchain infrastructure, this is still an unsolved problem. It's also the thesis behind 1kx's investments in privacy infrastructure, where we're backing teams building the version institutions can actually adopt.
1kx Partner and cryptographer @_weidai writes in @Forbes on why threat-resistant privacy is the only version worth building:
forbes.com/councils/forbesbu…
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David Alemany retweeted
The investor dinner and the start of something great.
1kx @HeyChristopher @Explorerdfa @karimhelpme
1Confirmation @YekiM_o
a16z @Jay_Drainjr
Archetype @DannySursock
Bitkraft @CegaPereira
Blockchain Capital @_Kinjalbshah
CMT Digital @OliverJaros_
Compound VC @0xsmac
Crucible Capital @Melt_Dem
Cyber Fund @Lomashuk
Dragonfly Capital @TomhSchmidt
Electric Capital @MariaShen
Fraction @Tkhoury
Frictionless @SolanaLegend @LoganJastremski
Hashed @Baekkyoumkim
Haun Ventures @Brxckinridge
Lightshift @SimaoCCruz
Maximum Frequency @Neilhar
Multicoin Capital @SpencerApplebau @ShayonSengupta
North Island Ventures @GregMRosenthal
ParaFi Capital @Anjan_Vinod
Portal Ventures @EvanbFish
Polychain @codeisnotlaw
Reverie @Lsukernik
Strobe Ventures @WinnieLaux
Yzi Labs @0xRickyW
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David Alemany retweeted
Tomorrow, @zachxbt is announcing the results of a major investigation into insider trading at one of crypto's most profitable businesses. And of course, there's already a Polymarket on which company it'll be...
People are joking that the ultimate insider trade would be for those employees to bet on it.
Turns out… they actually could. Well, the company could!
US prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are regulated by the CFTC as futures exchanges.
And yes — the CFTC does have insider trading rules.
But here's where it gets interesting:
1. In commodities law, insider trading isn't about fairness. It's about theft. An oil trader can't front-run her own company's positions for personal gain. But the company itself can trade on its own proprietary knowledge — production plans, internal data, all of it.
That's not illegal. That's literally what hedging is.
2. Former CFTC Commissioner Caroline Pham put it plainly:
Commodities insider trading is only illegal when it involves misappropriated confidential information — a breach of trust to the source.
3. So, back to the hypothetical:
If a rogue employee bets on the Polymarket before the investigation drops — that's probably insider trading. They're using information that isn't theirs.
But if the company itself bets? It's their information.
Under commodities law… that's likely legal.
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Will be at ETHDenver next week, hmu if you're building in DeFi, RWAs, stablecoins or payments and would like to meet.
We're actively leading rounds and looking forward to catching up with our network / meeting new community members.
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David Alemany retweeted
No shortage of debates surrounding protocol fees and valuations, but what does the data say? We covered this in our Onchain Revenue Report - now let’s do a deeper dive on causation. While many factors dictate token prices, the data suggests fundamentals are chief among them 👇
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David Alemany retweeted
We're hosting this event next week for @EFDevcon in Buenos Aires.
+ Actively leading rounds! (we're the most active we've been this year)
Amidst the market chaos, we continue to show up ready to catchup with our network and meet new community members.
Me and our team included: @_weidai @nichanank @jakub_rusiecki @Mikey0x_ @Explorerdfa will all be here and would to meet.
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David Alemany retweeted
I’ve been in crypto for over a decade, and one question from outsiders and skeptics kept being asked: “What is the value that crypto provides?”
We at 1kx are trying to answer this question once and for all: by surfacing onchain fees as the best indicator of repeatable utility that users and firms are willing to pay for. As protocols mature and regulation improves, the ability to generate and distribute consistent fee revenue will separate durable networks from early-stage experiments.
We think that digital tokens are primarily misunderstood as speculative assets for retail investors. We say they can evolve into an investable asset class for a broader, more sophisticated set of market participants, where token networks achieve product–market fit and sustainable business models.
We @1kxnetwork just released the most extensive report on monetization of the crypto industry to date:
The 1kx Onchain Revenue Report (H1 '25) aggregates verified onchain fee data across 1,200+ protocols - mapping where users pay, how value flows, and which sectors are driving growth👇
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David Alemany retweeted
We @1kxnetwork just released the most extensive report on monetization of the crypto industry to date:
The 1kx Onchain Revenue Report (H1 '25) aggregates verified onchain fee data across 1,200+ protocols - mapping where users pay, how value flows, and which sectors are driving growth👇
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Strong first day for @SolidexFantom, here are some numbers:
👉 TVL up to $1.6B, 3rd highest on Fantom
👉 36% of total $SOLID locked on Solidex
👉 $SEX price up ~600% over the past 24hrs, currently at $27.5,
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